The musician Peyton is a prime example of the quietly poignant history of Houston’s music scene. Her grandmother Theola Booker composed and arranged music for the gospel musician James Cleveland, even earning a Grammy nomination. (She was also a piano instructor to none other than Beyoncé.) A classically trained singer and violinist herself, Peyton makes music that is sunny and full of heart. The city’s respect for the past isn’t lost on the singer, who recently graduated from a college in Houston after performing an opera--inspired final recital. For all of the boisterous hip-hop coming from the region, Peyton’s music fits alongside a deep tradition of soul and R&B in Houston. She uses her bright and emotive croon as a tool against her own social anxiety. Though shy in real life, she projects a world of emotion within her music. Her upcoming album, due this summer from Stones Throw Records, is a lush collection of soulful ballads that could have only come from Houston. It’s just more proof of how multifaceted the city can be. On one hand giving rise to the ground-level raps of an OMB Bloodbath or Maxo Kream, and on the other, the down-home soul of Peyton.
Peyton
Reggie
debut album is due out sometime this year. “You know how niggas be when they meet a new bitch and then they Prince Charming-
type shit,” he explains. “Then when you really get to know him, he’s turned into a whole different. . . . That’s exactly what about to happen. I’m about to trick the fuck out y’all niggas.” The joke is unlikely to be on listeners. Reggie speaks with the wit and wisdom of someone who has truly learned from life. It’s no surprise that he tells me he got his introduction to music through listening to gospel musicians. Like so much of the music coming out of Houston today, Reggie’s is as grounded in the streets as it is in the spirit.
Reggie doesn’t want anyone searching for his old persona online. When we talk over Zoom, he jokes about his early raps less with embarrassment and more like he simply can’t recognize the person he used to be. Reggie came up in the suburb of Sugar Land around the same time that Maxo and his Kream affiliates were starting to take off; seeing their rise gave him the inspiration to keep going.
The music he makes now, gentle introspective tracks on which he might snap and spit an impressive few bars, is part of a careful reintroduction to the world. Reggie tells me he has several albums already recorded, and he’s introducing himself to audiences slowly; his
Twenty-year-old HVN started rapping on a whim. He was born in Beaumont but relocated to the suburb of Pearland for high school (Megan Thee Stallion is currently the suburb’s most famous alumni). Despite living nearby, he met BBY Kodie online, exchanging messages on -Instagram before meeting in person. Initially, HVN was more focused on helping Kodie as an artist than becoming one himself. His real passion was film, and he fashioned himself as a music--video -director. But as the story goes, a few tracks he uploaded online as a joke turned into serious buzz. HVN naturally moves through styles with ease, at one moment spitting relaxed bars about Dracos and the next bearing his soul. Now, as he prepares to go on tour with Brockhampton, he sees an opportunity to flourish as an all-around creative. “I want to make Houston the next Atlanta,” he says. “Just artists coming out of anywhere, any part of Houston. That shit’s cool to me.”
Ken
the Man
HVN
Uber shifts. As her star rose, she’s been able to take on music full time. She started with the type of bouncy club rap that made Megan famous, but she has since expanded into the kind of laid-back flow that the city’s scions of rap built careers on. The blend is as compelling as anything being released right now. She recently signed onto a partnership with Asylum records, and is working on her follow-up to 4 Da 304’s, which is sure to have the post-pandemic nightclubs jumping.
Do not compare Ken the Man to Houston’s other rising female rap icon, Megan Thee Stallion. It’s not that both don’t share a similarly buoyant flow that’ll make your head knock and your knees weak, it’s just that Ken the Man deserves to stand on her own. Last August, she independently released 4 Da 304’s, a record that would make any nightclub shake. It’s raunchy, sexy, and dripping with confidence. Like a true Houston hustler, she started making music in between
pain with me. So it’s going to be crazy. It’s going to be a real, real energy exchange.”
He says his latest project, due out sometime this year, builds on more positive emotional themes. Toliver sees Houston as a mecca for talent. “The artists, the painters, the dancers, these people are super-talented on another type of level,” he says. “We come at things differently, and I don’t think people really understand that, to a certain degree. Because the culture and the way we move is so diverse, and it’s really crazy.”
Don Toliver is likely up next from Houston.
An acolyte of Travis Scott, Toliver makes music that sounds like the latest iteration of the city’s sonic contribution to hip-hop. It’s got the ambient flourishes of later Kanye productions but retains that distinctly Southern energy. Toliver sings with a distinct vocal range that hearkens the easily identifiable register of Kid Cudi. His 2020 debut, Heaven or Hell, arrived just as the pandemic started. “There’s so much music people never got to experience,” he says. “People never got to experience that
Don
Toliver
though he got his start rapping much like Maxo. His newer music, a pair of lush and heartfelt singles released over the past year, stick with you unlike anything currently out there. On “I Don’t Wanna Feel No More,” he opens with a gentle croon: “Sometimes I feel good in my chest/But I can never get that to my head.”
Reggie remembers trying to get his footing early on when he started making music. Whereas hubs like Atlanta, L.A., and New York have an infrastructure of creative professionals — marketing agencies, PR firms, major-label studios etc. — Houston has none of that. There isn’t much of a professionalized creative industry in the city, and most people have fairly conventional jobs in health care or energy. It’s still relatively uncommon for someone in Houston to do anything creative as a profession. “We used to do all types of weird hustling shit. We ain't know what the fuck we were supposed to do,” he explains. “Bun B went to my church, and I wrote down my YouTube link on the top of the offering envelope and ran that bitch to him,” Reggie tells me. “That nigga looked at that shit and just said, ‘What the fuck?’”
For a lot of young artists coming up in the city, the lack of support fueled a fire internally. The musician HVN, alongside his close friend BBY Kodie, are something like the standard-bearers of the coming generation. Both in their early twenties, their sound is as freewheeling and untethered as the culture in Houston. There are electronic flourishes reminiscent of Aphex Twin and distorted kick drums designed to make your trunk rattle.
HVN started his brand Don’t Die after suffering a stroke due to complications from sickle cell, which he was diagnosed with when he was a kid. It was HVN’s frustration with the lack of venues willing to book Kodie that inspired his parties of the same name around 2015 — a raison d'etre for the city’s youth. “Me and my friends would go skate downtown and just be like, ‘Bro, there's nothing to do in Houston at all. It's fucking boring,’” HVN explains. “So, Don't Die helped with that.”
The current vanguard in Houston is of course indebted to Travis Scott, who came up around the same time as Maxo, and from a neighboring high school in Fort Bend County. Scott has become one of the youngest and most successful entrepreneurs in rap, and he’s making a point to bring it back to Houston. His Space Village storefront and cafe is an heir to H-Town Sneaker Summit in reverence to shoes as well as potential for connection. His Cactus Jack label is home to Don Toliver, who is poised to be another breakout star from the city.
“It’s such a blessing that I was able to lock in with bro at the time I did, when he started to take all these ventures,” Toliver says over the phone. “I’m happy that Travis has been able to do everything he's been able to do for the city.”
Scott’s sonic influence — a brash and cathartic meld of Yeezus-era Kanye and Houston rap melodics — has come to define the new music coming out of the city. Don Toliver’s debut, Heaven or Hell, points to an evolution of the city’s sound, picking up where DJ Screw left off, experimenting with sonic landscapes to make something new.
“I feel like we got a bird's-eye view on what's going on around the world,” Don Toliver says of Houston. “There's people out here that really know what's going on with fashion and music, way ahead of time. I feel like people here move so swiftly — we might just make it happen rather than talking about it.”
This piece originally appeared as part of Rolling Stone’s annual Hot List, in the July/August issue of the magazine.
renewed perspective. “Even when we were busting skinny jeans and snapbacks early, we always just did us,” Maxo explains. “Before, people rapped to blow up and shit like that. My shit was more like, ‘I'm going to do me.’ It was my escape from the streets.”
Our school district, in the suburb of Sugar Land, was the subject of a New York Times report about the changing demographics of the country at large. Fort Bend County, which contains Sugar Land, was 19 percent Asian, 24 percent Hispanic, 21 percent black, and 36 percent white when I graduated in 2010.
It’s an important feature of the new wave of musicians from Houston. The demographics of hip-hop have long been changing along with the rest of the country. It’s an innate understanding that young people from the city have. Houston is not only one of the most diverse cities in America but one of the most integrated. The children of doctors and oil magnates go to school with people on food stamps.
“These suburb white boys, these Hispanic kids, they really relate with all this street shit I’m talking about. Messed up parents, too,” Maxo explains. “And I'm in Supreme. I'm wearing the shit that they're into.”
The musician Reggie also grew up in Sugar Land, though his family is from Arkansas. He makes the kind of patiently vulnerable songs that are increasingly hard to come by in today’s landscape,
Going back as far as the early 1900s, as the Great Migration saw America’s black population leaving the South in droves, local leaders made a point to attract black workers to Houston. The city’s Chamber of Commerce took out advertisements in black publications calling it “Heavenly Houston.” For a time at the start of the 20th century, the neighborhood of Third Ward, birthplace of Beyoncé, was home to a thriving community of black-owned businesses. “My neighborhood is kind of known for the progressive black Afrocentric shit,” the rapper Fat Tony explains. “Back in the day, there was a Black Panther chapter in Third Ward where the police murdered Carl Hampton. There's places like the S.H.A.P.E Center, which has a free vegan lunch every Sunday for the community.”
The neighborhood shaped Tony’s creative identity: “I think all of that freedom in an area where I saw myself and other people just kind of set me up to try anything. I feel very lucky to be from Third Ward.”
“Growing up in Third Ward, that's what started it all,” OMB Bloodbath, who spins intricate tales of street economics in her raps, says. “I'd be going to everybody block rapping for dollars. ‘I'll rap. Give me money.’”
Like basically everyone, OMB looks to Beyoncé as inspiration. She tells me she’s the first Third Ward-born artist since Bey to sign a major-label deal. And their families have mutual friends — OMB was even featured on a recent Tidal playlist curated by the singer.
In 2007, when Pimp C died after an overdose on promethazine, the city’s inebriant of choice, it was like a shell-shock. The culture reeled and regrouped. In the years after, Houston’s younger generation found themselves charting a new path from scratch. If you ask anyone in the know, Houston’s current wave of hip-hop stems from streetwear and sneaker culture. Coinciding with the rise of social media, young people in the city found a new affinity for shoes. You can trace a number of the city’s current stars — Travis Scott, Don Toliver, Maxo Kream — to the H-Town Sneaker Summit. The event was founded in 2004 and over time grew to be the center of Houston’s new generation of culture. Rows and rows of rare sneakers — from Dunks to Jordans to Bapes and everything in between — are shuttled in from various independent vendors for what amounts to a giant swap meet. As the city entered the 2010s, young sneakerheads started to link up and build their own movements in the city.
“Something about shoes and Houston comes naturally,” Maxo Kream, who at age 31 is something of an elder statesman for the city’s new generation, explains. “Even when you look at the rims. Niggas will throw 84 swangas on any fucking car. I’ve seen it on Toyotas. I've seen it on Lamborghinis. I've seen it on Buicks. It's the shoes.”
The “Kream” at the end of Maxo’s name stands for “Kicks Rule Everything Around Me.” I know this because we were classmates in high school at the dawn of Nike’s foray into skateboarding, when some of the most coveted shoes in sneaker culture were released. When I meet Maxo on a balmy day in spring, he gives me a sly look before telling me I look familiar. After exchanging pleasantries about high school, I follow him to his house, a modern and luxurious home near Houston’s Galleria Mall.
When Maxo arrived on the scene around 2011, with a ferocious remix of Kendrick Lamar’s “Rigamortis,” young artists in Houston didn’t have much around them to look up to. The city’s golden era in the mainstream had faded, and the older generation were focused on maintaining a historic sound in the city versus embracing what was coming. “The Houston rap scene was dictated by niggas that they wanted to blow that were not blowing,” Maxo explains. “They used to put all these old-ass niggas on a pedestal that wasn't making no noise.”
Maxo raps with a deep Southern drawl that’s a clear continuation of the city’s legacy of husky rap vocals. Think Slim Thug, Z-RO, or Bun B, all of whom could have moonlit singing soul ballads. But he carries a
OMB Bloodbath started receiving national attention in 2019, with the Chicago-drill-inspired single “Shootson.” On the song, the 27-year-old rapper proved that she could rap circles around your favorite MC, and made a strong case for Houston as a gritty epicenter of the U.S. to rival Chicago, notoriously dubbed Chiraq. It was a bittersweet breakthrough for OMB, who would prefer to be seen as more than a menacing street rapper. “People grow and understand the world more,” she explains. “So I never get offended when people look at me as a certain way. I just got to show them with my actions that that’s not me.” As a standard-bearer for a street-level view of life in Houston, the Third Ward native is working to shine a light on more than violence: “You go from ‘Shootston’ to what I’m writing about now. Yeah, I still talk my shit in a song, but then you always got to read between the lines. I’m trying to tell them, ‘Yeah, this is what it is, but this ain’t where they got to be.’ ” She continues, “It’s too much money out here to be on some gangster shit. Tough guys ain’t getting paid right now.”
OMB Bloodbath
Both decidedly underground and deeply ambitious, BBY Kodie commands a uniquely devoted fan base. In interviews, he’s said he wants to model his career after Drake, but he might have more in common with a Gen Z rapper like Playboi Carti — his music is scattered across the internet in the form of loosies and snippets, in addition to a handful of official releases. Alongside friend and classmate HVN, Kodie makes what feels like a Gen Z interpretation of chopped-and-screwed music, the production maximalist and the bars braggadocious. His breakout tape, last year’s Kodie Kardashian, takes the celebrity-obsessed culture of millennials and inverts it into something sinister. Kodie has a knack for matching the punch of his drums with a thumping flow: He’s clearly paying homage to the city’s speaker-knocking history, but with a decidedly modern spin.
Fat Tony has seen Houston from every angle. A Third Ward native, he came up attending punk shows and makes music that holds a reverence for Houston’s radical black history. His mom exposed him to the arts early, and his Third Ward had the type of creative vibe you might expect in Northern California. In addition to recording eight albums and collaborating on a variety of different art projects, Tony is also something of a Houston historian. He explains the links between the city’s rap scene and that of Oakland. “DJ Screw said his favorite rapper was this artist C-Bo who’s from Sacramento. There were Bay rappers all over with screw tapes and stuff,” he explains. “Houston people and Bay people have this kind of whimsical side to them where it’s kind of OK for us to have fun.”
Tisakorean started out as a dancer and a DJ, and tells me he only started making music because he wanted a soundtrack to match his style. Tisa makes left-field rap not unlike Lil B or -iLoveMakonnen, except he has a slightly more accessible flair. His music has attracted the accolades of everyone from Lil Uzi Vert to Earl
Sweatshirt, precisely because of how singularly weird it is. Tisa grew up in Southwest and moved to Missouri City in middle school, not far from where Travis Scott lived, who’s also around the same age. Tisa’s music is perfect for TikTok, where dance videos soundtracked to his off-kilter tracks abound. He’s a good example of Houston’s position in the current generation of social-media-fueled youth. While Tisa tells me he isn’t a regular TikTok user himself, it’s telling that his music so dutifully fits the platform. For all of the hand-wringing about the internet’s impact on our attention spans and taste, Tisakorean is a perfect example of how one can adapt naturally. Even when he tells me about his fondest musical memory, a collapse of generation and genre shines through. “When I seen the ‘Frontin’ video, I didn’t know about Prince, honestly,” Tisa explains of the Pharrell and N.E.R.D. hit. “So when I seen that ‘Frontin’ video, I didn’t know that song was made for Prince. I’m listening to it, and I’m in love with it.” Tisa tells me he’s working on a bunch of new music that represents his progression during this past year of isolation. “I think the new stuff I got coming is so dope,” he says. “It’s just the growth of an artist. I look in the mirror and I see it myself.”
“Before I made it rapping or anything, I was -popular,” Maxo tells me in his Houston loft. “I’ve been popular all through high school.” Maxo and his Kream associates were the start of a new wave in Houston rap. He arrived just as social media was beginning to break down the regional barriers that had defined modern hip-hop. It was a period when everyone from A$AP Rocky to Playboi Carti were making their way through the city, soaking up the emergent streetwear culture, along with the unique creative flexibility present. “I was putting on rappers before I was rapping, coming out to the city and shit.
I was fuckin’ with Travis, fuckin’ with A$AP Ferg. You know what I’m saying? All before I was even rapping.” Maxo’s keen sense of business comes from a mix of traditional hustling and sneaker culture, which puts a premium on authenticity and taste. His music has the same appeal. He strictly speaks the truth when it comes to the real-life snippets in his raps, and he’s careful never to glorify violence or street life. “My goal was initially to get money — to really get like a legal job, to be honest,” says Maxo, who is preparing the release of his next album this summer. “I just embraced it and took everything that came with rapping.”
BBY Kodie
Fat Tony
Tisakorean
Maxo Kream
ouston is the fourth-largest city in the United States but can feel like it contains the
entire planet. Its freeways delicately intertwine like blood vessels as thousands of cars course through its more than 600 square miles each day. Unlike many cities its size, Houston’s population hubs are dispersed and multifaceted. The city’s diverse population of immigrants, transplants, and native Texans enjoy their own enclaves of self-determination. There’s a cluster of nearly a dozen Nigerian churches in the Alief suburb on the city’s southwest side. Little Saigon, home to a bustling Vietnamese community, sits adjacent to Houston’s Chinatown. And yet the city manages to feel cohesive. It’s not just diversity by numbers but by experience. Houston is a place where people chase the American dream, for better and for worse. Its cheap and accessible land makes it a hot spot for the entrepreneurial, and a good place to save money, nevermind that it takes nearly half an hour to get just about anywhere.
When the city’s rap scene captivated the mainstream in the aughts — with Mike Jones, Paul Wall, and Chamillionaire becoming household names — there was a distinct appeal. The city’s culture was miles ahead of the mainstream, easily captivating a nationwide audience. There still hasn’t been a pop-culture figure as unique as Paul Wall — a white rapper who brought iced-out grills to the masses alongside his Vietnamese business partner — who at no moment in his career did anything cringe-worthy, and who remains a genuine ally in the fight for racial justice. There’s Mike Jones, who in 2005 presaged the meme-ready music of TikTok with “Back Then.” At one point, thanks to the song’s infectious refrain, everyone in the world knew his phone number. Then, of course, there is Beyoncé, who needs no explanation.
The music coming out of Houston in 2021 is rooted in the same energy. Like the generation before them, the new crop of musicians in the city is a sign of what’s to come. Already, artists like Megan Thee Stallion, Lizzo, and Travis Scott illustrate the ways Houston breeds success in the mainstream. Each spent time sharpening their craft in the city. Despite being a major market, artists in Houston tend to not seek attention in the way acts from other major cities do, opting instead to build buzz deliberately. It’s why Megan Thee Stallion seemingly arrived on the scene as a fully formed superstar. She’d spent years rapping at parties around town before anyone outside of the city had taken notice.
Things have simply always worked that way in Houston. Screwed Up Records and Tapes, in the suburb Missouri City, sits in a nondescript strip mall with a gravel parking lot and an auto repair shop flanking its furthest corner. On a recent afternoon this spring, as a drizzle developed, the store was electric with activity. Speakers boomed Screw tapes while shoppers of all stripes pilfered through merch. It felt something like Supreme’s original Lafayette Street storefront in Manhattan — part museum, part nightclub, part retail store. The shop’s most compelling feature, however, is several impossibly thick binders containing a list of all of DJ Screw’s more than 350 screw tapes, the legendary producer whose slow-rolling chopped-and-screwed sound defined H-town rap. You simply pick one out and request it from the shop’s attendant. It’s a spellbinding physical archive of one of Houston’s most enduring and significant movements, and a testament to the thoroughly independent ethos of the city.
Photographs by Christian K. Lee
By Jeff Ihaza
A crop of young musicians from Houston
is poised to reshape the hip-hop landscape.
It wouldn’t be the first time
Heavenly
Houston
Tisakorea
Tisakorean started out as a dancer and a DJ, and tells me he only started making music because he wanted a soundtrack to match his style. Tisa makes left-field rap not unlike Lil B or -iLoveMakonnen, except he has a slightly more accessible flair. His music has attracted the accolades of everyone from Lil Uzi Vert to Earl
Sweatshirt, precisely because of how singularly weird it is. Tisa grew up in Southwest and moved to Missouri City in middle school, not far from where Travis Scott lived, who’s also around the same age. Tisa’s music is perfect for TikTok, where dance videos soundtracked to his off-kilter tracks abound. He’s a good example of Houston’s position in the current generation of social-media-fueled youth. While Tisa tells me he isn’t a regular TikTok user himself, it’s telling that his music so dutifully fits the platform. For all of the hand-wringing about the internet’s impact on our attention spans and taste, Tisakorean is a perfect example of how one can adapt naturally. Even when he tells me about his fondest musical memory, a collapse of generation and genre shines through. “When I seen the ‘Frontin’ video, I didn’t know about Prince, honestly,” Tisa explains of the Pharrell and N.E.R.D. hit. “So when I seen that ‘Frontin’ video, I didn’t know that song was made for Prince. I’m listening to it, and I’m in love with it.” Tisa tells me he’s working on a bunch of new music that represents his progression during this past year of isolation. “I think the new stuff I got coming is so dope,” he says. “It’s just the growth of an artist. I look in the mirror and I see it myself.”
Don Toliver
Don Toliver is likely up next from Houston. An acolyte of Travis Scott, Toliver makes music that sounds like the latest iteration of the city’s sonic contribution to hip-hop. It’s got the ambient flourishes of later Kanye productions but retains that distinctly Southern energy. Toliver sings with a distinct vocal range that hearkens the easily identifiable register of Kid Cudi. His 2020 debut, Heaven or Hell, arrived just as the pandemic started. “There’s so much music people never got to experience,” he says. “People never got to experience that pain with me. So it’s going to be crazy. It’s going to be a real, real energy exchange.” He says his latest project, due out sometime this year, builds on more positive emotional themes. Toliver sees Houston as a mecca for talent. “The artists, the painters, the dancers, these people are super-talented on another type of level,” he says. “We come at things differently, and I don’t think people really understand that, to a certain degree. Because the culture and the way we move is so diverse, and it’s really crazy.”
Peyton
The musician Peyton is a prime example of the quietly poignant history of Houston’s music scene. Her grandmother Theola Booker composed and arranged music for the gospel musician James Cleveland, even earning a Grammy nomination. (She was also a piano instructor to none other than Beyoncé.) A classically trained singer and violinist herself, Peyton makes music that is sunny and full of heart. The city’s respect for the past isn’t lost on the singer, who recently graduated from a college in Houston after performing an opera--inspired final recital. For all of the boisterous hip-hop coming from the region, Peyton’s music fits alongside a deep tradition of soul and R&B in Houston. She uses her bright and emotive croon as a tool against her own social anxiety. Though shy in real life, she projects a world of emotion within her music. Her upcoming album, due this summer from Stones Throw Records, is a lush collection of soulful ballads that could have only come from Houston. It’s just more proof of how multifaceted the city can be. On one hand giving rise to the ground-level raps of an OMB Bloodbath or Maxo Kream, and on the other, the down-home soul of Peyton.
Ken the Man
Do not compare Ken the Man to Houston’s other rising female rap icon, Megan Thee Stallion. It’s not that both don’t share a similarly buoyant flow that’ll make your head knock and your knees weak, it’s just that Ken the Man deserves to stand on her own. Last August, she independently released 4 Da 304’s, a record that would make any nightclub shake. It’s raunchy, sexy, and dripping with confidence. Like a true Houston hustler, she started making music in between Uber shifts. As her star rose, she’s been able to take on music full time. She started with the type of bouncy club rap that made Megan famous, but she has since expanded into the kind of laid-back flow that the city’s scions of rap built careers on. The blend is as compelling as anything being released right now. She recently signed onto a partnership with Asylum records, and is working on her follow-up to 4 Da 304’s, which is sure to have the post-pandemic nightclubs jumping.
OMB Bloodbath
OMB Bloodbath started receiving national attention in 2019, with the Chicago-drill-inspired single “Shootson.” On the song, the 27-year-old rapper proved that she could rap circles around your favorite MC, and made a strong case for Houston as a gritty epicenter of the U.S. to rival Chicago, notoriously dubbed Chiraq. It was a bittersweet breakthrough for OMB, who would prefer to be seen as more than a menacing street rapper. “People grow and understand the world more,” she explains. “So I never get offended when people look at me as a certain way. I just got to show them with my actions that that’s not me.” As a standard-bearer for a street-level view of life in Houston, the Third Ward native is working to shine a light on more than violence: “You go from ‘Shootston’ to what I’m writing about now. Yeah, I still talk my shit in a song, but then you always got to read between the lines. I’m trying to tell them, ‘Yeah, this is what it is, but this ain’t where they got to be.’ ” She continues, “It’s too much money out here to be on some gangster shit. Tough guys ain’t getting paid right now.”
HVN
Twenty-year-old HVN started rapping on a whim. He was born in Beaumont but relocated to the suburb of Pearland for high school (Megan Thee Stallion is currently the suburb’s most famous alumni). Despite living nearby, he met BBY Kodie online, exchanging messages on -Instagram before meeting in person. Initially, HVN was more focused on helping Kodie as an artist than becoming one himself. His real passion was film, and he fashioned himself as a music--video -director. But as the story goes, a few tracks he uploaded online as a joke turned into serious buzz. HVN naturally moves through styles with ease, at one moment spitting relaxed bars about Dracos and the next bearing his soul. Now, as he prepares to go on tour with Brockhampton, he sees an opportunity to flourish as an all-around creative. “I want to make Houston the next Atlanta,” he says. “Just artists coming out of anywhere, any part of Houston. That shit’s cool to me.”
though he got his start rapping much like Maxo. His newer music, a pair of lush and heartfelt singles released over the past year, stick with you unlike anything currently out there. On “I Don’t Wanna Feel No More,” he opens with a gentle croon: “Sometimes I feel good in my chest/But I can never get that to my head.”
Reggie remembers trying to get his footing early on when he started making music. Whereas hubs like Atlanta, L.A., and New York have an infrastructure of creative professionals — marketing agencies, PR firms, major-label studios etc. — Houston has none of that. There isn’t much of a professionalized creative industry in the city, and most people have fairly conventional jobs in health care or energy. It’s still relatively uncommon for someone in Houston to do anything creative as a profession. “We used to do all types of weird hustling shit. We ain't know what the fuck we were supposed to do,” he explains. “Bun B went to my church, and I wrote down my YouTube link on the top of the offering envelope and ran that bitch to him,” Reggie tells me. “That nigga looked at that shit and just said, ‘What the fuck?’”
For a lot of young artists coming up in the city, the lack of support fueled a fire internally. The musician HVN, alongside his close friend BBY Kodie, are something like the standard-bearers of the coming generation. Both in their early twenties, their sound is as freewheeling and untethered as the culture in Houston. There are electronic flourishes reminiscent of Aphex Twin and distorted kick drums designed to make your trunk rattle.
HVN started his brand Don’t Die after suffering a stroke due to complications from sickle cell, which he was diagnosed with when he was a kid. It was HVN’s frustration with the lack of venues willing to book Kodie that inspired his parties of the same name around 2015 — a raison d'etre for the city’s youth. “Me and my friends would go skate downtown and just be like, ‘Bro, there's nothing to do in Houston at all. It's fucking boring,’” HVN explains. “So, Don't Die helped with that.”
The current vanguard in Houston is of course indebted to Travis Scott, who came up around the same time as Maxo, and from a neighboring high school in Fort Bend County. Scott has become one of the youngest and most successful entrepreneurs in rap, and he’s making a point to bring it back to Houston. His Space Village storefront and cafe is an heir to H-Town Sneaker Summit in reverence to shoes as well as potential for connection. His Cactus Jack label is home to Don Toliver, who is poised to be another breakout star from the city.
“It’s such a blessing that I was able to lock in with bro at the time I did, when he started to take all these ventures,” Toliver says over the phone. “I’m happy that Travis has been able to do everything he's been able to do for the city.”
Scott’s sonic influence — a brash and cathartic meld of Yeezus-era Kanye and Houston rap melodics — has come to define the new music coming out of the city. Don Toliver’s debut, Heaven or Hell, points to an evolution of the city’s sound, picking up where DJ Screw left off, experimenting with sonic landscapes to make something new.
“I feel like we got a bird's-eye view on what's going on around the world,” Don Toliver says of Houston. “There's people out here that really know what's going on with fashion and music, way ahead of time. I feel like people here move so swiftly — we might just make it happen rather than talking about it.”
This piece originally appeared as part of Rolling Stone’s annual Hot List, in the July/August issue of the magazine.
Ken the Man
Do not compare Ken the Man to Houston’s other rising female rap icon, Megan Thee Stallion. It’s not that both don’t share a similarly buoyant flow that’ll make your head knock and your knees weak, it’s just that Ken the Man deserves to stand on her own. Last August, she independently released 4 Da 304’s, a record that would make any nightclub shake. It’s raunchy, sexy, and dripping with confidence. Like a true Houston hustler, she started making music in between Uber shifts. As her star rose, she’s been able to take on music full time. She started with the type of bouncy club rap that made Megan famous, but she has since expanded into the kind of laid-back flow that the city’s scions of rap built careers on. The blend is as compelling as anything being released right now. She recently signed onto a partnership with Asylum records, and is working on her follow-up to 4 Da 304’s, which is sure to have the post-pandemic nightclubs jumping.
Maxo Kream
“Before I made it rapping or anything, I was -popular,” Maxo tells me in his Houston loft. “I’ve been popular all through high school.” Maxo and his Kream associates were the start of a new wave in Houston rap. He arrived just as social media was beginning to break down the regional barriers that had defined modern hip-hop. It was a period when everyone from A$AP Rocky to Playboi Carti were making their way through the city, soaking up the emergent streetwear culture, along with the unique creative flexibility present. “I was putting on rappers before I was rapping, coming out to the city and shit. I was fuckin’ with Travis, fuckin’ with A$AP Ferg. You know what I’m saying? All before I was even rapping.” Maxo’s keen sense of business comes from a mix of traditional hustling and sneaker culture, which puts a premium on authenticity and taste. His music has the same appeal. He strictly speaks the truth when it comes to the real-life snippets in his raps, and he’s careful never to glorify violence or street life. “My goal was initially to get money — to really get like a legal job, to be honest,” says Maxo, who is preparing the release of his next album this summer. “I just embraced it and took everything that came with rapping.”
“Growing up in Third Ward, that's what started it all,” OMB Bloodbath, who
spins intricate tales of street economics
in her raps, says. “I'd be going to everybody block rapping for dollars. ‘I'll rap. Give
me money.’”
Like basically everyone, OMB looks to Beyoncé as inspiration. She tells me she’s the first Third Ward-born artist since Bey to sign a major-label deal. And their families have mutual friends — OMB was even featured on a recent Tidal playlist curated
by the singer.
In 2007, when Pimp C died after an overdose on promethazine, the city’s inebriant of choice, it was like a shell-shock. The culture reeled and regrouped. In the years after, Houston’s younger generation found themselves charting a new path from scratch. If you ask anyone in the know, Houston’s current wave of hip-hop stems from streetwear and sneaker culture. Coinciding with the rise of social media, young people in the city found a new affinity for shoes. You can trace a number of the city’s current stars — Travis Scott, Don Toliver, Maxo Kream — to the H-Town Sneaker Summit. The event was founded in 2004 and over time grew to be the center of Houston’s new generation of culture. Rows and rows of rare sneakers — from Dunks to Jordans to Bapes and everything in between — are shuttled in from various independent vendors for what amounts to a giant swap meet. As the city entered the 2010s, young sneakerheads started to link up and build their own movements in the city.
“Something about shoes and Houston comes naturally,” Maxo Kream, who at age 31 is something of an elder statesman for the city’s new generation, explains. “Even when you look at the rims. Niggas will throw 84 swangas on any fucking car. I’ve seen it on Toyotas. I've seen it on Lamborghinis. I've seen it on Buicks. It's the shoes.”
The “Kream” at the end of Maxo’s name stands for “Kicks Rule Everything
Around Me.” I know this because we were classmates in high school at the dawn of Nike’s foray into skateboarding, when
some of the most coveted shoes in sneaker culture were released. When I meet Maxo on a balmy day in spring, he gives me a sly look before telling me I look familiar.
After exchanging pleasantries about
high school, I follow him to his house,
a modern and luxurious home near Houton’s Galleria Mall.
Maxo Kream
“Before I made it rapping or anything, I was -popular,” Maxo tells me in his Houston loft. “I’ve been popular all through high school.” Maxo and his Kream associates were the start of a new wave in Houston rap. He arrived just as social media was beginning to break down the regional barriers that had defined modern hip-hop. It was a period when everyone from A$AP Rocky to Playboi Carti were making their way through the city, soaking up the emergent streetwear culture, along with the unique creative flexibility present. “I was putting on rappers before I was rapping, coming out to the city and shit. I was fuckin’ with Travis, fuckin’ with A$AP Ferg. You know what I’m saying? All before I was even rapping.” Maxo’s keen sense of business comes from a mix of traditional hustling and sneaker culture, which puts a premium on authenticity and taste. His music has the same appeal. He strictly speaks the truth when it comes to the real-life snippets in his raps, and he’s careful never to glorify violence or street life. “My goal was initially to get money — to really get like a legal job, to be honest,” says Maxo, who is preparing the release of his next album this summer. “I just embraced it and took everything that came with rapping.”
Tisakorea
Tisakorean started out as a dancer and a DJ, and tells me he only started making music because he wanted a soundtrack to match his style. Tisa makes left-field rap not unlike Lil B or -iLoveMakonnen, except he has a slightly more accessible flair. His music has attracted the accolades of everyone from Lil Uzi Vert to Earl
Sweatshirt, precisely because of how singularly weird it is. Tisa grew up in Southwest and moved to Missouri City in middle school, not far from where Travis Scott lived, who’s also around the same age. Tisa’s music is perfect for TikTok, where dance videos soundtracked to his off-kilter tracks abound. He’s a good example of Houston’s position in the current generation of social-media-fueled youth. While Tisa tells me he isn’t a regular TikTok user himself, it’s telling that his music so dutifully fits the platform. For all of the hand-wringing about the internet’s impact on our attention spans and taste, Tisakorean is a perfect example of how one can adapt naturally. Even when he tells me about his fondest musical memory, a collapse of generation and genre shines through. “When I seen the ‘Frontin’ video, I didn’t know about Prince, honestly,” Tisa explains of the Pharrell and N.E.R.D. hit. “So when I seen that ‘Frontin’ video, I didn’t know that song was made for Prince. I’m listening to it, and I’m in love with it.” Tisa tells me he’s working on a bunch of new music that represents his progression during this past year of isolation. “I think the new stuff I got coming is so dope,” he says. “It’s just the growth of an artist. I look in the mirror and I see it myself.”