Money in the Making
Houston rappers couldn’t beat the system, so they created their own. Now the H-town rap scene is the hottest in the country.
(Page 3 of 4)
H-town rappers don’t only bust rhymes about the thug life. Lil’ Keke identifies himself as a baller, a party boy who’s “goin’ to clown,” as his concert flyers advertise. One of his most popular phrases is “ballin’, ballin’ in the mix,” from his song “Baller in the Mix.” Love, finances, and the creative process are on Eightball’s mind these days, as he raps on “My First Love”: “I grab my pen, caressin’ empty pages, making love, creatin’ money, making phrases.” Then there is H-Town (the group), whose romantic ladies raps have made Billboard’s Hot 100 chart six times.
Makin’ a Scene
TO UNDERSTAND THE MECHANICS OF THE HOUSTON rap scene today, you have to know the history of its seminal label, Rap-A-Lot records. Rap-A-Lot was started in the Fifth Ward in 1985 when James Smith (now known as James Prince), a young black salesman of used luxury cars, got together with Cliff Blodget, a young white computer software engineer who had moved to town from Seattle. Smith, em-bracing the ßedgling West Coast gangsta style, handpicked a group of rappers specifically for their ability to rap hard. The result was the notorious Geto Boys, whose lineup would eventually stabilize around Brad Jordan, a South Acres homey who performed as DJ Akshun and was rechristened as Scarface; Bushwick Bill, a five-foot-tall Jamaican, born Richard Shaw; and Willie D (for Dennis), the only member who actually came from the Fifth Ward.
The Geto Boys recorded a couple of albums, and in the late eighties a scene began to build. Rappers were forming groups and releasing cassettes and CDs on their own. “You had to top the last thing you did,” says Doug King, who became an engineer and then a producer at Rap-A-Lot after following Blodget from Seattle along with Aaron Brauch, who would become the company’s general manager. “You had to get graphic and create a story that was more extreme. It was always a contest, with something at stake.” Their 1990 album, Grip It! On That Other Level, was re-released that same year by Def American, which was working with Rap-A-Lot on a trial basis and which was itself being distributed by Geffen Records. The album was so verbally abusive that Geffen severed all ties with Def American, which never worked with Rap-A-Lot again.
Undeterred, James Smith worked out a distribution deal with the independent Priority Records, and in 1991 the Geto Boys released their national breakthrough album, We Can’t Be Stopped, which included the track “My Mind’s Playin’ Tricks on Me,” a disturbing vision of paranoia:
I’m pumping in the clip when the wind blows / Every twenty seconds got me peeping out my window.
The album—whose cover featured an unstaged photograph of Bushwick Bill being wheeled down a hospital corridor after his girlfriend shot him in the eye (an inci dent that Bill later attributed to their drinking pure grain alcohol)—ßew off the racks, eventually going platinum. Senator Bob Dole only added to the group’s infamy when he cited them as one of the more disgusting examples of modern entertainment acts.
When the royalty checks from We Can’t Be Stopped finally arrived, the Houston rap industry became a reality. Blodget left to start his own label, Flash Point, in Austin, and King departed to create his Newstyle Records production company in Houston. Aaron Brauch dreamed up Pen and Pixel Graphics, with his brother Shawn, another Rap-A-Lot alumnus, as creative director. Other labels started popping up, including Russell Washington’s BigTyme Recordz and Tony Draper’s Suave House.
The Geto Boys foundered after Willie D left, but Smith went on to cut a Rap-A-Lot distribution deal with Noo Trybe/Virgin Records in 1995, making Scarface, the label’s biggest star, a colleague of the Rolling Stones. The label’s rags-to-riches story continues to exert a strong inßuence on Houston rappers. “Everybody’s trying to duplicate what Rap-A-Lot did,” says Andrew Chong, whose Urban Beat Magazine, a small monthly, is published out of his brother’s car-repair shop on Southwest Freeway. “They all want to do it on the street.”
Makin’ Tracks
TO MAKE THOSE STREET SOUNDS RADIO FRIENDLY, many Houston rappers come to Digital Services, a recording studio owned by John Moran. “All in all, the indies are kicking the majors’ butts,” Moran drolly observes as he shufßes into his office early one afternoon. “It’s San Francisco in 1967, and the Gray Line tour buses have just started showing up.” Moran should know. Gold and platinum records and plaques of records made or mastered in his facility hang on the wall: Eightball and MJG’s On Top of the World, Ice Cube’s Bootlegs and B-Sides, Scarface’s The Diary, the Geto Boys’ Til Death Do Us Part. There’s an empty space waiting to be filled as soon as Eightball’s Lost is certified. No matter that Clint Black recorded his breakthrough country album, Killin’ Time, there or that ZZ Top and the Rolling Stones have been in recently. Rap is keeping Moran booked up.
Before he can even plop his briefcase on his desk, he’s being petitioned by two young black men with gold chains around their necks who have been pacing back and forth in the reception area, jabbering into cell phones. The one with the white visor shading his forehead introduces himself as Dino, the romantic rapper from the group H-Town. The other gentleman is his road manager.
Like many rappers, disc jockeys, and producers, Dino has a studio in his home. But it lacks the technology he needs to edit the performance tape for his live show and insert samples of sounds his road manager found on some old records. So Dino has come to Digital Services, taking advantage of the state-of-the-art computers and mixing gear. He paces and waits, hoping to persuade Moran, a fortysomething white man, to do a rush job. Moran listens to Dino’s plea and shufßes into the mixing room, where he types commands into a computer that uses the Sonic Solutions mastering program. Suddenly a big bass, high voices, ethereal keyboard noodling, and Dino’s voice fill the room. He’s spouting original couplets (he rhymes “anus” with “famous”) and throwing down the gauntlet to his fans by asking all the “dirtyass nappy-headed bastards, ‘Are you working with me?’”
“You’re not gonna hear that at Wal-Mart,” says Moran. “However, just to show you that they know what they’re doing . . .” He pushes some buttons and a cleaned-up version of the same track plays, minus “shits” and references to “rubbing my balls.” Rap, Moran believes, embodies “evil Negro music”: “Kids love horrifying their elders. My pet theory is that it’s protest music. Economy’s doing good, stock market is setting records, yet a good third of black men under twenty-eight are doing or have done jail time.” Rappers’ embracing the gangster lifestyle, adopting names like Gotti and Kapone, is part of the attraction. “Guess what, folks?” says Moran, his voice rising above the music. “We’re living in Prohibition, only most folks don’t know it. Drive-by shootings, graft, smuggling, gangsters: Thank God we don’t have that anymore. Middle America can’t see it.”
Makin’ a Spectacles
‘SUPER COLORS, SUPER RICHNESS, THAT’S my signature,” Shawn Brauch says as he sits in front of a computer in the back room of Pen and Pixel Graphics, a design firm in an office park near the intersection of U.S. 290 and Interstate 610. He’s calling up images of Humvees, Lexuses, sparkling diamonds, curvy females, and stacks of cash and assembling them around the image of a young black man. “It’s a multidimensional type look,” Brauch explains in rapid-fire patter, pasting together forty images with the computer software Photoshop. “It makes the impossible possible. What we’re trying to do is put book covers on lyrical books, and since rap is a story, our objective is for our clients to stop consumers dead in their tracks and look at it. You look. You listen. You buy.”
My Library
