Paul Wall's Story
Excerpt:"Wall Unit
One of Houston's most prominent rappers gets his mind correct
By Mosi Reeves
"What you know about purple drank/What you know about poppin' trunk, neon lights, and candy paint," raps Paul Wall on "They Don't Know," his 2004 kaleidoscope of Houston's rap landscape. "What you know about white shirts, starched-down jeans with a razor crease/Platinum and gold on top our teeth/Big old chains with an iced-out piece?"
A small player on the national hip-hop scene for more than a decade, Houston came to prominence in the early Nineties for birthing the supergroups Geto Boys and UGK. But the pair's uncomfortably raw takes on gangsta rap — Geto Boys are notorious for insanely criminal nightmares like "Mind of a Lunatic" and "Mind Playing Tricks on Me" — masked the city's unique cultural traits.
Fast-forward to 2006, and the world has changed. Everyone knows about diamond-encrusted grills and jewelry, sipping syrup, guzzling Texas tea, and rolling on 22s. DJ Screw, the late mixtape producer who infamously slowed down rap songs into a psychedelic crawl, is widely acknowledged as a hip-hop pioneer. Once largely ignored as another Southern backwater, Houston's rap scene is a phenomenon dissected by major music publications, and Wall, Mike Jones, Chamillionaire, Slim Thug, and a few others are all national rap stars.
"People been telling us for years to stop rapping about candy paint and 84s and poppin' trunks. But we got platinum plaques off of it now, because we kept rapping about it," says Wall during a phone interview. "I'm proud to see how far Houston rap has come".'