Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town, by Langston Collins Wilkins, reads like a community endeavour, with ethnography at its core. The text uses the central locus of Houston to exemplify the ways in which one regional strand of a wider culture – hip-hop – can give rise to interdisciplinary inquiry, drawing on applications of area studies, urban geography, (popular) cultural history and Black studies, making this a text of interest to scholars working in any of these fields. He tells the story of the city's African-American community, and the music and culture created from those urban margins, across a period spanning the late 1970s to the present day: drawing connections from Houston to historic hip-hop legends like NWA, as well as present-day figures like Megan Thee Stallion and A$AP Rocky. The book is not overly theoretical, but it reinforces its academic foundations by interlocuting with scholars such as Murray Forman and Marcyliena Morgan, as well as engaging with local journalism, and the wider socio-cultural histories of Houston to offer a grounded appraisal of the city through time. Wilkins builds on this existing work not to challenge the dominant narratives surrounding the origins of hip-hop, but to enrich them, and make claim to elements of existing hip-hop history and scholarship that he believes are culturally indebted to Houston. Despite this, Welcome 2 Houston rarely reads with the density of most academic books, in part owing to Wilkins's narrative position within this text. He interweaves his personal positionality and experiences of the city as a Black Houstonian with a narrative approach to cultural history, crafting a story that is not only a ‘Welcome’ to Houston, but a concurrent love letter to a city Wilkins cannot help but come back to.
The book is separated into six chapters, each representing an aspect of hip-hop culture Wilkins feels is integral to Houston. Chapter One is a predictable, but necessary introduction to the demography of the city and its African-American specific history, and Chapter Two builds on this, using the history of the city's economy to draw out the economic and social conditions that precipitated the birth of this Houston-specific branch of hip-hop. Chapter Three takes on Houston slab, or car improvement culture, that ran parallel to its rap scene, while Chapter Four deals with the regional specificities and idiosyncrasies of rap in the city, such as its recreational drug culture, and we see how Houston's hip-hop evokes a kind of cultural patriotism amongst native listeners. Wilkins follows this through to Chapter Five, switching tracks slightly to focus on more underground countercultures that exist alongside the mainstream. We close with Chapter Six, a reckoning between Christianity and hip-hop in Houston, two forces that initially appear ideologically polarising. In a series of candid interviews, Wilkins offers space to Christian, Houston-based rappers to explain how they position their faith, and religious artistry, within a history that – as the preceding chapters have evidenced – is intensely secular. Ending a text like Welcome 2 Houston on a discussion of evangelical Christianity in rap may seem like an abrupt departure from the rest of the book, but it showcases what I feel Wilkins does best: putting a microcosmic research focus in conversation with a much broader discussion about where this fits in the wider world. Many discussions of hip-hop, for example, focus solely on one city – New York, LA, London – as though the rest of the world is non-existent. Wilkins is constantly zooming out to show us the ways in which Houston hip-hop as a microculture interacts with rap across the city and the wider country, and it feels fitting that he ends with a testament to how Houston hip-hop interacts with the city's Christian core.
Chapter Two is one of the most significant chapters in the book. It is here that Wilkins introduces us to a giant of hip-hop in Houston, DJ Screw, and the style of hip-hop he went on to inspire, honorarily named [chopped and] screwed music. This is not the exhaustive ‘screw’ chapter, as Wilkins follows the threads of Screw throughout the work. It does read, however, as a seminal introduction to the genealogies of hip-hop in Houston, an introduction to the heads of the family tree who championed Houston's hip-hop from the start. The work of DJ Screw, and the ensuing Screwed Up Click collective of trailblazers, is never understated, but Wilkins is careful to make clear that hip-hop in Houston goes beyond just the ‘O.Gs’. It is a cultural marker that ‘reflects working-class Black Houston's sense of place’ (p.159), and the vitality of community participation, as well as the spaces within the city that facilitate this engagement with hip-hop, is emphasised just as much as these individuals.
Wilkins's writing feels very fixated on place and space, with most chapters including at least a page or two of setting the scene – rich, imagery-heavy descriptions of the city's most hip-hop affiliated spots. There is the juke joint and the grimy, segregated suburbs, the politicised streets teeming with violence and gangland politics. Rich sketchings of the garages that propped up Houston's car improvement scene are followed by detailed accounts of clothing stores and the houses of community leaders. There is the sense that Wilkins is transplanting the ethos of what he feels Houston hip-hop truly is in each chapter, rebirthing it into a new physical locus each time. If we can see, through Wilkins's eyes, what the medicated drink syrup looks like when it mixes with Sprite, as we learn in Chapter Four, or what a slab, or modified car, looks like gleaming in the Houston sun, as is depicted in Chapter Two, we can then see hip-hop in Houston.
To me, Wilkins wants us to see and traverse Houston with him because he wants us to understand how fully space and place can permeate our musical identities. For Houstonians, this region-specific hip-hop culture has imbued a sense of belonging so resonant that it continues to inspire and evolve a rich musical heritage, and this book serves as an imaginative testimony of Houston's hip-hop legacy so far. There was a definite sense that there is more to be said here – I would have enjoyed a little more regarding gender and the male-dominated dynamics of the scene, for example – but I am hopeful Wilkins has paved the way for future scholars to cover these topics in more depth. Wilkins has certainly, and lovingly, advanced the documenting of Houston's cultural story, and the contributions this book makes to hip-hop history are valuable and engaging.
