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Paul Wall, Mike Jones & Bun B - “They Don't Know ”

Bun B - “Draped Up ”

Jim Jones, P Diddy, Jha Hha & Paul Wall - “What Ya Drankin On? ”

Rhymefest - “Brand New ”

Common - “Testify ”

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Did I imply in my “Sitting Sideways” review that I’d lost my faith in Paul Wall? That was then, friend, and “They Don’t Know” is now – and what we’ve got now is a stunner. Surrounded by video girls, Paul Wall was out of his element; but shot on the grimy streets of Houston, he looks as comfortable and appropriate as a chicken shack. “Still Tippin’” was our first glance at 44 Acres Homes, the notorious Houston neighborhood that gave the world Mike Jones and Slim Thug. I’m not sure if “They Don’t Know” is actually set in the 44 (I can’t find Southlee – the street Wall is always rapping about – on any map), but it feels like a deeper and more intense look at inner-city Texas than any we’ve yet been shown. Shot in grainy black and white, the “They Don’t Know” clip cuts furiously between stark, high-contrast images of the emcees in action and others of the hood that spat them out at us. Wall’s point: just as Texas hip-hop is indisputably distinct from music made elsewhere, so Houston is not quite like any other city. 

Indeed, the visual signature of this neighborhood is profound and unique – endless stretches of flat lots and drab, isolated homes, footbridge overpasses that resemble chicken cages, BBQ restaurants with disturbing spray-painted signs, religious revival posters, a pervasive, dusty impermanence. To their credit, the emcees seemed thrilled about all of this; stalking around like lions, proudly making that Texas Longhorn hand signal, and, oh yes, flashing the most visually arresting array of grills ever shown in a mainstream rap video. Now, you may think that the grill is the grunge goatee of the ‘00s, and when we get some distance on the fad, rappers will probably realize how silly they all looked with elaborate, baroque gold caps on their teeth. But in the meantime, Paul Wall, who doubles as a jeweler, is getting rich (“Just call me George Foreman”, he rhymes in the latest Nelly cut “because I’m selling you grills”) off of the trend. So you’ve got to expect a Wall video to be, in part, a commercial for his handiwork. He delivers, capping the teeth of grown emcees and innocent teenage girls alike – and closing the video with a shot of an insanely elaborate grill that makes his mouth look like the sparkling guts of a mainframe computer. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-14104970-videos--Paul-Wall

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The grill is just one small element in the Texas rap culture. Candy-paint cars are another. The image of the glossy finish shining from the Cadillac walls is far too sacred to represent in grayscale, and so the directors of the “They Don’t Know” clip break momentarily with the B&W motif to show viewers the glory of the freshly lacquered red convertible. Paul Wall and his partners learned their holy writ from UGK records – Nineties Texas g-rap set in Houston satellite Port Arthur, the petroleum city nearly washed back into the Gulf by Hurricane Rita. UGK put out their records through Jive-RCA, and were enormously important to the musical development of Third Coast hip-hop. But the act had so little national presence that when MTV Jams was airing its Chopped & Screwed Southern Legends weekend,they had to resort to airing the UGK remix of Jay-Z’s “Big Pimpin” – not exactly Southern music, or in any way representative of the Texas sound. Since then, Pimp C, the more proletarian member of the UGK duo, has landed himself in jail. But Bun B has soldiered on, and has lately gotten so caught up in the national rise of Houston music that he’s suddenly been appearing on MTV more frequently than the cast of Laguna Beach. Now over 30 years old – absolutely geriatric by rap standards – Bun B has recently taken the laid-back-but-dangerous elder statesman role in individual solo clips by the entire “Still Tippin’” trifecta. 

On “Draped Up”, the veteran emcee finally gets to take center stage and flex for himself, and for the most part, he plays it safe: showing off candy-painted cars, video girls, and gauche diamond jewelry in a style we’ve all become accustomed to. Yet the networks don’t seem to know what to do with his persistent calls to “Free The Pimp”: they’re bleeped here and in the “They Don’t Know” clip, and the video for “I Ain’t Heard Of That” appears to have been banished from rotation. Is MTV irritated that Bun B and his Houston admirers are using their platform to lodge a protest against the Texas penal system?  Bun seems unlikely to stop: there’s so much Pimp C content in his rhymes that it’s impossible to shut him up on the topic without banning him altogether. “I’m going to stand up for my partner "til they let him off of lock”, he warns us in “They Don’t Know”.  He is thoughtful and community-minded (Bun offers a guided tour of his favorite places in Houston on his weblog) and he’s old enough to be confident of his legendary status. He’s giving it to the networks straight. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-305608-videos--Bun-B

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As caretaker of Texas rap, Bun B is also the guardian of its iconography. That’s a position of respect, but it doesn’t give the UGK co-founder much interpretive latitude. For his lead clip, he needed to entertain us with a parade of signifiers – and, as I am sure he realized to his dismay, there was no way around the exercise. Iced-out bracelets and chains are required, of course, but they’re also pretty general; we were counting on him for that peculiar alchemy of wood-grain, eighty-four spokes, neon trunks, vogue tires, and candy-paint that we’ve come to associate with the Dirty South in 2005. And sizzurp, of course. Sizzurp, or Syrup, or That Purple, or Drank, or whatever else they’re calling it in a video near you, is the oil that makes this engine run. In case you don’t know what they’ve all been talking about, sizzurp is to South Coast hip-hop as LSD was to acid rock in the Sixties: the subculturally-celebrated drug that makes the trippy sound of the music make sense to listeners. That Purple is not to be confused with the celebrated (in Atlanta, anyway) Crunk Juice, a Hennessey and Red Bull concoction that elicits a radically different and far more aggressive reaction, or Pimp Juice, which is vodka and Sunkist. I think. To an extraordinary degree, modern rap music is about drinking really disgusting-sounding concoctions. 

Recipes for sizzurp vary, but most involve mixing codeine and promethazine with Sprite, and throwing in a Jolly Rancher for flavor. DJ Screw, the creator of Chopped & Screwed music, sipped this stuff until it killed him. Representations of sizzurp-sipping have lately been flying past the censors, who are about as far behind the curve on this as they’ve ever been in the history of the video networks. Consequently, those in the know have gotten to watch emcees and crew members flagrantly sipping from big purple styrofoam tumblers of Drank, all while rapping in Southern-code about the state of intense dislocation and disassociation that it causes. The “What You Drankin On?” clip, which doesn’t get played all that much, follows Jim Jones into a Little Miami tiki, where he orders a huge helping of That Purple from bartender Jha Jha. (Note to the morbidly curious: no, you cannot actually get sizzurp in a bar.)  Now, Jones is not a southern emcee – he’s a member of the NYC-based Dipset. Those guys are established hedonists, so it’s altogether believable that it might strike him as a capital idea to take a trip to the Dirty Dirty where Paul Wall can show him the ropes. What’s so striking is that arch-mainstream rapper P. Diddy is around for the ride, too. When Puffy jumps on the bandwagon, you know you’ve got a national movement on your hands. 2005: the year of sizzurp. -Tris McCall.

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-304627-videos--Jim-Jones

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As the tidal wave of Drank washes over the Continental U.S., Chicago remains dry ground, kept on the straight and narrow by the new and withering moralism of Kanye West. Like John Calvin before him, West is so drunk on his own ego that he can freely disregard all other stimulants. Where music from the South staggers and woozily weaves through a drugged-out blur, West continues to wave the flag for bright, crystal-clear production and articulate (though not always incisive) raps. To the uninitiated, his is the approachable face of modern hip-hop, and we’ve all seen where that leads: the covers of Time and Newsweek, and anointment as the shining star and exemplar of the whole genre. But in early ‘05, what really had the Internet going nuts was the rumor that West had cruelly bitten most of “Jesus Walks” from underground Chi emcee Rhymefest. If the haters had bothered to check the liner notes of College Dropout, they’d have seen Rhymefest fully attributed as co-writer. West may get some of his brilliance by proxy, but he’s footnoted his sources. 

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-7325215-videos--Rhymefest

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To bring it full circle, Common – who is to Chicago as Bun B is to Houston – is usually considered far too poised and boho-sophisticated to do any sizzurp sipping. Yet a few years ago, back when the Coca-Cola Corporation recognized that an increasing number of young African-Americans were using its products for, um… mixers, the company chose Common to spearhead its move on the urban market. Those of us who were more than a little irritated by the Common commercials have long since forgiven him for his corporatist impulses: he is, after all, a major-label emcee, and one whose self-serious reputation occludes a pretty decent sense of humor and a penchant for the absurd.  He plays the “Testify” video for maximum schtick-value, fully dramatizing his over-the-top courtroom narrative as if it was a piece of blue-tinted network TV. In case you’re not getting the joke, Steve Harris – better known as the star of the The Practice, the most formulaic courtroom show since Perry Mason – is on hand, playing a clueless detective. Common plays it straight, standing at the back of the chamber like an avenging angel overseer, telling the story with a poker face and the vaguest trace of a nod and wink. After excellent, gorgeous videos for “The Corner” and “Go”, it’s hard to fault him for wanting to blow off a little steam. -Tris McCall

Check it out for yourself at: http://music.yahoo.com/ar-271325-videos--Common

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