I made this into a Spotify playlist which you can listen to by clicking here:
(click the tweet...sorry, I couldn't figure out an easy way to embed the playlist on here)
Or you can click the song titles to listen to the songs on youtube.
My Block – Scarface
on my block – it ain’t no different than the next block
ya get drunk and pass out, and they back ya to the house
and when you wake up on the couch, you going right back at it
on my block, when you’re that fucked up, they laugh at it
on my block – it’s just another day in the heart
of the Southside of Houston Texas, making your mark
This song makes me tear up almost every time I listen to it. This is also one of my favorite music videos of all time.
Scarface is most famous for being an original member of The Geto Boys, who were really the first Houston rap group that achieved success outside the local scene. For all intents and purposes, The Geto Boys represent the beginning of Houston hip hop.
Scarface grew up in a very poor Houston neighborhood called Sunnyside, and as far as I know he still lives there, although by now he’s successful enough to live almost anywhere he wants.
This is a song about a specific neighborhood, in a specific city, but really it could be about 70% of the world. It’s about being born one side of the street and dying on the other side, having hardly seen anything else.
raised on Scott in the Yella
when I blaze, boys smell lemon haze
The song’s chorus “sittin sideways / boys in a daze” is such a badass line. It’s sampled from Big Pokey’s verse in the June 27th DJ Screw freestyle, which is the last song on this list. I also really like the line: “trunk bump like chicken pox.” It seems like after this song came out, everybody started saying “what it do,” which is now a deeply Houston thing to say. I once knew a guy who called himself “what it do.” He liked to steal rims off cars.
Paul Wall is like Houston rap 2.0…he was one of the main rappers to get national attention in the early 2000’s. That was the time when MTV started showing up in Houston to “report” on the scene.
Paul Wall is also famous for his grills. He has several grill shops around town, and he was really the first person to popularize that trend around the US. People had been wearing grills in the south for a long time, but I don’t think it really took off until Paul Wall started getting played on MTV. Pictures of Paul Wall smiling are part of the iconography of the city now.
on The Vard is where I swang, where I claim my name
So many arguments about what this song means...it’s about selling crack. Instead of using vials or other containers, people would put crack rocks inside empty BIC lighters. When the chorus says “I’ve got 25 lighters on my dresser, yessir / I gots to get paid” he’s saying that he’s got to sell 25 vials of crack.
When this song came out it was really popular in Houston, it used to get played on the radio all the time. Fat Pat’s verse at the end of this one is mega-classic. "I'm so throwed in the game / Southside playas Screwed Up Click, mayne..."
I swung and I swang, you know that n**** clean
hit The Belfort and The King, europeans with the screens
Lil Keke is one of those rappers who’s deeply loved in Houston, but never seemed to get much attention outside the local scene. One exception to this is "Southside," which was a minor hit. This song first became famous in Houston, but he re-recorded it so it would have a larger appeal. In the beginning Lil Keke shouts out a bunch of Southern states, broadening what it means when he says he’s from “the south” (as opposed to the south side of Houston).
Tops Drop – Fat Pat
now what’s up H-Town, cuz we know that they feel us
Fat Pat is a Houston legend…he was part of the Screwed Up Click, with DJ Screw and a bunch of other rappers on this list. He was shot shortly after making this video…the person in the first part of this video isn’t actually Fat Pat but a stand-in, because he was already dead by then. His mom and some of his cousins make an appearance in the beginning, and they do a little bit of foreshadowing by having Pat’s mom say: “Pat, please be careful out there.”
If you’ve noticed a bunch of songs in here being mostly about cars, it’s because Houston is 100% a car city. It’s really hard to get around town if you don’t own a car…we’ve got a bus system, but it takes probably four times as long to get somewhere by bus as it does by car.
Houston is a gigantic city…the fourth largest in the country…and because everything is so spread out, you end up spending a lot of time driving from place to place. To drive from one side of the city to the other takes about an hour and a half. Houston is a city of interstates and highways, they're pretty much everywhere you look, stretching out into infinity.
People love Cadillacs in Houston. A friend of mine owned three different Fleetwoods (not all at once, but one after another) and some of my most sentimental memories of Houston are driving through the city in the passenger seat of those Cadillacs, smoking blunts and listening to music, driving about ten miles under the speed limit.
The car obsession also goes back to how Houston rap was being distributed at the time. People were selling tapes out of the back of their trunks. The tapes weren't really meant to be played on the radio, they're meant to be played in the car, and at home. It’s true that if you heard DJ Screw before 2000, you almost certainly heard it in somebody’s car, because for sure they didn’t play it on the radio. Houston rappers are as much businessmen as artists, and tapes were a way to bypass the music industry and get some money directly into your pocket. You had to really hustle if you were serious about it, but selling music DIY was a better avenue than trying to get a record deal, because for a long time southern rap wasn't accepted by the mainstream rap scenes, which were mostly located on the East and West sides of the country.
The first time I heard a Fat Pat song was in my friend’s Fleetwood. Those Fleetwoods were fucking nice. I really miss them.
The first time I heard a Fat Pat song was in my friend’s Fleetwood. Those Fleetwoods were fucking nice. I really miss them.
Big Moe is another Screwed Up Click superstar…he was a little bit different from everybody because he usually sings while rapping, which you'll hear a lot of if you listen to the June 27th freestyle. He doesn't sing in this song but I included it because, to this day, if you play this song at a club in Houston people will go fucking CRAZY.
Big Moe’s on the list of Houston rappers who died from drinking too much cough syrup…he died from a heart attack, at the age of 33.
Big Moe’s on the list of Houston rappers who died from drinking too much cough syrup…he died from a heart attack, at the age of 33.
People on this list who are dead:
Big Moe – cough syrup
DJ Screw – cough syrupR.I.P.
I'm higher than a hizz-eel, mind on a mizz-ell
Southside of H-town, show me how you fizz-eel
I’m not a gigantic Lil Flip fan so I don’t have too much to say about this one, but it really should be noted that for about three or four years, Lil Flip completely ran the Houston rap game. This song is super famous, pretty much everybody in Houston knows the words to the chorus.
I’mma baller, I’mma twenty inch crawler
blades on Impala, diamond rottweiller, I-10 hauler
For sure, anybody who spent even a little bit of time growing up in Houston in the 90s and 2000s knows the words to this chorus. This song was a huge, mega-smash hit in Houston. You aren’t officially a Houstonian until you drunkenly scream/sing the chorus to this song at 2 am with your friends. This song makes me think about teenage summers.
I really like the line: “swisher rolled tight, got sprayed with ice.” Lil Troy probably has some sort of spray bottle full of tiny diamonds to coat his blunts with, before smoking them. That seems like the most natural assumption. I wish that I smoked diamond covered blunts, that would be fucking awesome.
got warrants in every city except Houston
Not really a big Chamillionaire fan either, but this song is a big Houston classic. He won a Grammy for this...I remember people in Houston being pretty excited about that. This is the song to play when you’re driving down I-10, smoking a blunt and/or transporting drugs that you just picked up from your dealer.
Stay safe out there, because Texas cops are pricks.
Stay safe out there, because Texas cops are pricks.
Bushwick Bill – Ever So Clear
It’s a bit tenuous to call this a “classic” because I never hear anyone play this song, but Bushwick Bill is a sort of mythological figure in the Houston music scene, like Jandek or ZZ Top.
Bushwick Bill, aka Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother Funky Stay High Dollar Billstir, was an original member of The Geto Boys. As far as I know, he was the first little person rapper.
Bushwick Bill, aka Dr. Wolfgang Von Bushwickin the Barbarian Mother Funky Stay High Dollar Billstir, was an original member of The Geto Boys. As far as I know, he was the first little person rapper.
From Wikipedia: “One night in May 1991, while depressed, drunk and suicidal, he went to his girlfriend's house and asked her to shoot him. She refused, and he threatened to harm their baby. After a struggle, the gun went off, piercing his eye, leaving a bullet stuck inside his head. He survived the accident, but lost his eye.”
A couple days later the group took a picture of Bushwick Bill in the hospital, which became the cover of their album "We Can't Be Stopped." After the suicide attempt, Bushwick Bill became a born again Christian and now he only does Christian rap.
If you want to hear the whole story, listen to this song because he recounts the entire thing from start to finish. It's a sad story.
all my boys in Houston Texas! SWANGIN N BANGIN!!!
Classic, classic, classic. So good…
Can’t think of much to say about this, but “swangin” is when you drive super slow, driving from side to side. Pretty much any parade you see in Houston is sure to have at least 5-10 pimped out Cadillacs, most with hydraulic. There are a lot of pimped out Cadillacs in Houston.
"Swangin" is basically cruising around…checking out the scene…smoking a blunt and listening to music…most importantly showing off your car to everybody. The vibe is Houston is very much about cruising and taking things slow. Driving around the city when you’ve got nothing better to do is a perennial Houston staple.
"Swangin" is basically cruising around…checking out the scene…smoking a blunt and listening to music…most importantly showing off your car to everybody. The vibe is Houston is very much about cruising and taking things slow. Driving around the city when you’ve got nothing better to do is a perennial Houston staple.
I’m on that 59 South Lee, baby holla at me
This was another huge song which marked the point when Houston rap became nationally known, through popular rappers like Slim Thug, Paul Wall, and Mike Jones. The whole summer this song came out, you could hear it all over the city…another great driving song.
Sippin on Some Syrup – Three 6 Mafia w/ UGK, Project Pat
Three 6 Mafia and Project Pat are from Nashville, not Houston—but I still think of this as an honorary Houston classic because it features UGK, probably the most famous rappers to come out of Houston…and this song has become closely associated with Houston, because it’s all about cough syrup. It's Houston that's known as “the city of syrup,” not Nashville.
I also like this video because it popularized the “drink your syrup out of a baby bottle” trend, which became a thing for awhile. I remember seeing people around Houston doing that at parties and stuff.
I vaguely knew one guy who was seriously addicted to cough syrup, and his stomach (he had a big potbelly) was hard like a rock. Sometimes he would lift up his shirt and slap his belly, and the sound it made was like someone knocking on wood. I’ve never seen anything like that, it was surreal. I've heard that happens to a lot of cough syrup addicts, although I don't really understand why. He said that when he didn’t drink cough syrup, his stomach felt like it was being ripped open, like the most painful stomach ache you could imagine. Lil Wayne called it "death in the stomach." I don’t know what happened to that guy, I think I was 17 or 18 when I met him.
I vaguely knew one guy who was seriously addicted to cough syrup, and his stomach (he had a big potbelly) was hard like a rock. Sometimes he would lift up his shirt and slap his belly, and the sound it made was like someone knocking on wood. I’ve never seen anything like that, it was surreal. I've heard that happens to a lot of cough syrup addicts, although I don't really understand why. He said that when he didn’t drink cough syrup, his stomach felt like it was being ripped open, like the most painful stomach ache you could imagine. Lil Wayne called it "death in the stomach." I don’t know what happened to that guy, I think I was 17 or 18 when I met him.
I'm from the ghetto, so I'm used to that
look at your motherfucking map and find Texas
and see where Houston at
it's on the borderline of hard times
and it's seldom that you hear n****s breaking and giving God time
I don't hear very many people jamming this song too often, but for me this is the definition of classic. The Geto Boys were a very political rap group, and the lyrics to this song are great. I'm just going to include some different quotes from Scarface, because they speak for themselves:
"Everybody throws up a fucking smokescreen to make the picture look how they want it to look, but I know how shit stand. I ain't no goddamn fool. I was there in the beginning. We were fighting the power for real. Our raps were considered negative rap, and we got a lot of fucking flak behind that shit. And we were just telling the truth. We were under immense scrutiny, from politicians to radio stations to the media. The Geto Boys were talking this politically charged, racist ass, system ran, gangsta ass, dope dealing, whoopin' ass shit..."
"You know how they make us [Southerners] look on TV? Like we live on the front porch with flies and shit flying around us, with our stomachs all big, eating watermelon rings. Don't fucking make a mockery of us because we come from down there, and you have no fucking idea what it looks like."
A couple other really famous Geto Boys songs you might like to check out:
"Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta"
"Ain't With Being Broke"
"Everybody throws up a fucking smokescreen to make the picture look how they want it to look, but I know how shit stand. I ain't no goddamn fool. I was there in the beginning. We were fighting the power for real. Our raps were considered negative rap, and we got a lot of fucking flak behind that shit. And we were just telling the truth. We were under immense scrutiny, from politicians to radio stations to the media. The Geto Boys were talking this politically charged, racist ass, system ran, gangsta ass, dope dealing, whoopin' ass shit..."
"You know how they make us [Southerners] look on TV? Like we live on the front porch with flies and shit flying around us, with our stomachs all big, eating watermelon rings. Don't fucking make a mockery of us because we come from down there, and you have no fucking idea what it looks like."
A couple other really famous Geto Boys songs you might like to check out:
"Damn It Feels Good to Be a Gangsta"
"Ain't With Being Broke"
June 27 freestyle – DJ Screw w/ Big Moe, Big Pokey, Bird, D-Mo, Haircut Joe, Key-C, K-Luv, Yungstar
Last one. If you're curious, I made another blog post on DC's about DJ Screw, which you can see here
This is a 30 minute freestyle that got recorded at DJ Screw’s house during a friend's birthday party, on June 27, 1996. If Houston rap had a heart, this would be it. It’s really difficult to overstate the importance of this recording. It's been sampled a million times and inserted into countless Houston rap songs. Even Drake has sampled this, which is amazing considering that this recording is basically a bunch of friends hanging out at someone's house for a party. Some of the verses are killer, and some of them aren't that great. It's clear that most of this is a genuine freestyle, right off the top of the head.
There's a distinctive Houston rap flow that I just spent twenty minutes trying to describe, typing and deleting and typing and deleting... But the best way to know what I'm talking about is to hear it for yourself.
Traditionally, Houston rap isn't about intricacy and complex wordplay, it's about saying something slow and clear, and loud enough that everybody around you is gonna hear it. I think the biggest obstacle for a lot of newer listeners to DJ Screw is the heavy Texan accents and the slang, but the music is meant to be understood, it's meant to talk straight to you. These songs are travelling from one bedroom to another bedroom, from one tape deck to another tape deck. It cuts out the music media, the studio system, and all the smooth recording tricks that music engineers use like photoshop to make something sound nicer. DJ Screw doesn't sound nice. He sounds like a scratchy mutant voice inside your head, like a dream in your sleep, like a ghost. These songs sound like a graveyard at midnight, if graveyards could talk.
*
p.s. Hey. Today the blog forefronts a crazily informative and sonically delicious fest of Houston-made power music, finessed and annotated and designated by the crazily talented writer and thing-maker and d.l. Chris Dankland. Please lean in or back and read/click and say what you think to Chris until the cows come home, thank you, and gratitude multiply squared to Mr. Dankland. ** Misanthrope, You never know. Or I never did or do. Readership is a weird crapshoot. I see that Dynomoose helped you out conceptually on your cellphone issues. ** David Ehrenstein, Real shame that you didn't get to write that Fassbinder book. Lommel has turned out to be one trippy talent. I still can't tell what the fuck is intentional in those latter films or not. That's saying something. RIP Donald Richie indeed. ** Dynomoose, Nice find on the graphene thing. I clicked over there and ended up poring over what I thought would take but a mere glance. Ha ha, yeah, not sure Lommel's stuff gets priority cueing in one's Netflix waiting line. ** Billy Lloyd, Hi, B! It was awesome! Oh, I should do a Mike Kelley post. Let me see if there's enough online stuff to do his stuff justice. That Rhianna-inspired dance floor moment made a super interesting mental image, at once tragic and bristling with frantic energy or something. I'll report back from our investigation of the ice rink. I tried ice skating when much younger, but I couldn't get my ankles to stay straight. They kept bending in half. I think they're weaklings. That is a quite nice ending to your trip. There's a breakfast restaurant in Paris too: American Breakfast. Serves the American version of breakfast all day and evening, which I'm guessing means scrambled eggs, toast, hash browns, bacon? Did your creativity break through your malaise? Surely it poked through just a little bit. ** Rewritedept, Hi. 'TToW' is interesting, not great, but with weird, good things in and about it. 'Blank Generation' isn't very good at all, but the seeing period punk era stuff is worth it. Richard's a great, complicated, sweet guy. Mellowed, I guess. A lot less drug usage if any. The new Iceage is even better than the first album. I like their drumming, but what I do know about drumming? Well, yeah, my books' outre content and my treatment of it is definitely a turn off and stop sign to most people. It's not just the sex/violence, there's also this prevalent 'who cares about these fucked up boys' reaction. My head and heart just don't have very much in common with most people's heads and hearts, and fiction can only do so much intervening. You either shortchange yourself to draw a ton of reader buddies, or you accept that you'll rarely be understood, and that that's okay. Way it goes. The Butthole Surfers, now that's a band with a fantastic sense of humor right there. Hm, I kind of go for a hallucinatory effect with my writing sometimes or maybe even more than sometimes, so saying my work is hallucinatory doesn't ring untrue to me. I like trying to make prose that seems really simple and flat on the surface do tricks in the reader's head that it couldn't seem like it could do. I think that tattoo might be a source of future regret, if you want my opinion. But I'm honored by your wish to extract the sentence, of course. ** Bill, Ha ha, I did try to find laudatory essays and descriptions of his films to use in the post. I really did. But almost the only positive things I could find were interview answers by him. Okay, well, I'm glad that you sort of made the deadline or were able to sneak past it. Good luck with all that work, man. ** Cobaltfram, Hi, John. I've had people in my life whom I cared about commit suicide since I was a kid, and, yeah, it's a tough thing. Well, I was kind of mostly kidding about the constant romance and wooing and so on in France and just working with the cliche, but cliches don't arise unless they have a basis. Being in love with books is def. a good love, and I will say that that kind of romance is very French. Decent nap? Oh, so your agent is carpet bombing publishers with your mss. That's an interesting tactic. Maybe it's the normal way to do things these days, I'm not sure. Saves time, hopefully. My agent used to do this tactic where he'd hit one or maybe two publishers at a time and use the whole 'this is an exclusive' kind of approach, which, ha ha, never did my mss. much good, come to think of it. Let patience be your byword. Oh, cool that Chad is giving 'TMS' a try. Hope he, you know, likes it. ** _Black_Acrylic, Lommel does seem like he could be a good fit for your pal's film series. Very nice title of his film series, of course. ** Steevee, That is curious about the lack of Fassbinder in Russo's book. I wonder what was about. I really want to see 'Leviathan'. I need to figure out the way. Cool that you interviewed those guys. ** Statictick, Hi. I SOO wish you could see the Mike Kelley show too. It'll be in NYC, so maybe you can scoot over there during the months that it's up. No problem, understood totally, about the guest-post thing. I appreciate you thinking of here in that regard. ** Sypha, Hey. Wow, you started an enthusiastic dialogue on my blog about 'Les Miserables'. I am agog. Wonders never cease. Hope your headache is as dead as a doornail by now. ** Kyler, Hi. ** Chilly Jay Chill, Hm, I can't remember what it was that you wrote that inspired the Lommel post. I just remember it was something. I'm reading the galley of Richard Hell's memoir right now. Yeah, it's a blast. I think I have a couple of the early Raime Eps, yeah. Real good stuff. I do think he's gotten better and better. I'm all about the new Iceage album at the moment. And I just got the new Autechre, but I haven't 'spun' it yet. Well, of course I'm way more than amenable re: any guest-posts you want to make. Potentially forever in your debt is more the reaction I'm having. ** 5STRINGS, Ex-sex. Can be tricky. Sounds like it wasn't. Cool. Hm, I think I think that the higher one's intelligence, the more complicated things become, but I'm hardly a role model. You're confused about sculpture, yes! Confusion is the truth, as they/I always say. ** Pilgarlic, Hi, man. I don't know. The soundtrack file seemed to download okay for me, but then my computer might now be full of termite-like code doing things that I'm misjudging as caffeine-lacking hallucinations. Yeah, weird what memory does to the past. Memory is such an interesting artist. Wow, very cool about her finding that short story draft of yours. Dude, do the rewriting. That's exciting! ** Un Cœur Blanc, Hi! I do know there's an Onyx Street in LA, yes, coincidentally. I've driven on it a number of times. You will already know that I think moving to LA is a lovely idea, given my fondness for the place. I wouldn't bother checking out the 'Frisk' film. It's awful. The score is worth the listen, though. ** Jerry Seinfeld, Jerry! What a strange thing to welcome you here, or, rather, to have my longstanding suspicions that Mr. Dankland was, in fact, merely a mask that you were wearing confirmed! Now, if I may speak to your mask for a moment ... Hi, Chris. Thank you like a hurricane for the amazing post today! Picking a favorite Fassbinder film is tough since he made so many different kinds of films, but I will say, nonetheless, that my favorite Fassbinder film is 'In a Year of 13 Moons'. Great about the Spacedads thing! I have yet to watch one of those Spreecasts. It's hard because, with the time difference, most Spreecasts of interest happen while I'm asleep, and then I space out about checking out the archives, but I will completely for sure watch that one, and almost for sure today. Everyone, there's a new video work by our guest-host du jour Chris Dankland that appears in the midst of the latest episode of the Alt Lit staple and funfest-shped spreecast 'Spacedads', and I hereby highly recommend you click this and watch it, that is if you need any extra encouragement. Seidel's really interesting, right? Excited for his brand new upcoming one. Chekhov is a very interesting point of comparison, hunh, yeah, cool. Boomeranging super awesomeness designation right back to you, man. ** ** L@rstonovich, Larsty! You're back again! You're like the opposite of the blog's one-man mysterious imbedded system of land mines. Or something. You sound like you're doing A-okay. Love the novel carving news, it won't surprise you. Majorly crossed fingers re: the promotion. Would be sweet. You're tumbling? I did not know that you were tumbling, no. Holy shit. I already bookmarked it. Everyone, legendary d.l./writer/sound curator/ musician and I don't know what all else L@rstonovich has a tumblr, and, since he's a god, and since he's not here all that often, I really think you should click this, which will make you wind up at SHNOYTZ, as his tumblr is titled, and then bookmark said locale for future visiting on a highly regular basis. Richard Lloyd with dyed blond hair!?! He's one of my all-time biggest rock star crushes, but that was not a good look for him, jeez. I love seeing you, as if you didn't know. ** Right. It's time for you to get yourself a feel for Houston Rap and think/act/type accordingly. I will see you tomorrow.