UGK Paving the Way
The following post contains music videos. These do not belong to me and in no way am I using these clips solely for personal enrichment. I am using them as a teaching demonstration.
I am back from a long hiatus, which was sorely needed. For some reason this Sunday morning, I woke up thinking about UGK. Don’t ask me why. It just happened.
To my students’ surprise, trap music is now 30 years old! Imagine, way back during a time before cell phones, tablets, the Internet, and laptops folks were getting high and making songs about it. Can anyone believe that? Trap music is a subgenre of RAP music in which the sole subject is making, selling, and profiting from illegal drugs.
One of the first songs in this subgenre to be widely distributed was “Pocket Full of Stones” by the Houston RAP duo, the Underground Kingz.
Pimp C and Bun B told the story of joblessness, despair, a turn to selling drugs, a meteoric rise to riches in the business, eventual homicide and jail time, and a return back to the life once the sentence was served. Not only did they release one song, they told the story in two parts.
The second part talks about a hesitancy to sell drugs and the dangers that it entails.
For many of us living along the I-10 Corridor, UGK were the first Southern RAPpers that we heard. Their tales of poverty, masculine bravado, and illicit sex over a beat that we heard on Saturdays while our mothers cleaned house, normally came to us via cassette tape that our old cousin got from another cousin who got it from a friend. And while Houston was not our home, it made us feel good that somebody from the South was RAPping. In those early days, RAP was not considered an artform for us. It was strictly an East and West Coast artform: New York and California with no people in between. I enjoyed the lyricism, but it didn’t speak to me. I mean, NWA was fun, but what did I know about California. I listened, but I could not relate. As a Southerner living through a crack and heroine epidemic and watching New Orleans descend into being the murder capital of the world, I could at least relate to UGK (As a child, I didn’t mind the inclusion of women as sexual conquest as I do now. I didn’t understand it.).
UGK’s cassette tapes predate anything we heard from Atlanta by at least five years for me (that’s when I could remember them). While the Atlanta RAPpers are FANTABULOUS, many of the people in my area, including Big K.R.I.T., feel indebted to Texas, particularly the Houston area, that showed us the first successful RAPpers who resided outside of the East or West Coast. And while Andre said it best, “The South got something to say,” they had been talking to us for almost 20 years BEFORE that statement. UGK set a prototype for RAP artists here: poetic lyrics set to a break beat that comes from the Blues/R&B songs that all of us know and sing along with. In addition to the break beat being familiar, it was enhanced with bass and ticks (highs). In other words, it has to sound good in a box Chevy (Please see the post, “Cutlass, Monte Carlos, and Regals…”). RAPpers along the area still follow this formula. I read many critics say that even K.R.I.T. can be repetitive, I understand that these critics are not from that culture and do not understand the homage that is paid to Pimp C and Bun B. The Houston RAPpers set the protocol. They were the first, and those of us from the area love them.
While UGK remained local to those of us around the I-10 Corridor for a large part of their career, they experienced national fame in the early 2000s, they achieved national fame through a number of collaborations with others who were true RAPpers. We all remember the collaboration with Jay-Z:
While people debate the merits of Jay-Z’s marriage to Beyonce, I have ALWAYS appreciated his knowledge of RAP music. He obviously heard the same cassette tapes that we heard (or, he was introduced by his Houston-born wife and appreciated what he heard).
Another very famous collaboration came during the late 1990s with Three 6 Mafia, a local Memphis group who followed 8 Ball and MJG.
Sadly, Pimp C actually died in 2007 after a night of heavy celebration with syrup and sleep apnea. He simply fell asleep after a night of partying and didn’t wake up the next morning. The Hip Hop community still mourns his death.
Bun B is still active, though. He is making music, making collaboration, and continuing to make waves. He has achieved that legendary status in music, as younger RAPpers tribute to UGK and ask him to appear on songs. And though these guys started out talking about the drug/sex scene in their Houston hood, they have become luminaries in the game. And that is the way to achieve lasting fame, and not fade out like a trend.
