Cruising the Blue Line: Neighborhoods celebrate slabs
BaKa Fields died young — in his 20s — of what his friend Tim “Toolman” Berard describes delicately as “certain situations that went on in his life.” That was in 2000, and then as now, in Scenic Woods on the pockmarked north side of Houston, young black men die of “certain situations” the way that coal miners die in explosions, the way that mountaineers die in landslides. It’s the kind of death that seems like an occupational hazard, part of being who you are.
Tim, only two years older than BaKa, vowed to keep his friend’s name alive — and also to keep alive his decked-out, hypercustomized cars. “BaKa blue,” Tim called their color: a shiny, candy-colored royal blue, a color so intense that no manufacturer would dare to offer it standard.
Tim, a car customizer, bought a ’93 Cadillac Fleetwood — at the time, the most prized of cars in the hip-hop world — and painted it BaKa blue. He recruited other guys from neighborhoods along Homestead to use the color, to ride with him to car shows and festivals, to throw a hot-dogs-and-hip-hop party in Scenic Woods Park for families every year around June 13, BaKa’s birthday.
Out of BaKa’s death, the Blue Line was born.
“Slabs,” people call the cars of hip-hop. Their style — low and slow; the colors of Kool-Aid; with a fake fifth wheel mounted on back like car jewelry; with “pokes,” wheel rims that look like medieval weapons protruding far past the car’s body — their style was born in Houston. “Screwston,” people called the city in the late ’80s, when DJ Screw ruled the big cars’ rumbling sound systems. Their style said, “Look at me. Don’t forget.”
As the style spread across the country, Houston remained its acknowledged epicenter: Houston is to slabs what France is to champagne, what Seattle was to grunge. These days, the company that sells most slab rims is based in Beverly Hills, Calif., but it calls itself Texas Wire Wheels. And it splays Houston’s skyline across the top of its website.
In the ’90s, Tim’s Cadillac was among the best of the best slabs in Houston, which is to say, among the best of the best anywhere. It was a Fleetwood, “kandy,” with a fifth wheel, with doors without handles, electronically controlled doors that swung open vertically, with a neon sign mounted in the trunk, with a stereo so powerful that at contests, the sound ripped gashes in the fiberglass near the back wheels. Proud, he left the gashes. “War wounds,” he calls them.
He doesn’t talk so much about other wars, about the “certain situations” that applied back then, about the ways that slabs and the hip-hop lifestyle intersected with death. Tim had the most coveted of rims: 84s, original Cadillac rims whose 30 spokes protruded out all of 3 inches, rims that the carmaker discontinued after 1984, rims that if you could find a set in the ’90s would have cost tens of thousands of dollars. It was understood that people would shoot you for rims like those.
It was also understood that Houston’s black neighborhoods were at war. Driving a slab from, say, the Fifth Ward (the Green Line) down to the Third (the Red Line) was an act of aggression. And you could be shot for that, too.
That’s no longer the case. In Houston, as in the rest of the country, young black men still are far more likely to die violently than anyone else. But these days, rims are cheaper; people no longer get killed for them. And the black-neighborhood wars are largely over; the various color lines mix easily at car shows.
How much have things changed? Consider this: Today, multiple color lines will ride in a citywide parade, then park at MacGregor Park, to be admired during a Family Festival — a family festival — celebrating all things hip-hop. The sponsors include staid, civic-minded groups such as the Museum of African American Culture and the Houston Arts Alliance, a public-private group funded mainly by the city of Houston.
“Slab culture is unique to this city,” the arts alliance’s Pat Jasper recently wrote me. “It originated here, but it stands for an entire Houston hip-hop scene that is distinctive.” Jasper, a folklorist, hoped that considering Houston’s entire hip-hop culture “in a broader perspective will help reposition this tradition’s arts — the music, dance, street art, style, spoken-word poetry, as well as the cars — as a source of pride for the public in general.”
In other words: We have reached the point where the wider world can consider hip-hop and its cars not as criminal and terrifying — but as a selling point for the entire city of Houston. Slabs are growing up.
I met Tim recently at Scenic Woods Park. From the corner where he parked his Fleetwood, we could see the house where BaKa used to live.
Tim showed off his Fleetwood: the captain’s chairs even in the back seat; the shiny green paint even under the hood, on the rim of the air filter; the Vogue tires with the white and yellow rings; the ornamental fifth wheel that, electronically cued, slid down dramatically so that the trunk could open.
He hasn’t updated the car since he finished customizing it in ’94. “It’s a classic,” he says. “So I kept the original look. I’m just gonna keep being me.”
Tim nodded a greeting when B.G. Porter’s BaKablue Jaguar XK8 pulled up to join us. If Tim’s Fleetwood is old-school, B.G.’s Jag is new-school: a car intended to shake things up
It is, for starters, a 2000 Jag — not one of the big old American cars slab-makers used to start with. And B.G.’s custom-made pokes make Tim’s 84s seem downright reserved. Where Tim’s wheels protrude out three inches, B.G.’s stick out an astonishing 15 — 5 inches longer than anything else on the streets at the time he bought them.
“Texas Outlaws,” he called the wheels, and he had the phrase tattooed on his arms: “Texas” down the right arm, “Outlaws” down the left.
“Are those street-legal?” I asked, eyeing those astounding rims.
“Well, I’ve been to court,” he shrugged. “They always end up dropping the charges.”
In lots of ways, B.G. doesn’t fit the old-school hip-hop stereotype. Most obviously, he’s white. Tim seemed proud of that: “The Blue Line has diversity,” he said. “We have AfricanAmericans, white guys, Spanish.”
Notably, too, Tim is a born-again Christian — he goes to Lakewood Church — and a family man. He brought his 5-year-old son, Todd Jr., to the park. Todd was born around the time that B.G. stopped being an electrician and went full-time into slab customization, and he and B.G.’s thriving business have grown up together. On a Craigslist ad for B.G’s services, one photo shows Todd, blue baseball cap backward, gold pendant over his blue sports jersey, striking a tough-guy pose next to his dad’s Jag, its trunk popped to display the neon: Growing up in the family business, being groomed to carry on the tradition.