Wilkins, L: Welcome 2 Houston

"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 ethnography that explores how the interaction between artists, audiences, music, and place create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways. Street-based musicians, avant-garde underground rappers, and Christian hip hop 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 an incisive portrait of 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 an insider's look at a unique musical culture"--