FROM Z- RO TO WIDE OPEN
As fearless outsider, Houston rapper connects through honest songs
On a rainy Monday morning, Z-Ro’s saucer-size sunglasses hide the effects of a late night drinking Patrón. The Houston rapper speaks slowly, his voice moving effortlessly with the darkness of a stormcloud. His is an urban basso profundo capable of telling tough stories with detail and honesty. The voice also conveys great emotional breadth, which is fitting because few songwriters — in rap or otherwise — so earnestly chart the struggle between faith and resignation. As Z-Ro, Joseph Wayne McVey doesn’t have the renown of the best-known hip-hop artists in the country. In fact, Z-Ro has never had an album break into the Billboard Top 40, which explains why the New York Times has called him “one of America’s most underrated rappers.”
“Incarceration is always unfortunate. But anticipation built while he was in jail. When he got out the city was on fire waiting for him.” Eric Kaiser on Z-Ro
“If the world heard him, he’d take off like a rocket,” says Eric Kaiser, a pioneering Houston rapper known as K-Rino. “He’s one of the few artists in the industry — not just in rap, not just in Houston — who shows no fear of opening up and revealing aspects of his life that most people are uncomfortable with: being homeless, losing his mother. He’s unique in his ability to convey pain and have people relate their own pain through him.”
His voice alone would command attention, but McVey has for nearly two decades paired it perfectly with those gnarled knockabout tales from his life and times: an awkward childhood, a youth without parents, homelessness, addiction, violence — he knows them all well.
He started with zero and decided to make that word his.
“It’s like calling a big guy ‘Tiny,’ ” McVey says of the most nihilistic of stage names. “I’ve known nothingness, and the moniker is a reminder about what I’m never going to return to. While I’m alive, I’ll never return to nothing. So I became Z-Ro.”
Having made five albums between 2008 and 2012 thematically organized around addictive substances — “Crack,” “Cocaine,” “Heroin” “Meth” and “Angel Dust” — Z-Ro has found surer footing in his life at age 39.
He’s started a record label and has an enormous amount of music ready for release — including a gospel album and a blues album. But right now, he’s working “Drankin and Drivin,” a bracing hiphop recording released earlier this year.
He spent part of his summer traveling to New York and Los Angeles, introducing himself to people in the music industry who had seen him as a cult curiosity out on the fringes, which makes sense: Z-Ro’s narrative has always been that of the outsider. He talks about his past and present without filter, even while nursing a hangover that fits his latest album’s title.
Though, like Dr. Dre’s landmark album “The Chronic,” “Drankin and Drivin” isn’t a celebration of chemical intake but rather a reference to the music within.
“Dre wasn’t encouraging you to go out and smoke chronic,” McVey says. “He was saying, ‘My album is dope.’ With ‘Drankin and Drivin,’ if you listen to it in its entirety, you might feel like you drank, drove and crashed. I think it’s that heavy.” The Corduroy Kid
Hard times and McVey found each other early.
“Childhood wasn’t really my cup of tea,” the rapper says of growing up first in the South Park neighborhood and later southwest of town in Missouri City.
He says he was a black sheep in his family as well as in school. He was shuffled around from home to home, from family member to family member.
“I’ve always been the last guy,” he says. “You always have that last guy. You look at the kids and what they’re wearing: Polo, Polo, Polo, Polo, Izod … corduroy. I’m the Corduroy Kid. ‘Look, he’s got on carpet pants!’ That’s what it was from the jump.”
Things got worse before they got better, starting with the death of McVey’s mother to cancer. He was only 6 at the time.
His interest in words and music began after her death.
“Would you believe the paramedic who pulled her out of the house is the same dude who baptized me?” he asks. “If that’s not a coincidence, I don’t know what is. But the Sunday after we put her in the ground, I was sitting there in church.”
Z-Ro breaks into song, his voice big and beautiful:
“I didn’t even know what ‘beckon’ meant,” he says. “But because of that word, in my mind, I pictured people in white telling my mama to ‘come on.’ ‘Come on.’ It just made me cry. That’s when I knew words have power. I didn’t know it’d turn into rap. Sometime later, I’d wake up and feel angry. I’d write ‘angry’ on a piece of paper and leave. Come back, ‘I’m not as mad anymore.’ Maybe later, ‘I want to kill everybody in the classroom.’ That (expletive) turned into poems, and that (expletive) turned into subtle R&B, and then it turned into rap.”
As a teen, McVey continued to move from home to home. At one point, he says, his father kicked him out, forcing McVey to sleep on a bench in a Missouri City park.
He started selling drugs to scrape by.
“I remember that time like yesterday,” he says 20 years later. “That’s why I hustle. I’m not going back to that.”
McVey started by formalizing his written thoughts into songs. He hung with the great Houston hip-hop ensemble Street Military, but his path truly changed when he met trend-setting Houston producer DJ Screw. As Z-Ro, McVey was welcomed into Screw’s studio and made an instant impression, being invited into the producer’s Screwed Up Click.
In addition to his raps, Z-Ro found himself singing his hooks, too — an uncommon thing in hip-hop. McVey had sung in church but figured he’d have Houston artist Big Moe sing his hooks like others in the SUC. Then McVey found out Moe charged $500 per hook — a fee he couldn’t cover.
“That’s really how it started,” he says. “It was just about money.”
Singing became a crucial and distinctive part of his music: Z-Ro could drop unflinching rhymes and then turn around and sing a haunting hook. An outsider’s voice
From the beginning, McVey’s music spilled contradictions that framed him as a compelling storyteller who put his flaws front and center.
Sometimes, he’d blame others for his woes, other times he’d bear the responsibility. Dubious actions would be followed by contemplative guilt.
Not surprisingly, the music twists and turns tempestuously with him. Album titles almost became chapter heads: “Look What You Did to Me,” “Z-Ro vs. the World,” “Life,” “The Life of Joseph W. McVey,” “I’m Still Livin’.”
His writing is frank, with one eye always cast on ways his story might end. “I used to keep a pistol by my side, but it don’t matter if I’m strapped,” he rapped, before dropping a line worthy of Hank Williams. “I’m still gonna die.”
Z-Ro songs chart an outsider pulling further away from others and deeper into his own thoughts. One telling title: “Happy Alone.”
In another song he raps, “That’s how I mean to act.” Intentions are worth something to him, but they’re not always an indicator of how he’ll behave.
That duality follows him.
“By nature, I’m humble,” he says. “I like to help people. To be a light in darkness. A regular guy. But there are some situations I feel antagonized. Somebody comes up and says, ‘You said you’re a gangsta in your song. What’s up there?’ And I gotta break his face. And after the face-breaking, I go back humbling. I want to help. ‘See what you made me do?’”
Face-breaking caused setbacks, which he acknowledges.
“You get to the point where you’re always ready for war,” he says. “Even in a nonviolent situation. It’s tough. You walk in a club, somebody says, ‘Why do you look like that?’ Well, for one, God didn’t make me cute. But it’s the face he’s given me, and it’s ready for war when some (expletive) runs up at me. When that happens, hopefully I can make my bond. If not, I go to war again, just in a different place. It’s like that all the time.”
McVey recalls additional periods of homelessness, sleeping under Pierce Elevated — even while he had a record deal. Drug busts have landed him in prison, which is where he was in 2006, when “I’m Still Livin’ ” — which should’ve been a breakthrough record for him — was released.
McVey’s music would still circulate Houston while he was incarcerated. And prison didn’t keep him from getting a video shot — with actual prison footage — and made for one of his betterknown songs, “I Hate You (Expletive).”
But he wasn’t able to get out and sell his songs elsewhere, a struggle that continued even when he wasn’t incarcerated.
A strong album, “Melting the Crown,” was released last year without any push and landed with a thud. For the first time in over a decade, a Z-Ro album didn’t even find its way to the deeper regions of the Billboard 200.
Z-Ro remained a localized talent. But the local support was fervent.
Kaiser recalls getting stuck with McVey in traffic on the way to a concert outside of town. Not only did they miss the scheduled start time, they showed up at 2:30 a.m., well after the venue’s closing time. The club had remained open and packed.
“Incarceration is always unfortunate,” Kaiser says. “But anticipation built while he was in jail. When he got out, the city was on fire waiting for him.” ‘Devil Cities’
McVey still shouts out to Missouri City on his albums. But he stops short of revisiting the neighborhood.
“You can’t take a Bentley through there,” he says. “It’ll go flat on those raggedy-ass streets.”
He also feels his successes could make him a target.
“People there who were in the same boat I was in, they may see me as an opportunity,” he says.
Which isn’t to say he’s turned from current events. “Drankin and Drivin” opens with “Devil Ass City,” a condemnation of the segregated power structure in American cities.
“Police shootings, these things, I’m not psychic, talking about this,” he says. “I just know these things come back around again and again. That’s common sense. So it’s just me being a reporter, putting observations on paper. And right now, you’re dealing with all sorts of Devil Ass Cities. It’ll get better. And then it’ll come back.”
Even more recently, he was in the studio making a song called “No Justice, No Peace” with Mike Dean, a top-shelf producer originally from Houston who has worked with Kanye West and Scarface. While they were recording, news broke about a sniper killing five Dallas police officers.
That song drew some heat.
“People miss the meaning of that song,” he says. “I’m not calling to rise up and kill anybody. I want killing to stop — all of it. But the point of the song is that everybody’s asking, ‘Why?’ If you want peace, you need to give us justice. It can’t just be police killing us, police killing us, police killing us, coffee break, police killing us. That’s the message. Not more killing. No more killing.” Faith and solitude
On his new album, McVey raps, “I don’t do this for y’all.” The mindset has propelled him through his career, but it also means that he’s been known to put out releases on top of each other — nearly 20-plus mixtapes in fewer than 20 years — taking away the focus of a given record.
So he’s taking advice from management not to flood the market right now — to let “Drankin and Drivin” try to find an audience outside Houston. The album offers a representation of his reliable subjects, primarily an array of people who cause him grief: record labels, the law, women, lesser rappers, doubters. He suggests some have sabotaged his career:
The result is the Corduroy Kid hanging back by himself again. “I stay in my own lane,” he declares on “Hate Me So Much.”
If the qualities of his day-to-day aren’t relatable to everyone, the broader themes are: He takes refuge in faith and solitude. When he references chemicals, he’s not looking to get high. He’s trying to stay low.
“Substance creates longevity,” Kaiser says. “And he doesn’t run off the fumes of his success. Still, when you make that connection with an audience through expressing pain and being transparent, they’ll stick with you forever.
“The old saying about music being the soundtrack to our lives, some of the songs he’s written put people back to periods of time in their lives, whether they were happy times or sad times. He makes that kind of music. All the greats do, whether it’s Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye or Scarface. That’s a specific kind of artist, whose music puts you back to where you were the first time you heard it.”
Despite the boasts that flavor “Drankin and Drivin,” McVey doesn’t ever make his job sound glamorous. When he talks about his work — void of music — he sometimes makes it sound more like a trade. He does his job because he has to.
“I can’t change,” McVey says. “I got to go on being me. It’s my job. … At the end of the day, I do this for my kids. Hopefully, they’ll be comfortable and they won’t become rappers and do what I do.”
My treasures are laid up somewhere beyond the blue The angels beckon me from heaven’s open door And I can’t feel at home in this world anymore. Certain people at the record label tried to block my shine, but I am the sun/Thirteen years later I am not done.