* (restored)
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.
Sittin Sidewayz – Paul Wall w/ Big Pokey
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.
25 Lighters – DJ DMD w/ Lil Keke, Fat Pat
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…”
Southside – Lil Keke
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.
MANN!! – Big Moe w/ ESG, Big Pokey
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.
People on this list who are dead:
Big Moe – cough syrup
DJ Screw – cough syrup
Pimp C – cough syrup
Big Hawk – shot
Fat Pat – shot
R.I.P.
The Way We Ball – Lil Flip
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.
Wanna Be a Baller – Lil Troy w/ Fat Pat, Yungstar, Big Hawk
I’mma baller, I’mma twenty inch crawler
blades on Impala, diamond rottweiller, I-10
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.
Ridin – Chamillionaire w/ Krayzie Bone
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.
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.
“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.
Swangin and Bangin – ESG
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.
Still Tippin – Mike Jones
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.
The World Is a Ghetto – The Geto Boys
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:
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.
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p.s. Hey. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi. I would have to agree with you. About Derrida. I knew nothing of that, yes, curious sounding film based on the Sparks novel. I’ll check it out, thanks. ** Tosh Berman, Hi, Tosh. I’m guessing you saw Philip Best’s comment replying to your question? If not, take a trip back to yesterday. ** Philip Best, Hi, Philip! Thank you ever so much! ** Sypha, Hi. Maybe some of the music/score they made for that dreadful ‘Frisk’ film ended up on that album? My favorite Coil albums? Hm. ‘Horse Rotorvator’, followed by ‘Love’s Secret Domain’ and then maybe ‘Musick to Play in the Dark Vol. 1’. What are yours? ** T.B., Hi. Hey, are you Thomas Boettner? if so, it’s nice to have you here. If not, well, very nice to have you here too. I met her a couple of times through Peter Sotos. Also, strangely, people have told me about her novels, but I hadn’t put two and two together that it was the same person until Philip sent me the post. The Houellbecq comparison could easily be true. I’m not hugely up enough on his recent work to really know, I guess. How are you? How is everything? Respect, me. ** Scott Bradley, Hi, Scott! Wow, thanks for coming in here, pal. I met her through Peter too, but here in Paris. I hope you’re doing great, man! ** Paul Curran, Hi, Paul! Thanks a bunch! It’s snowing here, well, a teeny weeny bit. I’m so happy that you’re going to have all the room you need to write! Use it promiscuously please. Stuff okay there? The news over here about the covid situation there is very confusing. Love from me. ** Bill, Hi. Well, it literally just came out so I doubt single person that doesn’t run AS has a copy in their paws yet. Tim’s diary is so nice, yeah? Me too about the ‘wishing + there’ thing. I was there, but not until about a year after he stopped writing in his diary. If you can remember to alert me about the Friday thing, that would be cool since my post-it already fell off the wall. ** Dominik, Hi! I think so. I think we have the right combination of deviance and utter integrity. You actually taught sex ed? Wow. I had a sex ed class at my elementary school when I was, like, 11, but, yeah, they made sure it was the most boring class it could possibly be. You’re on a love roll, my friend. Love that paints every piece of litter and garbage in Budapest gold and makes them rise three feet in the air above the ground or trash can or wherever they’ve been dumped and hover there telling their life stories in great detail to whoever asks, G. ** Ian, Hi, Ian! I hear you on the book acquisition front. I’m lucky ‘cos writers and publishers send me their things gratis fairly often I guess hoping I’ll mention them in a blog post. Huge congrats on finishing your novel! Fireworks! Wow, now what? Are you going to send it to publishers, or let it sit, or … what’s the plan? That’s fantastic news! I’ve never been interested in American football, but I understand the thing because I was really into baseball for a long time. I hope you’re happy that Tom Brady’s team seems to have won. ** _Black_Acrylic, AS is kind of really on fire for sure. Of course I don’t know about ‘Luckenbooth’. Let us/me know how it is. ** Misanthrope, Maybe you should buy David a ventriloquist dummy for his next birthday. Maybe all he needs is the access. It’s … wait, was snowing here barely. Barely. As with Ian, I hope your team was the winner and all of that. Good news about Kayla! ** Steve Erickson, Hi. Yes, Marilyn Manson was one of four stars who refused to let me write a big article about them for Spin. In his case, he thought I was too ‘hardcore’, ha ha. (The others were Trent Reznor, Larry Clark, and Todd Haynes). And, yes, I was a Contributing Editor and writer for Spin, and Craig Marks was my boss, at the time MM pulled that shit on him. And, in fact, as I understand it, he pulled that shit because of something the writer he did approve of wrote in the article that ended up running. Weird. Enjoy your storm. We got a useless but just barely pretty brief snow sprinkle this morning. ** Right. I’m restoring this old post by the mighty Chris Dankland today that is even more of a history lesson now than it was when he originally offered it as a history lesson. It’s big fun, enjoy it. See you tomorrow.
Now available in North America 
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Hey Dennis.
Thank you to Mr. Dankland for this post about h-town rappers. I know what I’m listening to today.
Re my novel, I guess I send it to publishers and shit? Idk, I mean I’ll send it anywhere, I’ll print it on recycled toilet paper and give it away for free. You wanna start a publishing house and you can publish it? :p
For now I will work on my sad little two paragraphs that are meant to get a publisher/agent interested. Then planning for the next project.
Xoxo Ian
Ps I love baseball, it’s very meditative. I listen to it on the radio during the summer. You get to hear ice cream ads for small ice cream producers right across America.
Dennis, Hahaha, buy David a dummy. That’d be ace. And then watch him take the world by storm. 😀
Yeah, the team I wanted to win…won. So that’s good. I guess. It’s not my favorite team, so I have to grab onto what I can when my team isn’t good enough to play in the Super Bowl.
Yeah, it snowed here…and then rain followed and essentially washed it all away. Was pretty and all that while it was happening. Bleh. Stupid rain.
Apres The Last Peots Le Deluge
As we await Orangina’s seond impeachment Tom Waits reminds us. . .
Thank you Philip Best! And thank you Dennis for letting me know about Philip’s response.
@ Chris, thank you for this overview! I knew plenty of DJ Screw but not much else. This will soundtrack my Monday nicely.
Anyone liking this sort of thing, there’s a Memphis Rap Mix here by the mighty Legowelt from 2012 that’s really good and may be of interest.
Hi!!
Hahaha, yes, probably. We had sinfully boring and pointless sex ed. classes both in elementary and high school too. They made sure to only talk about teenage pregnancy, menstruation, and STDs.
Oh, hell, haha! As Budapest is full of garbage, I wouldn’t be able to get anywhere on time – I’d listen to all their stories. Love with an uncontrollable urge to sing t.A.T.u.’s “Not Gonna Get Us” every time he gets an erection, Od.
I’m not a super-huge rap guy but I will confess to enjoying some of the old stuff and I guess the Geto Boys qualify… the fact they’re seen as one of the big pioneers of the horrorcore subgenre certainly appeals to me.
Dennis, I re-listened to both of the MUSICK TO PLAY IN THE DARK ones recently. My favorites? Well, obviously HORSE ROTORVATOR is still the best, but I also like APE OF NAPLES (which I still feel is severely underrated: I also like the BACKWARDS material that preceded it). LOVE’S SECRET DOMAIN I re-listened to two nights ago and my reaction was, “Man, I really should have had this one on the ‘Top 100 Albums’ list I posted on Facebook last year. I also really love the 3 UNNATURAL HISTORY compilations: in fact the first UNNATURAL HISTORY was the first Coil album I ever heard, so I have a nostalgic soft spot for it. But my favorite Coil albums tend to be the ones where they focused more on songs and more traditional sonic structures… some of the more experimental stuff they were doing in the mid-to-late 90’s (all that glitchy stuff) was interesting in an abstract sort of way but don’t do a super-lot for me.
Dr. Demento — Would you please stop with the compelling content? I’m trying to work here! But good on Chris Dankland for defining the Houston scene. Paul Wall’s line “What it do” reminds of the old EW&F hit “Shining Star” with the chant, “What yo life.” And now I see the post on Isabelle Nicou. Curse you! According do my Good Reads page, “None of your friends have reviewed this book yet.” So it might have to be me. Hope you and all DC peeps are good as gold today.
hello!! leaping briefly and uninvited-ly into your convo with Dominik about sex ed classes: when i was ten years old our class was sat in front of a super old sex ed video, they projected it but it was full of vhs scan lines and stuff. and one very significant part of it was very, very early CGI. there were the lower halves of a man and a woman, both in an untextured grey colour, and the man moved in and out of the woman like someone was moving a slider back and forth on a graphics program. we had been told that anyone who laughed would be sent out so we had to sit in silence watching this. it was wonderful. i wish i knew what it was called.
i had more normal sex ed stuff when i was fifteen… though we did have an assembly with some uber-christian people the school had dug out of nowhere. they showed a black-and-white video of a nuclear family looking super depressed on a sofa, with an “evil piano chord” soundtrack, and the voiceover was something like, “when i was a teenager, i thought it was a bit of fun. i thought it was a laugh. now my wife has AIDS, and my kids have both tested positive for HIV.” the only answer given, of course, was celibacy. god knows why those people were brought in. there was a significant population of creationists at the school, that might have been part of it. weird, weird place. x
Did Manson expect you to tie him up and whip him or something? (And wouldn’t going through that just enhance his EdGeLoRd image?) I didn’t know about Clark and Haynes. Did they give a reason? Haynes’ refusal surprises me.
Now that Gay City News seems to want me to review far more LGBTQ-themed films, I can see more merit in the common community complaint that they’re all too dark judging from what I’ve watched in the past month. Often, these complaints seem to be coming from very young people who came out as teenagers with no angst to accepting families and communities and who perceive AIDS as a problem that ended before they were born. But I keep seeing movies which are interested in homophobia, the closet and/or patriarchy mostly as plot points or romanticize an aura of doom about living as a couple.
I don’t know if you were serious about starting HANNIBAL, but if you do, I’d warn you that it’s an OK police procedural until the last few episodes of the first season. Then, it finally moves away from “murder of the week” plots and finds its odd tone, mixing grim but lovely gore and campy subtext about queer obsession. When I saw the episodes RIVER’S EDGE director Tim Hunter helmed at the start of the second season, I thought “Finally, this lives up to the hype!”
Hey Dennis!
This is a total favorite subgenre for me. I’m excited to look through Chris’ selections…
Hope you’ve been good. I’m eagerly anticipating the new novel (I guess it will be a bit until it comes, but I’m sure the date will arrive before I know it.)
I wanted to stop by and invite you and anyone else perusing the comments to a Zoom event I organized with a club at Bard called the Meme Lab. We’re going to have a talk with John Olson, one of the musicians behind the great Wolf Eyes, about his meme page Inzane Johnny and how his interest in avant-garde media intersects on his page. If anyone here is interested in attending, they can follow us at brdmeme on Instagram or register for the event on our site: memelab.bard.edu
I don’t think the event generously sync’s up with your time zone, but I thought I would extend the invitation anyway!
Again, I hope you’ve been well—I’ve been busy working with Blake and Shane on putting out the collected works by Mark Baumer, these events, and a more proper paying job. I will comment sometime this month to catch up more thoroughly 🙂
Yess, what a day. Can’t wait to give this a proper listen on Spotify. Missed this the first time around.
Snowing here heavily and while its prettifying effects on London are kind of undeniable I’m not so into it. I guess the peruvian heat has made me soft.
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