Taylor Crumpton Considers Big Tuck’s Purple Hulk
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The following is an excerpt from “Taylor Crumpton Considers Big Tuck’s Purple Hulk.” The essay is part of a hip-hop–focused offering out this week from Halfway Books. Crumpton’s contribution is a heartfelt attempt to properly contextualize the legacy of Dallas hip-hop through the lens of Big Tuck’s debut mixtape. Essential reading for all fans of Southern hip-hop and the genre as a whole.
Between October 2003 and December 2004, the South dominated the Billboard Hot 100, holding the No. 1 spot and accounting for over forty percent of urban radio airplay nationally. Although non-Southern artists had achieved chart-topping success, this overwhelming collective of Southern artists, producers, and songwriters represented a distinctive fracture in the prominent East Coast/West Coast binary. Their rise was a radical departure from the state of the industry less than a decade earlier, when Andre “3000” Benjamin was booed at the 1995 Source Awards after OutKast won Best New Rap Group. His words then, “The South got something to say,” were a premonition that foreshadowed the region’s dominance in hip-hop—and what we now see, twenty-five years later.
In the years that followed Andre 3000’s speech, the South would go on to push hip-hop forward.
The emergence of Southern record labels between 1997 and 2000, like No Limit, Hypnotize Minds, Cash Money, and Suave House established the foundation for the South’s chart dominance in 2003 and 2004. The 2000s introduced a new generation of rappers inspired by the OutKast emcee’s words, artists who no longer felt pressured to emulate an East Coast/West Coast sound. Below the Mason-Dixon line, these musicians produced a multitude of regionally-specific sounds, each representing their state’s unique musical history and influences.
Miles away from Atlanta, a group called Dirty South Rydaz was building an empire nearly four years after The Source Awards. After their first mixtape, Freestyle Massacre, the nineteen-member group winnowed itself down to six. Of the new lineup, only one original member remained: Big Tuck. Their next project, From Dallas 2 Tha Kappa, introduced Tum Tum, Double T, and Fat Bastard into the group’s roster, but Tuck’s authoritative voice remained the mixtape’s crown jewel. Tuck’s voice is reminiscent of a drill sergeant, with its powerful bass being weaponized to command respect. Dallas is Big Tuck’s military. From college football to local nightlife, Tuck’s guttural voice has invigorated millions of Dallas residents to follow his directives, whether it’s showing love to South Dallas on “Southside Da Realist” or fighting someone at the club to “Tussle.” In Texas, hip-hop found its home in Dallas and Houston. In Dallas, we found our Billboard champion in Big Tuck.
“Tuck stands out because he was fine being where he was, being who he was and didn’t want to try to do anything else. [He] didn’t try to act like he wasn’t from Dallas. [He] didn’t try to claim he wasn’t from Dallas to catch up with anybody else. He was [like] if I’m going to do it, I’m going to do it here,” said Zac Crain, senior editor at D Magazine and a former music critic at the Dallas Observer. Born in Queen City, “the heart of the historic South Dallas African-American community,” Tuck was raised in the epicenter of the city’s Black culture. Tuck graduated from Lincoln High School, the second high school designated for black students in Dallas. He went on to attend a historically Black college out of state, the University of Arkansas at Pine Bluff. After his senior year, Tuck dropped out and returned home to pursue a career in rap.
In Houston, Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw, created “chopped and screwed” music, one of the first subgenres in Third Coast hip-hop, which rose in popularity alongside Memphis horrorcore and New Orleans bounce. “Screwtapes,” his signature cassettes of remixed and slowed songs, and Screw and Screwed Up Click, his collective of local hip-hop rappers, classified the city’s Southside as a cultural and musical hub. However, DJ Michael “5000” Watts developed his signature technique of “slowed” records, which provided an opportunity for the Northside to participate in the city’s screwed sound. DJ OG Ron C partnered with Watts to create Swishahouse, a Houston-based record label that came to the forefront due to their “slowed and chopped” remixes that ascended into mainstream, largely because of their national distribution deal. In Texas, Swishahouse developed a relationship with George Lopez, owner of T-Town Music & More, a Dallas-based record store that introduced the label’s mixtapes into the Dallas-Fort Worth market, along with Rap-A-Lot and No Limit Records.
“There wasn’t a big light on Dallas, but Houston was booming. At the time, I was in Houston three days a week, doing bookings for the artists that I worked with before DSR. After I created DSR, I pushed the hip-hop group towards the Houston artists that I was distributing and booking shows,” recalled Lopez. Over the years, Michael Watts and DJ OG Ron C had developed a mutually beneficial relationship with Lopez, which resulted in a series of musical collaborations between artists from Swishahouse and T-Town Music. Michael Watts and DJ OG Ron C ensured that DSR secured placements on their record label mixtapes. “I would have never done it without the support of Houston artists, like Slim Thug, Chamillionaire, Paul Wall, DJ OG Ron C, and DJ Michael Watts. If it wasn’t for them, those guys co-signing everything I was doing, I would have never done it because it was hard.”
“You had two Hispanics running the company with six rappers that are not Hispanic. It’s kind of hard but the faith was there between OG Ron C, Michael Watts, Slim Thug and all the artists at Swishahouse. They were like, we got your back bro. We’re on it. We’ll fuck with you. We got mixtapes coming out, we’ll put DSR on our mixtapes. We’ll help you grow,” said Lopez. “They gave me that support first. They gave T-Town Music that support first. They gave Tuck that first support, before their Kappa mixtape series, which is legendary for Swishahouse.”
I-45 and North 2 Tha South, T-Town’s first compilation mixtapes, featured a roster of Dallas and Houston rappers, which strengthened the bond between the two cities, and displayed the emergence of a new hip-hop movement in Dallas. “After the two compilation albums, I decided to make our own rap group called DSR, Dirty South Rydaz,” Lopez told me. For local artists, Lopez’s in-house approach was the defining trait of working with T-Town, which felt different from the predatory deals with national record labels. Lopez’s DSR championed the city’s sound when few others would. “There was no push for Dallas music. Mr. Pookie and Mr. Lucci dropped their album in 1999, so they had that going for them but that was it. No one else was getting played in Dallas,” Lopez recalled.
T-Town linked Dallas to the Third Coast. At the outset of his career, Tuck’s original style and delivery was influenced by Swishahouse—until he developed his signature sound. “When I think of the Dallas sound, I think of somebody riding round. It’s trunk rattling music. Tuck is a pretty good example of what the actual sound is,” Crain stated. Tuck’s official debut showcased that noise, instantly making him a legitimate force.
On August 31, 2004, Tuck released Purple Hulk, his debut mixtape. It was the first contemporary musical project that paid homage to Dallas, a city lost in the record-label rush of the Third Coast era, led by artists in Atlanta, Miami, Memphis, New Orleans, and Houston.
Produced by Play-N-Skillz, a Grammy-winning duo raised on local legend DJ Snake’s Snake Beats, Purple Hulk was a medley of club and street anthems that highlighted the city’s hard-ass bass, a singular musical component capable of busting your car’s subwoofers or stomping someone’s face at Little World on South Malcolm X Boulevard. In a Houston-centric environment, Purple Hulk represented the city’s militant and vicious spirit, heard on “T.U.C.K,” “Can’t U See,” “Tussle” and “Southside Da Realist,” the most iconic Dallas rap song to date, according to the Dallas Observer in 2016.
Tuck was the fulfillment of a generational promise, a proud local rapper who was unafraid to fight for Dallas’ rightful place in hip-hop. At the time of its release, Purple Hulk received rotation from prominent DJs throughout the nation, including DJ Drama and DJ Chuck T “The Carolina King.” DJ Kay Slay, the legendary mixtape DJ who debuted “Ether,” one of the most iconic diss songs in Jay Z and Nas’s historic beef—featured Tuck on his Streetsweepers mixtape series. “New York is listening. If King, the number one DJ in New York called us and wanted to place Tuck on the album, it was huge,” said Lopez. “When we dropped the album it just became a huge, huge album. For Dallas, people don’t know the numbers. The numbers were huge. And that’s when Universal started calling like, ‘Yo man, what’s this Purple Hulk album?’”
Tuck’s successful debut mixtape attracted executives at Def Jam, Sony, Priority, and Universal Motown Republic Group, who all engaged in a bidding war for not only Tuck, but for all of DSR. Lopez orchestrated a $7.4 million deal, one of the most expensive contracts in Texas hip-hop history, which also stipulated that T-Town Music would operate as a subsidiary of Universal Records.
And so Dallas hip-hop had received it’s rightful due, brought forth by Big Tuck, DSR, and George Lopez.
Taylor Crumpton is a music, pop culture, and politics writer transplanted in Oakland, originally from Dallas.
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