Music

Mouth of the South

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He went home a changed kid, as did all the other fledgling local rappers. Not long after that, K-Rino would meet another in a fateful rap battle. K-Rino was then the top MC at South Park's Sterling High; Ganksta Nip was his archrival across the 'hood at Jones.

"We was enemies," K-Rino remembers. "We used to go at it. In '87 we just decided we were gonna go ahead on and settle this once and for all."

Their enmity was leavened by a healthy respect, so the two teenage rappers met at a neutral site. "It was like, 'I'm not gonna come to your school and battle you, and you're not gonna come to my school and battle me,'" remembers K-Rino. "So we met on the corner of Bellfort and Martin Luther King, and from that point on, that place was called 'The Battleground.'"

Today K-Rino remembers the battle lasting hours and hours. "Finally the crowd was like, 'I don't know. We just gonna call it a draw,'" he says.

Afterward, K-Rino and Nip happened to head home in the same direction. "We hopped on the same Metro bus when we was goin' home," he remembers. "It was a crazy situation. Normally when you do something like that, you go your way and he goes his, but we took off in the same direction.

"Just me and him," he continues. "So we got on the bus and started talkin' — 'Man, that was crazy.' 'Yeah, that was tight.' After that you wouldn't see one of us without seeing the other."

What's more, their epic combat set events in motion that would soon birth the South Park Coalition, Houston's first rap clique. (The Geto Boys preceded the SPC, but the trio wasn't a clique.)

"Every week after that we was promotin' battles," K-Rino remembers. "It was like, 'All right, you and you meet at The Battleground at four o'clock.' Boys had to prove they stripes on that spot."

Eventually, other cliques would rise. K-Rino's Sterling classmate Robert Davis (a.k.a. DJ Screw) would found the Screwed Up Click, which over the years has included Lil' Flip, Lil' Keke, Big Pokey, brothers Fat Pat and Big Hawk, Big Mello, Yungstar, Big Moe and Trae; and E.S.G. Swishahouse, which launched Paul Wall, Mike Jones, Chamillionaire and Slim Thug, formed on the north side.

Besides intermittent breakouts, Houston rap simmered underground until 2005, when it hit the charts like never before. Then it fell apart again, all while K-Rino watched from the underground, releasing one killer album after another.

Today, he's content as an uncom­promising underground legend commanding universal respect, whose musical influence can easily be detected in the rhymes of artists as diverse as Chamillionaire and Z-Ro.

He's not content to let revisionist history marginalize his clique's feats; MTV's Houston rap documentary failed to even mention SPC.

"They tryin' to write us out of history," he says. "You hear about the Screwed Up Click, you hear about Swishahouse, you hear about Rap-A-Lot. You hear about all these different entities who played major roles and shaped the city, but they never mention us, and I've got a problem with that."

So K-Rino continues to host a yearly SPC Weekend, and promises the opposite of a typical, poorly produced rap show.

"People can expect to hear real lyrics, not a bunch of people onstage muffled and hoppin' around, lookin' crazy," he says. "We from the old school, so you're gonna get to see a lot of H-Town legends and classic artists in the building. I ain't sayin' we're gonna have lions jumpin' through a ring of fire, but it is just gonna be a good solid show."

If hip-hop at large could pull that off on a macro scale, it might not be in terminal meltdown today.

john.lomax@houstonpress.com

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