words: swagrporters
Flash back: 2005. The Rockets, a respectable 51-31, are about to finish 3rd in a competitive Southwest Division that produced the league champion Spurs and the regular season top seed Suns. Tracy McGrady, in his first season on the roster, will drop a ridiculous 13 points in the last 0:35 to beat the Spurs on his way to a gaudy 30.7 points per game average and an All-Star appearance. Fellow All-Stars, Yao Ming, Dikembe Mutombo and Rod Strickland will play out the last days of their careers, and Juwan Howard was actually adding value on a basketball court. But more importantly, Paul Wall’s “Sittin Sidewayz” hit #98 on the Billboard Top 200.
Bringing southern slang and screw music to the forefront, Houston hit the scene hard. Bun B dropped his first solo project in the Trill trilogy (turned quad…whatever they call it). Chamillionaire dropped his debut album, The Sound of Revenge, featuring the Grammy Winning single “Ridin”. Mike Jones had us all memorizing his phone number with his debut Who is Mike Jones? that went platinum in 2 months and later went double platinum. Slim Thugga hit us with Already Platinum which premiered #2 on the Billboards featuring “Still Tippin’”.
That was literally all just 2005.
Now flash forward: 4 years. The Rockets won 34 games and missed the playoffs. Yao is plagued with injuries related to being too damn tall. T-Mac played a total of 41 games in the ’09 and ’10 seasons combined. Bun B was between projects that everyone forgot about. Mike Jones showed us he couldn't rap or act with back-to-back disappointing album and film appearances. Chamillionaire and Paul Wall continued to drop albums that tend to fill the middle years of a career that eventually leads to a shocking realization one-day that “They’re still makin’ music?... huh.”
How could all these grill-flashing goons come onto the scene overnight and disappear the next? The Houston rocket to the moon was the path that Devin the Dude and Bun B and Pimp C (as UGK) forged with real, raw hip-hop. These guys brought something that the likes of mainstream media hadn’t seen at the time. A southern fried experience we gobbled-up and couldn’t get enough of. Then the hard work of these dudes was all wiped out when the novelty of chopped & screwed remixes wore off.
Now for the good news.
It seems that even the stall of Nasa’s space shuttle program can’t keep the real Houston rockets on the ground forever. Now it’s on Fat Tony to see what he can do with it. He brings a modern twist of the same flavor we fell in love with back in ‘05, and something so uniquely different that it couldn't be from anywhere but Houston.
I know you got this my dude.