Ludacris may have been the one “doing a hundred on the highway,” but in the early 2000s many hip-hop listeners were ceding the road to one Southern rapper above all others. Now as then, Paul Wall rhymes almost exclusively about zen and the art of car modification: tipped hydraulics, candy paint finishes, and subwoofer-shredding Screw tapes, with nary an expression of pity for any pedestrian blinded by the sunlight refracted from his signature $30,000 grillz.
And though the iceman’s latest release, Hall of Fame Hustler, regrettably favors plain, undernourished, digitized trap beats over the lush sonic signatures of his classics – you miss the woozy organ vamps, burbling guitar washes, and clumsy, top-heavy drums – the trade-off is we now get to hear him rap about starting his car with his phone.
Subcompact though his subject matter may be, Wall’s utterly unleaded Houston horsepower is key to his never-challenged status as the only white rapper to ever go platinum fully embodying his local scene. Ideally we’d be catching the “king of the parking lot” performing drive-in style from an authentic open-top slab – not least because a recent radio interview with 97.9 The Box revealed his lifelong distaste for deodorant – Saturday’s Empire show does offer Wall the necessary trunk space to bring along lyrically inclined H-town hustler GT Garza and Georgetown’s own xBValentine, who recently collab’d with Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.
—2859246— Julian Towers
