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Hip-hop, Tejas - Latinos take on rap music and make it their own
I'm SPM you know my name / I'm the one that came about the dope game / I've paid my dues and kept my cool / I'm the one that told your kid to stay in school / I'm from the streets thank god for rap / I creep through my hood in the smoke gray 'llac...- South Park Mexican, "You Know My Name"
Even though he didn't make any CDs, Al Pacino's portrayal of Tony Montana in Scarface looms as large for hip-hop as Peter Fonda's portrayal of Captain America in Easy Rider did for hippie rockers, likely more so. Scarface is the starkest, most cynical telling of the American dream possible and a cautionary tale of how the means always gets you in the end, but every poor kid who watches it thinks of how they would have done things differently, how they would have stayed on top of the game.
And whether by emulation or mere coincidence, the rap game is not much different from the dope game. It's hard as hell to get to the top and harder still to stay there. It's all about getting as much as you can as fast as you can and fighting like hell to keep it. There are people who will rip you off at every turn and a few out there who would kill you in return for an insult.
The mob as portrayed in the movies - be it Scarface's Cuban variety or the Italian one - is hip-hop's guiding force. Houston's Latin rappers take up names like Juan Gotti and Lucky Luciano.
So a case can be made for Tony Montana's being as influential on rap as Grandmaster Flash, L.L. Cool J or Run-DMC. (A recent documentary included in the DVD edition of Scarface also makes this case.) There's Houston's Scarface, the elder statesman of Dirty South rap, and the breakthrough album of his former group the Geto Boys was positively encrusted with sound bites from the movie. Just as surely as you'll find a copy of the good book on a preacher's mantel, on every hip-hop-based episode of Cribs, you're sure to see a deluxe DVD edition of the flick in the entertainment center. And since Tony Montana was a Cuban immigrant, he has become something like the first and still the most influential Latin rapper, in terms of style if not grooves.
Just as Carlos Coy, a.k.a. South Park Mexican, was Houston's most important and influential real Latin rapper. SPM's rise and fall mirrored that of Montana so closely it seems almost intentional. Like Montana, Coy started from scratch, hustling in the streets. Coy claims to have dealt drugs and had a few brushes with death while in the dope game, just like Tony Montana. And like Montana, Coy had the strong work ethic and talent it took to found and run an empire. And as with Montana, the kingdom Coy created was undone by his personal demons - both had sexual perversions that led directly to their undoing.
Unlike Montana, though, Coy can't be said to have gone down with guns blazing. His downfall - a conviction on charges of sexual assault of a nine-year-old girl - could hardly be seen as the sort that brought any street cred. Tupac and Biggie went out like gangstas, just like Tony Montana. Coy went out like a dirty old man.
Many of Pac's fans believe he faked his death. Similarly, many of Coy's fans refuse to believe in his guilt. "I thought he didn't do it," says one fan. "But I was afraid to tell people I thought he didn't do it, because lots of people thought he did. The 14-, 15-year-olds, yeah, I could see him doing that," he adds, referring to the other young girls who took the stand and said they had had sex with Coy. "Some girls that age look 18 or 19. But a nine-year-old? That sounds like a setup."
"One day you've got the entire world going for you and the next day you're behind bars," says another fan. "And for something stupid - it wasn't like a drug charge. It's very embarrassing to have a sexual assault charge of a nine-year-old."
"He had so many local kids looking up to him," says the first fan.
And yet Coy's influence can still be felt on the scene. After all, it was SPM who first brought native Californian Baby Bash to town, and this year Bash's "Suga Suga" became the biggest non-Beyonce/Destiny's Child hit out of Houston since Coy's day. And it's likely the connections that Coy made with suits at his former label, Universal Records, helped Bash get his deal with that company. What's more, he showed thousands of local Hispanic kids a whole new realm of possibility.
In five years, SPM went from high school dropout/crack dealer to rap mogul, written up by Newsweek and a mainstay on the Billboard charts. To the kids in Houston's barrios he was something more: He was a folk hero. He was signed to Universal, and he and his family also controlled their own local label, Dope House Records, with about a dozen hip-hop acts in the stable. And he did it all on his own terms.
"He was one of the ones who inspired me, who showed me that we could do it," says H-Town Slim. "This dude is Latino like me, he's from the same neighborhood as me, and if he could get a deal with Universal, then so could I."
"SPM got pretty far, and I'm not counting him out 'cause he will get out someday, but when he was making his big move, people really embraced that," says Chingo Bling. "People were like, 'We saw him come up, he's from my neighborhood, he raps about stuff we know and we like...' He was relevant. The stuff that's really relevant to us isn't (often) represented."
"It was a big deal how he set the tone," says Garcia-Lopez. "You could be Hispanic and be from Houston and be a rapper. He did a lot of things with a lot of people that nobody had done before. Yeah, there were rappers before him that were Mexican, but nobody got around as much as he did. You could go to a music store and see him guest-appearing on all kinds of albums. I won't say he broke doors down, but he really got his name out there."
Prior to the revelations about his sexual proclivities, even the older generation saw Coy as more of a force for good than evil. "I think he tried to be a positive figure," says Jumpin' Jess Rodriguez, the oldies/Tejano DJ and concert promoter, who adds that he used to play Coy's music on his radio shows. "When you sell that product, you've gotta go with that gangsta situation, talking about weed and girls and going out partying. But later on, some of his music did have a positive message. It was about going out and getting an education, being positive, fighting the fight and having respect for yourself. A lot of it did say to be proud of who you are... And he also said that music was his new drug, which encouraged a lot of young people to want to get into music, which is a positive road."
While on the stand at his trial last year, SPM made a characteristically boastful statement in his defense that had most in the courtroom scoffing. "Y'all all credit [Mayor] Lee Brown with calming down the gang problem," he said. "I think y'all should thank South Park Mexican."
H-Town Slim, a former gangbanger himself, doesn't see it as being all that laughable a claim. "When SPM came out, gangbanging was still really popular, but when he got huge, the whole thing kinda died out. After SPM came out, every kid wanted to be a rapper, not a gangster."
But as popular and influential as Coy was here, he was never able to crack the market in California. Los Angeles is the Mexican-American New York and L.A. rolled into one, and until a Houston rapper makes it there, he hasn't made it anywhere, at least in the eyes of the major labels. And cracking that nut is not as easy as an Anglo might think. After all, Mexican-Americans are Mexican-Americans, right? Wrong.
Hip-hop, Tejas - Part V
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