City of Syrup

Exploring the evolution of Houston's chopped and screwed vibe from it's origin to the biggest hits coming out of the city today

Houston has become one of the biggest cities in hip hop with breakout artists like Beyonce, Travis Scott, Megan Thee Stallion and Don Toliver leading the charts for almost 20 years now. Rewind back to the early 1990s, it was DJ Screw’s distinguished sound - slowed-down beats, pitched-down vocals that really made Houston stand out.

Listen to the hits coming out of Houston, then and now on YouTube Music and Spotify.

This unique brand of music was derived from his consumption of lean or sizzurp, cough syrup infused soda that created euphoric feelings. Houston hip hop, some argue, popularized the drug overdosing that has grown so much in hip hop everywhere. Was it this Houston hip hop movement that fueled the later-known City of Syrup or was hip hop just an outlet and a form of expression for people who were already struggling with addiction?

Diving into that a little bit deeper, we looked at arrest numbers for lean, marijuana, and cocaine and compared them to mentions in music from Houston’s biggest rappers over a 20 year span where the bar graph is mentions of the drug in music and the drug icon is number of arrests for that same drug:

*Texas Drug arrest records classify lean (codeine) as a derivative of opium and cocaine so arrest counts are the same

Interesting to see there is a correlation. More interesting to see that mentions actually follow arrests suggesting that hip hop artists speaking about drug abuse were expressing their everyday realities rather than glorifying consumption culture.