With so much news to that flies by in the Houston rap scene, luckily we're here to sit back and deal with it all. Welcome to our own version of March Madness, where every workday we're delivering stories to keep you occupied with the ins and outs of the Houston rap landscape.
Maxo Kream is all of 23 years old.
I know this because even though a tightly groomed beard hugs his jaunted face close, he still wields a bit of a baby face. His charm is that he goes about his way, plotting of new ways to articulate his passion for robbing people. For collecting shoes, for letting nobody in his world except his Kream Clicc brothers and that's it. Maxo cares about keeping certain people at a distance, arming himself with a sound that declares allegiance to Houston and sounds absolutely nothing like it.
When Maxo puts down influences, the names register like a generalized Houston word bank. His sound, however, is more amorphous. When the highlight of his QuiccStrikes tape, "Whitney Houston," bubbled and bounced with slight tinges of Miami rhythm, the second hit was that of "Lewinsky." That track, complete with a brooding video in which Maxo plays ringleader to a home invasion, sounds guttural, something plucked from the mind of SpaceGhostPurrp and sent up North to get a tune-up by The Alchemist. Maxo Kream is Houston, and then again, he isn't.
Wolf de Mçhls is the signature sound that covers most of Maxo's latest release, the oft-delayed but punishing #Maxo187. Being all of 23 means Maxo's childhood was shaped around the glossy early 2000s, where sounds dragged behind muddy melodies from the likes of Mr. Lee, Pimp C and others. Wolf's pragmatic approach to production has to been to use all of his influences, regardless of geographic association.
The result is as spread-out a Maxo project as you could ever guess, with guests coming from all over the country. Lamb$ associates with Ohio, Cincinnati to be proper. Joey Bada$$, who has built his own career around the sounds he grew up on, hails from New York. Father jumps in with a Motorola flip-phone and plenty of chirps from Atlanta. Le$ and the Sauce Twinz stick to being from Houston, though they couldn't be any further away from each other on the aesthetic spectrum.
In a sense, artists who run in similar circles, professing gang allegiances but spin rhymes in varying degrees, have populated the current rap underground. While the Sauce Twinz run heavily atop trap beats (see "Astrodome" on #Maxo187), Joey Bada$$ has dived so far into boom-bap and a trapped-in-the-'90s ethos that he's come out sounding even better. The Internet age of rap has led to synthesis du jour, and Maxo is a prime example. He will forever rap in different baritones about robbery, selling dope and looking out for his brothers who bleed blue.
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