The 20
Essential
Texas
Rap Tracks

The story of Houston’s first bona fide rap label, Rap-A-Lot Records, and the legendary group it spawned starts with this twelve-inch single about “Girls hounding homeboys all day nonstop / Because he got a live car, she’s on his jock.” A dubious concept, sure, but “Car Freak” made sense as Rap-A-Lot’s debut: James Smith (a.k.a. J. Prince) founded the label in the office of his used car dealership. And as many of the songs that show up later in this list make clear, cars quickly became a core motif of Houston hip-hop.

The track, set to gated, reverb-heavy drums (think eighties Genesis) and a buzzing synth line, sounds as boxy as the cars on Smith’s lot (“If you’re walking down the street there is no conversation / The girl wants a man with some damn transportation”). It’s a product of its time, when rap was primarily an East Coast phenomenon and making significant inroads to the mainstream; Run-DMC’s 1986 Raising Hell was one of the very first platinum hip-hop albums, and the Beastie Boys’ Licensed to Ill would become the first rap record to reach number one on Billboard’s pop charts weeks after “Car Freak” dropped. Houston wasn’t yet the Southern hip-hop capital we know today, but local kids loved the track, which received substantial airtime on stations geared toward high schoolers, and that was enough to give H-Town rap a jump start. (And launch Rap-A-Lot, which went on to break artists such as Devin the Dude and Z-Ro.)

Though the record cover depicts a trio—Jukebox, K-9, and Raheem—only K-9 and Raheem actually rap on the song (Jukebox didn’t show up for the session, so Raheem, who was supposed to record for his debut solo album, stepped in). Ultimately, the group would benefit from a series of lineup changes and a slight name change, and by 1989 Smith had finally assembled the trio that the world recognizes as the Geto Boys. Success wasn’t far behind. —Matt Sonzala

1992’s “Tell Me Something Good” launched the duo UGK’s career by showcasing Bun B and Pimp C’s knack for insults, boasts, and threats. But four years later the success they had worked so hard for had put them, probably to their surprise, in a very different, more introspective mood.

Over a heavy, melancholic sample of a late-seventies Bootsy Collins track (“Munchies for Your Love,” which features one of those high, keening Bernie Worrell keyboard lines that fueled so much West Coast rap) and a hook straight from DJ Screw’s “Elbows Swangin’,” the duo reflects on what stardom has changed for them—and what it hasn’t. “Glitter and gleam ain’t all what it look like,” Pimp C warns the jealous people who are “looking at me and my car so shife” (slang for a threatening attitude) but don’t know about his baby’s mama, who “act like he ain’t mine.”

Even when he tries to see some good in his Port Arthur neighborhood, he can’t help but note that some “frown when you up, and smile when you down.” For Bun B, success is no protection from random violence: “I lucked up today, and didn’t fall prey to none of that pistol play / But who is to say, tomorrow they won’t be blasting this-a-way.” He puffs “spliffs of hay” to cope with the sadness of “wiping away my dead homie’s mama’s tears.”

“Diamonds & Wood” is of a piece with everything else on UGK’s somber third album, Ridin’ Dirty. The record is widely regarded as the essential Texas rap album, but it’s not what anyone would have expected at the start of UGK’s career. As one rock critic famously said of Sly & the Family Stone’s 1971 downer classic There’s a Riot Goin’ On, “the record was no fun.” And that’s exactly how they wanted it. —K.F.

DJ Screw’s 1996 album 3 ’n the Mornin’: Part Two features guest turns from a handful of rappers who were already established presences on the Houston scene. But the album’s most defiant and boisterous track, “Pimp tha Pen,” belongs to Lil’ Keke, who was then still struggling to make a name for himself. Keke, born Marcus Lakee Edwards, had been working on his skills for years, entertaining fellow students in his public school cafeteria with his raps, driving around the south side with his friends, freestyling over cassettes.

“Pimp tha Pen” was his breakthrough: while Screw twists and slows a sample from UGK’s 1992 classic “Pocket Full of Stones,” Keke opens with a bit of self-penned slang that quickly entered the pantheon: “I’m draped up and dripped out / Know what I’m talkin’ ’bout.” (In case you don’t know what he’s talkin’ ’bout: “draped up” refers to wearing a flashy outfit; “dripped out” refers to a car’s glossy paint job.)

The track is an expression of the quintessential Houston underdog attitude, born of spending too long in the shadow of the East and West Coasts. Keke and Houston have “been waitin’ / Never ever hatin’,” working on their skills until they “let the world see / True hidden talent like Screw and Lil’ Keke.”

Keke’s prophecy was self-fulfilling: his wordplay and unique slow flows, stacking slang upon slang, not only made the track a Houston anthem, but also gained him an international audience. Drake dropped the line “draped up, dripped out” on his 2009 Screw homage “November 18.” Today the world is definitely seeing Lil’ Keke; he’s a community organizer and activist who received a Lifetime Achievement Award from Barack Obama in 2015. —Brandon Caldwell

When Patrick Hawkins was shot and killed in his hometown of Houston in 1998, Texas lost a singular talent. The 27-year-old rapper, better known as Fat Pat, hadn’t yet released a proper album, but he left behind enough tracks to produce a handful of posthumous albums. The first, Ghetto Dreams, released a month after Hawkins’s murder, included a bona fide classic: “Tops Drop,” which peaked at number five on Billboard’s rap chart. The track is pure Texas. Houston producer J Slash built Pat’s ode to south side H-Town car culture (“Trunks pop, tops drop, and the front end hop”) around a sample of Dallas R&B duo Yarbrough & Peoples’s 1980 funk hit “Don’t Stop the Music.’’ The minimalist synth and disco bass line add gloss to Pat’s smooth baritone as he bounces from rhyme to rhyme, giving the record the heft, gleam, and flow of one of his beloved candy-red custom cars “floating smooth as a kite.” Nearly a quarter century after its release, “Tops Drop” is still regarded as the greatest tribute to his hometown’s SLAB (“slow, loud, and bangin’ ”) culture. –B.C.

Houston-born Troy Lane Birklett, better known as Lil’ Troy, once told an interviewer that he wanted to be “the Quincy Jones of rap” after the legendary composer and producer put himself on the cover of his 1995 album Q’s Jook Joint—even though he didn’t perform on a single track. Troy followed Jones’s example for his 1999 major-label debut album Sittin’ Fat Down South, in which he performs in only a few songs and not the most famous one, “Wanna Be a Baller.” The decadent, syrupy track features an all-Houston cast of MCs: Big Hawk, Big T, Fat Pat, Lil’ Will, and Yungstar.

This is another posthumous appearance for Fat Pat—his verse was chopped from a different track (1997’s “So Real So Tight”) and slowed down to fit this song’s cadence. Each MC drops memorable lines as he brags about his cars and clothes and throws in fun Houston-rap Easter eggs (Yungstar gives props to UGK’s “Diamonds & Wood” with the line “I’m lookin’ good, diamonds against my wood”). But the iconic hook, delivered with gusto by Big T, and the song’s use of the introductory chords to Prince’s “Little Red Corvette” are what make the track immortal.

Today this celebratory capstone to a legendary decade of Houston rap has taken on a somber hue. Except for Yungstar, every MC on the track is dead: Big Hawk, like his younger brother Fat Pat, was fatally shot; Lil’ Will was killed in a car accident; and Big T died of a heart attack. As for Lil’ Troy, he never became the Quincy Jones of rap—he hasn’t released new music since 2006. But if you squint a bit, you can see how he came upon such delusions of grandeur: for one brief moment, he gathered the right voices at the right time and created a classic. —K.F.

Ronnie Ray Bryant, a.k.a. Baby Bash, wasn’t born in Texas, but in 1999, the California native encountered a vibrant Mexican American presence in Houston’s hip-hop community and soon made the city home. He fell in with a crew that included musicians Grimm, Happy Perez, and Shadow and bunked with them in a compound off the Hardy Toll Road, in North Houston, where they’d party, make music, and scrape together enough money to cook a communal vat of pork chops. He especially clicked with Perez, a guitar player turned beatmaker who, around 2003, gave Bash a CD he’d burned that contained twenty instrumentals. One of them caught Bash’s ear: a melancholy piece built on top of a warbling guitar riff inspired by one of Perez’s favorite guitarists, John Frusciante, of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Bash thought the beat might be too “soft” for him, but he took the CD with him when he drove from Texas for a visit to California to work with Frankie J, of the Kumbia Kings (a Corpus Christi collective started by Selena’s brother, A. B. Quintanilla), with whom he had crossed paths a few times before. The pair met up in San Diego to record a few songs. Bash put Perez’s beat on the stereo, lit up a joint, and leaned back into his chair. “I’m lifted, shifted, higher than the ceiling,” he said. He and Frankie instantly knew they had something, and the phrase quickly became the refrain of “Suga Suga.” Bash at first tried rapping in the assertive style of UGK’s Pimp C but then adopted a monotone talking style for the track, with “fluffy, more airy and pretty” vocals, as he puts it. Later, back in Texas, he handed a CD of the song to Ed Ocañas, a radio program director in Corpus Christi. When Ocañas called him weeks later to tell him that “Suga Suga” had become a hit in town, Bash explained that the track was actually called “Lifted.” But the people had spoken, and Bash changed the title.

The song soon spread to San Antonio, then on to Houston and beyond. In December of 2003, it reached the number seven spot on the Billboard Hot 100, a breakthrough for Houston hip-hop, which had done well on the rap charts but hadn’t quite conquered the mainstream. Suddenly, the Third Coast was on the radar of record labels, who came calling for Bash and Perez. “People started looking to this place as ‘We make hits here,’ ” Perez says. Several Houston rappers, including Chamillionaire, Paul Wall, and Slim Thug, nabbed record deals soon after.

In the nearly twenty years since “Suga Suga” first trickled out of a local Corpus Christi station and into the world, Bash has had other hits, and Perez has served as a producer for the likes of Ariana Grande, Frank Ocean, and Miguel. The song has become a familiar presence on TikTok, and other artists have covered it; the late French rapper Népal’s 2019 cover has more than 20 million plays on Spotify alone. “When you think about that era, that was the only song that sounded like that,” Perez says. “Back before ‘vibe’ was a big word, ‘Suga Suga’ was a vibe,” adds Bash, maybe only slightly hyperbolically. —P.M.

It’s easy to tell why Z-Ro’s “Mo City Don” is regarded as the national anthem of Houston. It’s a four-minute, 25-second freestyle packed with punchy lines and references to Houston culture, stacked and harmonized over a hypnotizing sample of Erik B. & Rakim’s “Paid in Full.” The track took Houston by storm and is considered the only contemporary freestyle that compares with the ones on DJ Screw’s “June 27.”

Although the song was released in 2005, it wasn’t until 2009 that its legend was first minted—at the expense of Drake, who just may be the biggest fan of Houston rap outside Houston. At Warehouse Live during his first-ever tour, the soon-to-be-superstar dropped just a few lines from “Mo City Don” during an interlude. The Texan crowd responded by belting out each and every syllable of the freestyle with an intense fervor that silenced Drake, who seemed to vacillate between frustration with the seemingly uncontrollable crowd and joy that he was among a tribe who loved the tune perhaps more than he did. This moment, captured on video, went viral on hip-hop blogs. Suddenly, the track was no longer limited to playback in clubs and at house parties.

Even after Drake became one of the biggest rappers in the world, he didn’t forget his humble—and humbling—beginnings. His 2013 song “Too Much” is partly about how nervous he was before that Warehouse Live show. Then, in 2014, he closed the circle during a triumphant return to the venue, bringing Z-Ro onstage to perform “Mo City Don.”

And the funniest thing about the whole story? Z-Ro never even liked the song. —Jessi Pereira

Travis Scott’s triple-platinum 2018 album Astroworld is an homage to his hometown of Houston and the Texas rap giants upon whose shoulders he stands. Named after the amusement park that Scott frequented as a child, the record helped birth his annual Astroworld music festival, held on the grounds of the defunct park. (This year’s festival is slated for November 5 and 6.) Though Scott’s two previous albums made him a star, Astroworld was the first mature realization of his artistic vision: hip-hop with a spaced-out, psychedelic bent.

Astroworld’s massive success was driven primarily by the mosh pit–inducing “Sicko Mode,” which became the first hip-hop song to spend thirty weeks in the top ten of the Billboard Hot 100. But the fourth track, “R.I.P. Screw,” is peak Houston, a futuristic culmination of the city’s distinct hip-hop sound. A dedication to DJ Screw in both style and substance, the song is marked by slowed-down, slurry distortions that give the impression that a twenty-first-century Screw is manning the board. As soft electronic keys patter like rainfall, Scott, his voice transformed as usual by Auto-Tune processing that leaves him sounding like a stoned cyborg, settles for belting out one sizable, mortality-obsessed verse. “I just took a four to the head,” he raps, referring to four ounces of codeine cough syrup that, mixed with soda and hard candy, was Screw’s drug of choice. Though the mixture plays a role in the Houston rap scene analogous to that of LSD during the sixties, it has claimed lives, including those of Screw, who overdosed in 2000, and the late Port Arthur/Houston rapper Pimp C. During this track’s three-minutes-and-change, Scott doesn’t try to resolve that dichotomy. His fuzzy, blissed-out affect (“Oh my God, I just can feel the love”) may be the only thing that makes sense to someone ambivalent about a substance that fueled his heroes, and also killed them. —K.F.

2020 was no one’s favorite year, but it had one thing going for it: San Antonio–born, Houston-raised Megan Thee Stallion. “Savage,” which appeared in her EP Suga in March of that year, boasted an insistent keyboard line that played peekaboo with the beat and a memorable chorus that encapsulated her brand: “Classy, bougie, ratchet / Sassy, moody, nasty.” The song inspired a global TikTok dance craze and by April 1 reached the twentieth slot on the Billboard Hot 100, making it Megan’s second biggest hit, after the previous year’s “Hot Girl Summer,” which placed nine spots higher.

Well, for a moment it was her second biggest hit. As “Savage” percolated through the airwaves, the first lady of Houston music, Beyoncé, contacted Megan, offering to contribute her own verses to the song—a surprising move, given that Bey rarely makes guest appearances. “You grow up and you friggin’ watch Destiny’s Child, and you go to the rodeo to see them perform,” Megan later told the Guardian. “You don’t grow up and think you’re gonna meet Be-yon-cé!” Their collaboration produced “Savage (Remix),” which stays true to the original but is enlivened by Beyoncé, who effortlessly switches from ethereal singing to boastful rapping to a sly combination of both. Megan, who touched up her own verses, seems to have been inspired by Queen B—who makes sure to remind listeners that “Texas up in this thang.” The track hit number one on the charts, and Megan and Beyoncé became the first women ever to win the Best Rap Performance Grammy.

And that was just the start of Megan’s year. A few months after the remix topped the charts, she hit number one again with “WAP,” her lascivious, controversial collaboration with New York rapper Cardi B. (Okay, maybe 2020 was someone’s favorite year.) By this August, after Megan became the first rapper to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated’s annual swimsuit issue, it was clear that the future of the genre would center on assertive, body-positive women—and have a distinctly Texan twang. —K.F.