Triller: Windows Never Go Down

By absolutely no account besides my own, the best rap song to come out of Texas in the last year– and maybe more – is J-Dawg’s “Ride On 4’s.” It does not feature T-Pain nor is there an accompanying dance, where one would hypothetically use their appendages to mimic the act of driving around on large tires with almost equally large rims. It was the second of two singles on last year’s debut from Slim Thug’s group, the Boss Hogg Outlawz, a project that didn’t ever figure out how to market itself nationally and was eventually overshadowed by the marketing push for Slim Thug’s second solo album. For all of these reasons, you very well may have heard this song in the last six months, but it’s also not surprising if you did not.

In terms of gimmicks and novelty, “Ride On 4’s” offers nothing. Mr. Lee’s beat is excellent but covers no new ground and is about 30 beats-per-minute too slow to play on radio. Slim Thug drops by for the third verse but the song lacks The Big Guest Chorus, a.k.a. the Worcestershire sauce for your radio smash. J-Dawg’s lyrics form a laundry list of Houston rap etiquettes – getting high, drinking drank, driving around slowly, drinking more drank, getting higher, etc. If you traveled back in time ten years and slipped these verses onto a Screw tape, it wouldn’t muck up any space-time continuum; by comparison, if you somehow put Andre 3000’s “Roses” on ATLiens, your 2008 bread would be toast, McFly (we’ll get to this).

To review: “Ride On 4’s” seems to have an Icee’s chance in hell of compelling more than a few listens. But this Icee’s got sweat equity! “Ride On 4’s” sounds about as subtle as a young John Rambo (and certainly not as delicate as a young Jean Rimbaud). Yet what distinguishes it from your dime-a-dozen “block burner” is a set of very minor yet commanding deviations from the norm.

I’ve spent the last few months misguidedly attempting to reconcile the mainstream Texas rap sound with the Atlanta scene, for they function and coalesce in dramatically different modes. One distinguishes Atlanta rap by its hyper-kinetic energy and the broad chasms between each of the sounds within it – Outkast sounds nothing like Young Jeezy, who sounds nothing like D4L, who sound nothing like B.O.B. or Lil’ Jon or Ludacris or Polow Da Don. The dominant Houston sound is much more static. It’s largely variations on a theme, as opposed to the disparity one hears between D4L’s “Laffy Taffy” and Jeezy’s “Trap Or Die.” Slim Thug and Trae and Z-Ro and Lil’ Keke and Bun-B are more in the same camp than their Atlanta counterparts. Relatively speaking, their various sounds do not differ in form, but rather approach; and while not as obvious, they are absolutely just as compelling.

Enter: J-Dawg.

[warning: the video above contains explicit lyrics and photographs of car parts]

As mentioned, the lyrical content of “Ride On 4’s” is roughly analogous to your standard Houston party/drive song – “Still Tippin’” being the most popular example. But “Still Tippin’” is bright and prideful and celebratory, as though sponsored by Texas Tourism. “Ride On 4’s” is the opposite – defiant, brooding, exclusionist, even while saying pretty much the same thing (that a rapper’s lifestyle in Houston is relaxing/awesome).

Producer Mr. Lee pulls his weight by gutting the mid-section of the beat, leaving behind a cavernous kick-ride-snare and a melody buried in the bass. His production handicaps to a certain extent, and it also does not. Any rapper would sound OK on this beat as long as their verse was mastered correctly and they stayed, literally, on beat. But J-Dawg doesn’t stay on beat – he raps behind it, as though struggling against the music. Throughout the song, he sounds as though he’s either shouldering this monster of a beat or dropping one of those shoulders to push it out of the way. The strain of his vocals amplifies this whole effect, as does his solo rapping on the chorus, as though it’s his burden to bear/shed, not the producer’s or a guest artist’s.

I stand by my earlier assessment that these lyrics would be at home on the songs J-Dawg listened to when he was 14. But just because the slang is timeworn doesn’t mean the ideas aren’t profound. “Still Tippin’” - and other songs of similar make – portray the expensive rims and shiny cars as luxuries. However, J-Dawg shies away from the "conspicuous consumption" angle. He focuses more on the idea of these possessions as earned or, as he puts it, “deserved”, like they are rewards for the real-life struggles that he epitomizes in his phrasing.

In the most profound rhyme on the song, he raps, to paraphrase inelegantly: I’m a violent person but there’s something about these rims that could change me. But then he immediately ad-libs a laugh in the background. So who knows exactly what J-Dawg is attempting with “Ride On 4’s” and if he's really interested in the things that usually go unspoken in these songs. All I know is what it sounds like and that is a completely inverted, working-man’s version of the car song, seen from the gravel up, as opposed to the crane shots of Houston boulevards that proliferate the videos. Of course, because this was a second single that didn’t chart, it never got the video treatment.

Fingers crossed for the remix.

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