T2 "The Ghetto Hippie"

Any conversation with T2 The Ghetto Hippie operates in the same vein of a movie script. He’ll play protagonist but also operate as narrator, side character, comic relief and more. On a random night, he’ll recall the night he sat up and realized he had a song with Z-Ro on the radio (“Surreal!”). On another, he’ll ash out a blunt, exhale and then begin whipping up a tale of how Roosh Williams got his nickname and who presented themselves as the most morally upstanding on tour. Or how his living time in England and overseas helped him perfect the art of rolling a blunt where no seeds spilled out and everyone was satisfied. A self-professed “Roll-fessional."


The Hippie, as it seems, is as off-kilter as one may find within a Houston rapper. He befriended Kyle Hubbard long before national rap outlets called him a hipster. He cranked out a masterwork of a project with Trakksounds in A South West Side Story. Yet as he can slice open a cigar, dump out the guts and replace them with his own brand, he’ll look outward for something more.

“I’m not a traditional rapper,” he tells me through email. “In fact, I don’t label myself a rapper at all.”

It’s outlier speak, that of a man who makes music primarily through rhyme declaring that he doesn’t position himself in the same box as his contemporaries. Trust, we went through a similar situation with Jeezy and a host of other non-rappers who actually were rappers. Only it’s not an act with T2. He believes every single word he says about not being in any part traditional or boxed in.

"I've chased the concept of making great art as opposed to chasing what's trending and popping,” he says. “I’m grateful for the creative zone that has taken me too. I really and truly love all the music I’m making now. I can write great trap hooks that would sound dope with some auto tune. I just prefer to do exactly what I want. Not what the radio wants. I like making music I would regularly listen to.”

Does it get better than this for T2 The Ghetto Hippie?

He feels as much. His brand-new song, “Better Than,” is getting the world premiere treatment via yours truly. It’s produced by Trakksounds and features Hood Politician and Houston rap everyman DeLorean. You can stream it in full below. “Better Than” serves as the first single from T2’s upcoming Double Cups & Taco Trucks album. He can calmly laugh about all of this now all because of a renewed focus on his own material.

“I thought it was a great record to start the rollout of all my new material, which I know is really going to help me solidify my sound and my place as an artist,” T2 told us. “Plus, Delo is one of the best, and one of the most underrated artists in the city. I love making and releasing music with people I am genuinely a fan of. When it comes together organically like this one did, you actually get excited about sharing the material. I have a line about The Suffers in the first verse that I love too.”

On “Better Than,” T2 riffs through a number of cloud-like dreams and aspirations. He wants to ask Ellen questions about global warming while setting the world on fire like The Suffers on Letterman. Trakksounds obliges him and DeLorean with his usual piano-boy melody and attaches aggressive drums and hand claps. “My concepts got them trippin', but one day they’ll get it,” T2 raps. There’s confession attached to his words, a snake-like wind-up that crushes it when any bit of excitement hitches within his voice. DeLo, his voice as tuned as a 454 engine bats clean-up. “I’m getting to it, swear to God I’m getting to it!”

Double Cups & Taco Trucks doesn’t have a set release date, but it varies heavily from what A South West Side Story accomplished. From melody to content, production to features, T2 leaned even more on TrakkSounds and local kingpin Chris Rockaway to further allocate wide, spacious sounds for him to sit behind the wheel on. It’s a worldly rap album, whereas A South West Side Story was insular and curated specifically for Houston and Houston proper. A story that took place within the city and is confined within the city has its own je ne sais quoi to it. Explain it to somebody not from Houston, and that person wouldn’t get it. Someone who lives here, breathes here and rides around here? They’d fall in love with it every single time.

T2 even speaks of his new project as if it's a living being. “It's about connection with people all over the world through music,” he says. “I wanted to show the ghetto side of the 'Ghetto Hippie' more on A South West Side. This is more the hippie side. The content drives much deeper than just codeine and Mexican food. 'Better Than' doesn’t even scratch the surface in that sense.” - Houston Press

Houston is a great place to be a music fan. The city's diverse crop of singers, players, producers and DJs never stop reppin for the H, whether its in front of 25 fans at a small club, onstage at a burgeoning festival or on the national TV stage.
That excitement makes for some great music from year to year. And 2016 was no exception. A handful of Houston acts offered up particularly intriguing, invigorating efforts. Here are 12 of the best.

1. "Miss Direction," Lyric Michelle: The year's best homegrown album was this tour-de-force from Michelle Umeh, who records as Lyric Michelle. It's a blazing reflection of every facet of her personality and the world at large: heartbreak and hope, anger and euphoria. She's a poet with a fierce flow.
2. "The Suffers," The Suffers: Kam Franklin and her merry band of men earned a much deserved 2016 breakout. The album that carried it was pop and soul and old-school shine - and the absolute best way to put Houston music in front of national ears.
3. "Children of the Sun," Guilla: A sci-fi rap opera commandeered by the terrifically talented Guilla, who delivers it all with a growling rasp of a voice. Assists from locals Say Girl Say and Kam Franklin added to the shine.


4. "A Picture Perfect Romance," Kemo for Emo: Houston pop-punk heroes returns after a decade with this rager. It's seven songs of unrelenting, aggressive energy. Welcome back, boys.
5. "Summer Love," Turnaways: More pop-punk from this newish quartet, who hook songs on big, singalong choruses and a wall of guitars. The vocals here are on point. These guys deserve to be huge.
6. "What Does 69 Mean?" Children of Pop: Gorgeous, glitchy opener "Manic" sets the tone for this groove-heavy collection, which mines '90s house for a bevy of standout tracks. Chase DeMaster, the man behind the curtain, could conjure something serious with the likes of Rihanna and Selena Gomez.

7. "A South West Side Story," T2 the Ghetto Hippie: An rap record about pressure and perseverance that could only come from Houston. T2 also employs smart features from GT Garza, Roosh, Nadia and the legendary Z-Ro.


8. "Dear Misery," Colonial Blue: Singer Stephanie Rice evokes Grace Slick and riot-girl charm on this trio's debut effort, which runs the gamut from folk and country to rock and pop.
9. "Trill Feels," Ingrid: Third Ward rapper Ingrid made her national debut with this adventurous EP, which hops back and forth from rap to R&B. She toured with Beyoncé much of the year, repping Htown all the way.

10. "No Big Deal," Ill Faded: DJ and producer Jose Gorbea has worked with the likes of Fat Tony and Guilla. He takes center stage as Ill Faded on "No Big Deal," surrounded by full-bodied production and atmospheric, pop-leaning grooves.

11. "Wild & Free," Annika Chambers: The blues diva returned with this blaze of songs after spending six months in federal prison for a military recruitment scam. It has vibrancy and verve - and she recounts her struggles on "Why Me."

12. "Lighten Up," Birthday Club: Airy alt-pop with terrific vocals, strong melodies and a retro slant. - Houston Chronicle

T2 the Ghetto Hippie has never been the kind of rapper who’s afraid to smile. Onstage, he’s a ball of energy, bouncing and swaggering and basking in the electric joy of his role as chief party-rocker. His rhymes are tight and his ambitions are lofty, but it’s T2’s happy-go-lucky defiance that people really respond to.

That’ll probably never change, and T2 is cool with it. But he wants you to know there’s a little more to his story, too.

“Everybody kind of expects from the Ghetto Hippie something wavy, friendly and very uplifting,” T2 says. “And that’s kind of my whole thing. Everybody knows the happy-go-lucky side. But it’s time we introduced the other side. I want to show the ghetto side of the hippie.”

T2’s new album, A South West Side Story, adds some rough-and-tumble shading to his smilin’, smoked-out persona. Backed by Trakksounds’s lush, synth production, there’s an unmistakable urgency to the rapper’s triplet-pattern rhymes as he describes growing up in a household with plenty of love but not quite enough dollars to keep serious trouble from seeming like a fair opportunity. When he was a kid, it was music that helped him keep his chin up and imagine different possibilities.

“My dad is English, and he’s very hippie,” T2 says. “Some of my first memories were sitting down and listening to the Beatles, Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd on his headphones with him after work. He put me on a lot of game, like classic rock and the whole lifestyle of One Love. He would show me stuff about MLK and Nelson Mandela. My dad’s white as hell, but he was all about equality.”

Equality is certainly a noble ideal — sometimes maybe a little too noble for the southwest Houston neighborhood where T2 grew up. On A South West Side Story, it sounds like a prideful place, but also the kind of place where hanging out aboveground wasn’t a day-to-day given. As a budding, biracial MC as obsessed with Bob Marley as with Big Moe, T2 didn’t quite fit in with his peers, either at school or in the local hip-hop scene. Or maybe he just didn’t want to.

“I was kind of expected to do one thing, the ‘Houston Rap’ thing — and I never wanted to do that,” he says. “I’ve always been goofy, and I was always that dude who was being more sarcastic than anybody else — talking about Full House while everybody else was talking about N.W.A. Listening to Eminem, it was finally like, ‘Cool, it’s OK to not do what anybody else is doing.’”

As his skills as a rapper blossomed, the studio began to seem like T2’s ticket to something bigger and better than the Southwest side. But to get there, he’d have to navigate the streets.

“Where I’m from, it just gets crazy, especially middle-school, high-school times,” the rapper says. “It’s a very fast life. You become a man very early in the Southwest. It’s a lot of struggle and a lot of dreamers. You see a lot of dreamers where the dream fizzled away.”

Telling that part of his story has been T2’s dream for quite a while. A South West Side Story gave him his chance. There’s plenty of comedy and braggadocio in its eight tracks, sure. But there’s tragedy, too. The semi-autobiographical skits between songs that form the album’s narrative make it clear that T2 has seen enough of the streets to know that money, respect and even love can be crushingly fleeting. Through the ups and downs, it was music that he clung to. If it was Eminem who helped give T2 the confidence to stand out, then A South West Side Story is his 8 Mile.

“It took awhile to get good enough to be able to be different, to portray the natural energy I have with my friends and in my daily life while performing in front of people,” the Ghetto Hippie says. “It took time, and now I’m there. I’ve found a way to show people who I am.”

The obvious single from the new album is “Swang On ‘Em,” a personal tale of pain and escape that largely encapsulates the record’s themes. T2 released a video for the track, featuring fellow Houston up-and-comer GT Garza, last week. But the album’s moody energy crackles most intensely on “Last Breath,” the nervy, go-for-broke finale to A South West Side Story’s narrative arc. It’s an ambiguous ending, closing with a single gunshot. As if to reassure us that he’s too slick to die just yet, though, T2 can’t help but return for an encore of “Hustletown,” last year’s radio breakthrough that finds the Ghetto Hippie trading verses with Z-Ro, Houston’s long-reigning King of the Ghetto.

It’s a fun, fitting capper for T2’s full-length summation of the people and the place that made him who he is today.

“This (record) is for the city,” he says. “The next project I’m doing, I’m trying to take it to California. I’m trying to take it to the world. But A South West Side Story is for Houston. It’s for the people who endured what I endured growing up. This year, we’re going to make some crazy shit happen.”

And for your friendly neighborhood Ghetto Hippie, that’s reason enough to smile.

A South West Side Story is streaming online now at ASouthWestSideStory.com. Physical copies will be available for purchase at BC Smoke Shop (7909 Westheimer and 10950 FM 1960 West) and Smoke Dreamz (6447 Richmond and 1201 Westheimer). - HoustonPress

Rapper Kyle Hubbard hopes to "take Houston hip-hop tropes and turn them on their head" in the new video for "This is Houston."
The clip features Hubbard, Lyric Michelle and T2 the Ghetto Hippie along with various familiar spots, including Frenchy's, The Breakfast Klub, Warehouse Live and The Safehouse.
I've got the premiere right here. See how many places you recognize. (And this is your explicit language warning.)

Hubbard explains:
Lyric, T2, and I don't fit into the mold that is so often associated with Houston hip-hop, despite the fact we have all three been active members in the city's hip-hop scene for years.
Lyric's hook is dripping with Houston hip-hop stereotypes, but that it is delivered by a female emcee known for her poetic lyrics gives the whole thing a tongue-in-cheek feel. The verses delivered by T2 and myself are more on the nose with the entire concept. The juxtaposition between the hook/production and the verses is all very deliberate. - Houston Chronicle

After another quick-hitter from Def Perception, T2 the Ghetto Hippie came out next and killed. Wearing his long locks in a samurai bun and his pants perilously low on his scrotum, T2 won over the crowd quickly, dancing across the stage with boundless energy to his woozy beats while he delivered a tight and aggressive flow. The Ghetto Hippie wasn't afraid to smile up there, and he had reason to: the highlight of his set was a closing rendition of "Hustletown," his recent collaboration with H-town icon Z-Ro. Put simply, T2 held his own with the King of the Ghetto. His upcoming album, Southwest Side Story, is going to convert a lot of skeptics. - Houston Press

Local artists show that positive rap and hip-hop aren't only for the Grammy awards and take it a step further by adding the infusion of art to music, creating a movement called Cloud Riders. - Houston Chronicle

HOUSTON, TEXAS – Our favorite music gal Ky Meyer is sharing some of her favorite music videos from Houston. She’s narrowed it down to her top three *drum roll please* and it looks like Roosh Williams, The Suffers and T2 The Ghetto Hippie made the cut.

T2 The Ghetto Hippie. Ky discovered him opening a show at Mango’s. Afterwards he gave her his mixtape and she’s been diggin’ on his music ever since. T2’s positive vibes and feel-good sounds are something you don’t want to sleep on. - NewsFix Houston

T2 (The Ghetto Hippie) is kicking the month off with a bang, enlisting Z-Ro The Mo City Don himself for new heat titled “Hustletown,” featuring production from Jon Z Productions and Dusty Rodez. Keep your eyes open for his upcoming project, A South West Side Story, set to be released later this year. - Hiphopweekly.com