With the celebration of the 50th anniversary of hip-hop continuing, the CW39 Spotlight is on Houston’s hip-hop culture that is so unique to the city.What started as a dissertation for his doctoral degree at Indiana University, Langston Collin Wilkins returned to the city where he grew up to illuminate the complex relationship between place, identity, and music in Houston’s hip-hop culture.What came out of it is a book called Welcome 2 Houston: Hip Hop Heritage in Hustle Town.

Wilkins conducted interviews with local rap artists, producers, and managers to find out how artists, audiences, music, and place interact to create a heritage that musicians negotiate in a variety of ways.“I went back into Houston 10 years ago to do a deep study into Houston’s hip-hop scene,” Wilkins said. “Out of that, I have turned that dissertation into a book, so not only there’s an academic part, but I’m a big Houston hip-hop fan, and it’s a love for Houston and hip-hop in this book.”

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.