Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town by Langston Collin Wilkins

Langston Collin Wilkins, PhD, returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s Hip Hop culture in Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town, available on August 1.

Langston Collin Wilkins returns to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip hop culture. Interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers inform an exploration of how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian artists offer candid views of the scene while Wilkins delves into related aspects like slab, the area’s hip hop-related car culture. What emerges is a portrait of a dynamic reciprocal process where an artist, having identified with and embodied a social space, reproduces that space in a performance even as the performance reconstructs the social space.

A vivid journey through a southern hip hop bastion, Welcome 2 Houston offers readers an inside look at a unique musical culture.

Published by the University of Illinois Press, this book is one in the “African American Music in Global Perspectives Series.” Publication of this book was supported in part by a grant from the Judith McCulloh Endowment for American Music.