George Floyd’s Hip-Hop Legacy
Before his death in Minnesota made him into a symbol of police brutality, he was known in Houston as Big Floyd, a beloved member of a vibrant rap scene
Before his death made him a symbol, he was a beloved member of a vibrant scene.
ABOUT A DECADE AGO, the Houston rapper Trae tha Truth hit a stumbling block in his rising career: After a shooting took place at a community event he’d organized in his hometown, followed by a spat with a local DJ, at least one radio station banned his music from the airwaves. “At that point, a lot of people left,” Trae recalls. “They didn’t want to talk to me. They didn’t want to have no affiliation, because I was going through a tough time as far as being blackballed.”
It was a serious blow to his future, but while Trae was down, one man kept speaking out in his support to anyone who would listen: his friend George Floyd. “Y’all know what it is: Big Floyd, Houston, Texas, Third Ward projects,” Floyd says in a video from the time. “I just want to say, stop the ban on Trae tha Truth, man. . . . It’s about coming together, man. Because God is good. . . . This man has helped the homeless, the elderly . . . Putting on in a major way, with a genuine heart.”
Years later, Trae has never forgotten that moment of loyalty. “[Floyd], on his own, went to protesting: ‘Y’all trying to stop him, and it’s not right,’” he says. “He always spoke up for what’s right. When there was a lot of killing going on in our city, he would always speak up, like, ‘This ain’t the way.’ ”
Most of the world first heard George Floyd’s name after May 25th, when he was killed by four police officers in Minneapolis. He’d moved there in 2014, searching for a better life. Before that, Floyd spent the majority of his adulthood 1,200 miles south, in Houston’s Third Ward, where his family settled a few years after his birth in North Carolina in 1973. He was a well-known member of the community, a friend to many, and a part-time musician with ties to the most respected hip-hop crew ever to exist in Houston. Now, the rappers he came up with are left to grieve. All of them have stories of Floyd helping them when they most needed a hand. “He believed in people,” Trae says, “to the point that it seemed he believed in people more than he even believed in himself.”
As the video of Floyd’s death rocked America, sparking protests across the country, the people who knew him best could only watch in horror. “[George] had no aggression to him,” says Cal Wayne, a Houston rapper who grew up with Floyd. “He wouldn’t hurt nobody.”
Cal knew Floyd as the lifelong friend who always believed in his rap career. “That’s my nextdoor neighbor,” he says. “I actually lived with him for three years. When I was young, my mom went to prison. His mother came and got us, and we just stayed with her.”
The morning after Floyd’s death, Cal received a text from a friend: “That’s your brother.” It included a video, which Cal thought showed one of his oldest friends being arrested. Before he could finish watching the clip, his girlfriend came home and delivered the news he couldn’t believe, news that would soon lead to millions of Americans taking to the streets. “I watched it,” Cal says. “I didn’t realize they just killed my nigga.”
“I ain’t gon’ lie, it’s devastating,” Cal adds. “I idolized him.”
Trae was with his daughter in their living room in Houston when he heard that Floyd had died. When one of his friends called asking about the identity of the man in the soon-to-be-viral video, Trae had to watch it for himself. “I was just lost,” he says. “Watching it took me for a loop. Then I called Cal Wayne — he was always with George before he moved to Minnesota. When I called him, he was crying.”
Since his death, recordings have resurfaced showing Floyd as someone who was part of his hometown’s insular but influential rap scene at a key time. Chopped and screwed music — rap that’s been slowed down to a crawl, and punctuated by abrupt stops and starts — is a way of life in Houston. The sound was invented by DJ Screw, who died in 2000, and was famously sold via mixtapes from Screw’s home throughout the Nineties.
Floyd was a friend of Screw’s, and an affiliate of his Screwed Up Click, which means Floyd’s voice appears on a number of cult-classic Screw tapes from that era. Rapping under the name Big Floyd, he had a low, raspy, booming voice that he used well. In typical freestyle fashion, his lyrics were full of casual self-mythologizing. On a song
called “Sittin on Top of the World,” he describes his daily life, in Houston slang that’s nigh impenetrable to the uninitiated: “True south-sider/Watch me crawl low on my motherfuckin’ spiders/Welcome to the ghetto, it’s Third Ward, Texas/Boys choppin’ blades on their motherfuckin’ Lexus.” But most of all, Big Floyd loved to repeatedly say his name in song. He spells it out, proclaims it one bar, and 20 seconds later says it again for good measure. Sandwiched between many competing voices all vying for attention, Floyd was determined not to be forgotten.
“It automatically ties him to a legendary legacy,” says Bun B, a member of the landmark Texas rap duo UGK. “By having that level of proximity to DJ Screw, you are automatically afforded a certain status in the city of Houston, and held in high regard.”
Just as important, Floyd embodied the role of an enthusiastic cheerleader for his friends, many of whom would go on to become Houston legends in their own right. Trae remembers how Floyd would go out of his way to help at the community events Trae organized with colleague Tiffany Cofield. “George would drive her up, and they would be there helping me hands-on,” he says. “When I would come help the projects — I would give them supplies, food, different stuff — he’d always be out there.”
In the late Nineties, when Floyd was rapping, Houston hip-hop stood alone, complete with its own aesthetic and cultural orbit apart from what was happening in New York, Los Angeles, or Atlanta. The divide between those who rapped as a full-time profession and those who were hobbyists was often fluid. DJ Screw’s prolific mixtape output inspired many people, like Floyd, to try their hand at rapping between other pursuits. Someone who wrote lyrics on the side could clock out of a retail job, hop on one of Screw’s records that night, and become a word-of-mouth phenomenon by the next day. It was an era before MP3 downloads or social media, which has left the people who were there at the time to keep the memory of these foundational talents alive. “It’s a vocal tradition that gets passed on from one person to another,” says Paul Wall, another Houston rapper from around the same era who would later make it big.
Wall remembers hearing Big Floyd’s name on Screw tapes in the Nineties. “You would also hear other rappers say his name on tapes,” he says, reeling off a few more famous regional stars. “Big Pokey saying something about Big Floyd. Lil’ Keke saying something about Big Floyd. Mike D saying something about Big Floyd.” He mentions a possibly apocryphal story about Floyd’s appearance on Chapter 007: Ballin’ in da Mall, a 1997 DJ Screw tape: “[Floyd] supposedly worked at Foot Locker, him and some other people. I think it was Big Floyd’s birthday, and they asked him, ‘What you want to do for your birthday?’ ‘I want to do a Screw tape.’ ‘Aight, on your birthday we’ll go over there.’ That’s what a lot of people would do. It’s your birthday, you’d go and make a Screw tape.”
In the early- to mid-2000s, Wall was one of several Houston-based artists affiliated with the label Swishahouse — along with Mike Jones, Chamillionaire, and Slim Thug — who fulfilled the mainstream commercial promise that the previous generation’s Screwed Up Click never got the chance to. As a white rapper, Wall is not only deferential to the memory of the rappers who populated Screw’s mixtapes, but also to the Houston culture that accepted him. “It don’t matter where I grew up,” he says. “It don’t matter how much money I give to causes in the community. It don’t matter how many rallies or protests I go to. It don’t matter how many songs I make spreading positivity or sending a message. It don’t matter how much time I spend within the community. It don’t matter that I have a black wife. Being a white person in America, you represent being a beneficiary of slavery, of what this country was built on.”
In the days after Floyd’s death, Bun B and Trae tha Truth traveled to Minneapolis to protest for Floyd and every other black American killed by the police. The following week, the two rappers turned their attention back to Houston, marching through the city’s streets with Floyd’s family and a large group of protesters.
For Bun B, those marches felt personal. Although he didn’t know Floyd himself, he’s a good friend of Stephen Jackson, the Texas-raised former NBA player, who was close to Floyd and called him his “twin.” “Imagine this, a man growing up in an area where the odds are already against him,” Jackson said at a rally. “You get an opportunity to move away from the environment that brought you down. You get away. You be successful. You get a job. Your life starts turning in the right direction. You stumble a little bit again. That’s not worth your life, though.”
Bun B, like the rest of the world, was shaken by watching the video of Floyd’s death. “That Friday was the first day that my own son had to come to the realization that, as a father of black children, something could happen to his children in this world just because they’re black,” he says. “It actually brought me to tears for him having that realization.”
On June 9th, mourners from around the country came to the Fountain of Praise Church in southwest Houston to lay George Floyd to rest. The funeral was as much a venue for political action as a somber remembrance: During more than four hours of televised speeches, civil-rights advocates and national politicians pleaded for the world to make Floyd’s life count by holding the police accountable. “This was not just a tragedy. It was a crime,” said the Rev. Al Sharpton in an impassioned oration. “We must commit to this family — all of these families, all of his children, grandchildren, and all — that until these people pay for what they did, that we’re going to be there with them. Because lives like George’s will not matter until somebody pays the cost for taking their lives.”
Family members of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, Botham Jean, Pamela Turner, Michael Brown, and Ahmaud Arbery were among the people in the pews. Former Vice President Joe Biden recorded a video message offering his sympathies. “No child,” said the presidential candidate, “should have to ask the question that too many black children have had to ask for generations: ‘Why? Why is Daddy gone?’ ”
In one of the service’s most emotional moments, Floyd’s niece Brooke Williams remembered him in simple but moving terms. “My uncle was a father, brother, uncle, and a cousin to many,” she said. “Spiritually grounded, an activist. He always moved people with his words.”
None of this can bring him back, but hopefully, it can help to make sure the world isn’t robbed of another Big Floyd. For Cal Wayne, the past weeks have been full of pain, but he’s also felt proud to see the entire world fight in memory of his fallen friend. “That’s the best part of it,” he says. “He shook the world. Big Floyd is really Big Floyd now. He’s a martyr now.”
“HE BELIEVED IN PEOPLE,”
SAYS HOUSTON RAPPER TRAE
THA TRUTH, “TO THE POINT
THAT IT SEEMED HE BELIEVED
IN PEOPLE MORE THAN HE
EVEN BELIEVED IN HIMSELF.”