The music is unhurried and woozy, as if it had been left too long in the sun. “Still Tippin’ ” is an elegant primer on Houston hip-hop. Two other local m.c.s, Aztek and Short Dog, who are virtually unknown outside the city, have been signed by established industry figures-Jay-Z and Russell Simmons, respectively-and the Geto Boys’ new album, “The Foundation,” has been well received.
1 in September, and Jones’s first major-label album, “Who Is Mike Jones?,” which was released in April, has gone platinum. Wall’s major-label début record, “The Peoples Champ,” entered the charts at No. in January-introduced Americans to three influential Houston m.c.s: the needling, self-deprecating Mike Jones the swaggering, bass-voiced giant Slim Thug and the cheerfully louche white rapper Paul Wall. One of the year’s biggest hip-hop songs, “Still Tippin’ ”-which was released on Swishahouse, an independent label, in 2003, and rereleased by Warner Bros. Not since Nirvana made Seattle the capital of grunge, in 1991, have a city, a sound, and a significant chart presence been so closely linked. Now Houston hip-hop is back, enjoying a musical hegemony that happens only occasionally in pop.
In the fourteen years since “Mind” was released, the band has showed up again on the Billboard pop charts only twice, most recently in 1996. Then Geto Boys-and Southern hip-hop-seemed to disappear. I’m paranoid, sleeping with my finger on the trigger.” For several months, “Mind” was on the radio all the time. Candlesticks in the dark, visions of bodies being burned. “Mind” is an unsettling song, its opening couplets freighted with anxiety: “At night I can’t sleep, I toss and turn. Geto Boys-Scarface, Bushwick Bill, and Willie D-had deep, unmistakably Southern voices, and their lyrics didn’t celebrate or protest anything. If the song had an antecedent, it was the blues, not music you might have heard in a disco. A slow, mournful plaint, “Mind” relied on long, harmonically complex guitar samples-a departure from the short horn bursts and rapid drums then dominating hip-hop. It was called “Mind Playing Tricks on Me,” and was performed by a Houston hip-hop trio called Geto Boys. In the fall of 1991, an unusual song found its way onto the radio.
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