It's was for the sake of brevity because just discussing the mainstream is a lot of name dropping and this is just one person's perspective being from the mid west. I don't think all southern rap was bad but I don't think it was 90's west coast good either.
I'm not tryna hate on your perspective or anything like that. Everyone is entitled to their point of view.
I look at it a little different- because I was born right outside of Houston in a smaller city in Harris County that's considered part of Greater Houston. I've lived in Houston but I don't say I'm from Houston because I don't want to disrespect the people that were born inside the city.
If we're looking at mid-West hip-hop, you're probably going to look at it very differently than how I look at it. I know hardly anything about the mid-West.
But if we look at Houston hip-hop, naturally I'm going to see it very differently. I think Houston rap is better than West Coast, to be honest.
I say this because Houston rap has been more spiritual and more soulful. You look at Z-Ro, for example. That dude will sing about Jesus in his raps and a lot of his stuff is actually very religious. Not only that but... and a lot of people don't really understand what chopped-and-screwed is.
Chopped-and-Screwed music comes from DJ Screw. It's part of the DNA of Houston rap. I used to smoke weed and chop and screw music. You slow down the music and do the chop effect... you can do other stuff if you want but that's basically chopped and screwed. I guess you could call it a form of remix. It slows down the music and makes the music more calming and basically it's for when you smoke weed. You smoke weed and your whole world slows down and then you listened to slowed-down hip-hop. The stuff sounds deeper in pitch and then there's the chop thing altering how time works and you get sort of a slowed-down psychedelic effect. Also I wanna mention that a lot of people think chopped and screwed is supposed to go with sipping syrup and that's not true... it's supposed to be weed, not syrup. The syrup is a separate thing. Also I wanna mention that Robitussin is not no syrup. You have to put codeine in it for it to be syrup.
But I mean... if a person doesn't really know about the music of Fat Pat, DJ Screw, Z-Ro.... I don't think they can really talk about Houston rap. I mean they
can talk about it but they can't really talk about it in the same way a person from Houston can talk about it. Because you talk about Houston rap to someone from Houston... they're gonna think of Fat Pat, DJ Screw, Z-Ro or Lil Keke, for example. I live outside of Texas now and you can't really talk about Houston rap to someone from outside from Texas because, for example, they won't even know who Lil Keke or Z-Ro are. When I was a teenager, I saw someone get made fun of because they didn't know who Z-Ro was and then people kinda backed off a little because someone explained "it's not their fault, they're not from Texas". If you come to Texas- at least around Houston- and you don't know who Z-Ro is... then people know you're not from Texas. There's people in Texas who think Z-Ro is better than Tupac. And Z-Ro doesn't just have a few hits... that dude has been putting out albums since the 90's and has had hella albums and hella Houston classics. When I turned 19 me and my girlfriend went to a Z-Ro concert in Houston and you couldn't even hear Z-Ro when he did his Mo City Don song because people were chanting every single word to his song and you couldn't hear him.... pretty much the entire audience knew every single word. He's as big as Lil Wayne to people in Houston. But then you go outside Houston and no one has ever heard of him.
When I think about it, it makes sense that you mentioned Mike Jones. Because like I said Mike Jones was part of that wave around 2005 when Houston rap became mainstream for like two seconds. But the people not from Houston... they saw the stuff that went mainstream and was big outside of Houston.... but what the person outside of Houston saw of Houston rap was totally different than what the person in that area saw of Houston rap. I mean, you're entitled to your opinion but I don't think you can really seriously evaluate Houston rap unless you really know about Fat Pat, DJ Screw, Big Moe, Lil Keke, Z-Ro, etc.... because that's part of the basics of Houston rap is that stuff. If a person doesn't know about them, they don't know about Houston rap. And if people don't know about them, they're probably not gonna know about rappers like K-Rino, Big Mello, Street Military, E.S.G., etc.
I don't know what you know... if you know about the people I mentioned, I think you're entitled to talk about Houston rap... but if you're not familiar with them I don't think you really know Houston rap.
I don't really know about Atlanta rap but I think most of the Southern rappers you mentioned were from Atlanta... at first, rap was dominated by NYC, then California, and then I think Atlanta.... I think right now it's Atlanta... I dislike a lot of the music from Atlanta but I can't say anything about Atlanta as a whole because the mainstream acts that get famous outside of Atlanta.... it could be that there's better underground rap acts that don't get famous outside of Atlanta because they don't sell out and the best ones don't actually become mainstream famous... that's how it is with a lot of Houston rap... for example, that's why Slim Thug went back to being underground and left the mainstream. He's still making hits in Texas but he quit being mainstream because he felt like he was having to give up his integrity. And I really respect what he did because I think it was right. He needed to stick with making Houston music and keeping true to his style... Slim Thug didn't sound right on Pharrell beats.