On the way to TisaKorean’s crib, in southwest Houston, there’s nothing but fields of weeds, worn down churches, liquor stores, and gas stations next to gas stations next to more gas stations. It made me understand why so many of the rapper’s bugged-out, lightly choreographed Texas dance skits and snippets have been filmed at unidentified Texacos and Chevrons around the way. Houston is hot, muggy, and short on public transportation, so cars are the norm, and the gas station is one of the few places where you stumble into unexpected social interactions. “I literally never see my neighbors,” says Tisa, laughing at the thought. “But when we go to the club—or even the gas station—we gon’ turn that shit up.”
Since 2017’s “Werkkk,” Tisa’s slurred, animated swag rap and self-produced blown-out party beats have been going viral on the regular. It’s fun music completely on its own wavelength, hardly concerned with chasing trends. When I get to Tisa’s spot, in one of those sitcom-y Texas cul de sacs where every single-family home looks the same, it’s way less chaotic than I expected of the guy who has been pumping out off-the-walls, groovy, situational club rap for years.
I imagined strolling in his house to find one of his friends passed out on the couch, fully clothed from a night of hitting “The Woah” too hard, next to a handle of liquor and leftover Whataburger scraps. Instead, Tisa is digging through his fully stocked kitchen of healthy snacks and fruits, looking for something to eat at his spotless granite island. After a long morning in the gym, he’s ready to cook up instrumentals that put a twist on the inspiration of his next production era: the Louisiana jig beats you’d hear on Boosie and Webbie tapes in the mid-to-late-2000s.
Tisa brings me upstairs to his incredibly organized home studio—an intimate corner bedroom with posters from his Silly Show Tour on the wall and a Dennis Rodman floor mat on top of the carpet—and talks my ear off about the Mouse and BJ beats all over Bad Azz and Bad Azz Mixtape, Vol. 2. Stuff released around the time when Boosie had Texas’ own Pimp C in his corner. We listen to 2007’s “Big Dog” and lose our minds over the shoulder-swaying bounce and bell that hits like a roar of thunder every few seconds. I’m getting the realest glimpse at Tisa’s enthusiasm for lived-in, homegrown regional rap, which clearly comes through in his music: There’s the collision of Dallas boogie and Atlanta snap on 2019’s A Guide to Being a Partying Freshman, for instance, and last year’s horny-as-fuck “lEgs In tHe aIR,” which is like if the vocals on Epiphany were pitched-up and dropped over the “Teach Me How to Dougie” rhythm. Tisa continually finds ways to bring new life out of longgone sounds.
Tisa’s curiosity about microscenes is as real as it gets, because, when he learns I’m from New York, he starts asking me a ton of questions about litefeet icons like Larry Smoove (whose remixes he danced to in high school), Ducksause and Hypestar—music I’ve never spoken about with someone who wasn’t also raised in the five boroughs. “I’m so big on regions; I’m so big on culture; my favorite thing is hearing another city’s lingo,” says Tisa, his mind racing. “But dance music gets deeper with me. Hip-hop started out as dance music, and dance music is part of what bonds us as Black people no matter what city we’re from.”
For a long time, Houston was a city known for downtempo player rap made to soundtrack cruises in your decked-out whip. After all, it was home to DJ Screw, the pioneer of chopped and screwed whose legacy is as strong as ever 25 years after his death. One day, when I had some free time, I coasted up and down Houston’s overlapping highway routes—they resemble Hot Wheels tracks if you squint—listening to the throwback Thursday mix on one of the city’s two premier commercial rap radio stations, 97.9 The Box. What caught my ear was that almost every song was extremely (and expectedly) laidback—the honeyed melodies of Z-Ro, the syrupy flows of Big Pokey—except for the twerk music of the late BeatKing.
In the early 2010s, BeatKing, threading together the energy of Three 6 Mafia radio hits and Atlanta trap with thick Houston rap flows, started pumping out faster-paced, out-of-pocket, and often hilariously irreverent punchline-based party anthems. He became the self-proclaimed “King of the Clubs,” providing the raunchy backdrops for nights of loose-limbed dance battles (known locally as jiggin’) and grindin’. “Before me, there was no Houston club sound. Like, what you considered, like, Houston club music was, like, Trae Tha Truth… UGK,” BeatKing once claimed in an interview. “I would hear nothing but Dallas shit in the club.… I was like, I gotta do something about this… and I learnt how to make club music from Dallas.”
At the same time, Tisa was a Houston teenager throwing house parties every Friday and Saturday night. “I’d be dancing so hard niggas would talk about me in different schools,” he remembers like a former star quarterback talking about the state championship game. He’d DJ nothing but Dallas boogie (so many of his ad-libs are inspired by KBzo and Yung Nation), New Orleans bounce, and twangy Baton Rouge rap, but it was the club music of BeatKing that really set the jiggin’ off. “We partied to that every week,” he says. “You might have a dope dealer nigga or real killer there, but even they’d be hittin’ that shit, boy.”
Initially, Tisa made music to fill that same niche, eventually borrowing little production touches from outside influences of his own, like the Neptunes and Tyler, the Creator. He didn’t think his music was anything out of the ordinary until it started gaining traction online. “I thought my shit would be lame to somebody not from Houston,” he recalls while clicking through his beats on the computer. “But people from other places would be like, ‘Yo’ shit crazy!’ And I’d be like, ‘Really? We all sound like this in Houston.’”
Now long removed from the gym, Tisa changes out of workout clothes and into baggy shorts and a T-shirt that reads A1 Junky, a reference to his recently formed crew, A1, whose job I think is mostly to mob out in dance videos and wear matching outfits—stuff of that ilk. Joining us is co-face of the clique Mighty Bay, who has been partying, dancing, and occasionally rapping with Tisa since they met through a cousin nearly a decade ago. Together, they joke and sometimes finish each other’s sentences and share stories of tearing up dancefloors like they’re in Saturday Night Fever. “Partying cost too much now to not turn up; if I pay 500 to get in, you gon’ have to choke me out to make me not have a good time!” exclaims Tisa. Mighty Bay smiling along goes, “Yeah, we partying fanatics.”
The three of us spend the afternoon rolling around the south side of Houston in Tisa’s snow white Benz. They point out the club where they dance, the liquor store where they dance, and, of course, a few of the gas stations where they dance. We stop at Tisa’s favorite snow cone spot where he gets his drowned in cream the color of melted American cheese. Mighty Bay gets a kick out of my disgust. On line, a few people from the neighborhood come by and dap them up. Next, we head over to a Chinese chicken wing counter where we chow down as they get on my ass about the choices on Pitchfork’s “Best Rap Albums of All Time” list. “You guys are just rage baiting,” goes Mighty Bay; Tisa nods.
In the car, we’re listening to and cracking jokes about music. Mighty Bay has tears in his eyes from laughing so hard at the funky drum machine beats of Keith LeBlanc’s Major Malfunction, coming around to it by the final track. They go nuts for some old Afrika Bambaataa instrumentals, especially Tisa who tells us he was heavily influenced by a chopped-and-screwed version of “Planet Rock.” Tisa then plays a few beats that have lately been inspiring him as a producer: the G-funk bounce of Westside Connection’s “Bow Down,” the soul of UGK’s “Choppin’ Blades,” and more Boosie. “We really influenced the most by what we grew up around,” goes Tisa, barely talking when the beats play to catch every detail.
Later that night, I pull into a Chevron lot about 15 minutes from TisaKorean’s place. I spot Tisa and Mighty Bay at the far side gas pumps in backward NBA jerseys, chino shorts, and boat shoes, tossing around cans of Twisted Tea in front of the Benz. With them, and in similar outfits, are Tisa’s cousin Whitney and their friend CEO. The four are dressed like frat boys and sorority girls at a day rager to shoot a jiggin’ clip to celebrate the streaming success of Tisa and Mighty Bay’s “WhiteBoy Wasted,” a track that seems inspired by vintage Young Dro and Shop Boyz hits.
Blasting the track over and over out of the car, Mighty Bay takes charge, coming up with mini dance routines on the fly and critiquing the little details that are off on each shot. He’s like the Francis Ford Coppola of Texas dance rap videos. Since I’m around, he gives me two jobs: First, to throw Twisted Tea cans in the air for them to catch, and then to hold the iPhone camera for scenes with everybody in them, giving me directions on how to point and shoot while improvising moves. After each scene, Tisa and Mighty Bay get together and go, “You know it might be crazy if we did…” while cracking up. The girls are just as down to clown, coming up with funny drunk poses and faces.
They shoot for about an hour. Cars passing by after filling up their tank give them a beep or sit and watch for a few seconds like they’re at an impromptu comedy show. One man gets out of his pickup truck and leans against the hood sipping a Red Bull as he looks on. By the end, all of the Twisted Tea cans are busted and Tisa and Mighty are jiggin’ even when the cameras aren’t rolling. “We really just be having fun,” says Tisa. “I like when you can tell where a rapper from just by seeing them; I just love getting to know about your city’s swag, that’s why we make what’s already in us.” A week later, the barely 20-second video was online; they were in costume but the Houston swag was undeniable.