STILL AIN NUN BIGGER

In the shadow of Houston, a Southern rap mecca, is Dallas: an underdog hip-hop city that has rarely gotten its due. One of the first Dallas rappers to get a buzz was the D.O.C., who broke out in the late ’80s with the homegrown Fila Fresh Crew, then hit the road to L.A., assisting with N.W.A. and the rise of Death Row. In the mid-aughts through the early 2010s, the Dallas boogie scene popped—a grassroots movement of slow-mo club-rap jams (Lil Wil’s “My Dougie,” Treal Lee and Prince Rick’s “Mr. Hit That,” The Party Boyz’s “Flex”) with infinite loose-limbed dances to match. It launched a few countrywide grade-school dance classics, but immortal hip-wobbling moves like the Dougie and Ricky Bobby became ingrained in pop culture through their California offshoots.

Compared to Houston, Dallas lacked the musical infrastructure, reach, and industry co-signs. But by the mid-2010s, this seemed to be changing, when Mo3 went on a run of raw, melodic ballads that merged Boosie-ish blues with the scenic, leisurely Dallas reality rap of the 2000s (Big Tuck, Big Chief, etc.)—perfect to be blasted out of a whip with a fresh coat of candy paint. But in 2020, fresh off “Broken Love,” a multi-platinum collab with Kevin Gates, he was murdered on a freeway in Dallas. His posthumous album Shottaz 4 Eva hit the charts, but the moment felt cut short.

Recently, a wave of Dallas street rappers have emerged on a mission to finally take the city’s music mainstream. Unified under the hashtag #NewDallas, they’re combining bits of regional scenes of the past and present into a flood of rags-to-riches stories a lot like the ones up and down HeadHuncho Amir’s STILL AIN NUN BIGGER. The smooth-talker’s tape is the latest in a string of noisemaking full-lengths of the city—joining Zillionaire Doe’s D Boi Dreams, released in January, and Montana 700’s 700 Reasons, in February—where the backstory on how the scene reached this point is more interesting than the music itself.

Coming on the heels of October’s AIN NUN BIGGER, STILL AIN NUN BIGGER (hopefully he goes the Rich Homie Quan route with the mixtape titles) is easy-to-listen-to, no-frills motivation rap. You can visualize it inoffensively playing at a club with a bottle service or soundtracking college football training montages—the music video for the tape’s generic hometown anthem “Motivate the City” leans into that by actually including footage from an SMU football practice. Evoking Rick Ross’ underdeveloped brand of boss rap, which he made before cranking up the theater on Deeper Than Rap, Amir is heavy on unimaginative tales of steak dinners, Zoom meetings, and getting chauffeured around in black SUVs; obligatory dreams of riding in private jets and making one billion dollars; and life coach tips: “My advice to these young niggas learn how to save,” he raps on “Blow.” The point is to present himself as a Dallas boy who beat the odds and turned himself into a young rap mogul, which can make for exciting rap—but only if the details pop.

Unfortunately, Amir’s writing is undercooked and non-specific. He lacks the finesse of other get-money motivation rappers; he doesn’t set scenes like Jeezy, nor is he a hall-of-fame embellisher like Bossman Dlow. He relies on rap clichés and skimps on storytelling granularities. On “Bring to the Table,” he goes, “Every time I’m out to eat I’m known to leave a tip,” and the lyric says jack shit about him. How much is the tip? A standard 20%? Something lavish and unreal? On “BBTN,” he tells a girl his schedule is booked up with meetings, but doesn’t give us any info about those meetings. He doesn’t take these opportunities to be funny, or to otherwise be direct and realistic. It might seem like nitpicking, but those particulars are where you get to know a rapper.

Amir is better at setting a specific mood: one of hard-earned triumphs. He perpetually sounds like the newly wise narrator at the end of a sports movie, whether he’s poppin’ bottles on project standout “Barry Sanders” or on a g-funk cruise with Montana 700 on “Stay Down.” His worn voice and half-speed flow does a lot of the emotional heavy lifting. On the intro “3000,” over one of those spaghetti western beats I associate with fellow Dallas heavy hitter BigXthaPlug, he celebrates inking a record deal. Yeah, he’s overestimating how much I want to hear about his negotiation tactics and splits (save it for the DJ Vlad interview), but you can tell how much being one of the Dallas rappers to break through the glass ceiling means to him. That balance between hard life and victory is in the tape’s best music, like when he imagines what his grandmother’s face might look like if she saw his bank account on the bouncy “Booked Up” or when, among the vintage trap flourishes and horns of “Hands On,” he recalls bonding with his dad over therapy.

This kind of emotional complexity makes Amir feel like a real human, rather than just a rapper of the moment repeating Southern hip-hop platitudes. But it doesn’t happen enough on STILL AIN NUN BIGGER to elevate it from a random roundup of popular regional rap sounds—Flint shit-talk, South Florida stunting, rumbling Memphis radio hits—to a release with a distinctive identity. In general, that’s the issue with the #NewDallas sound. It’s hard to pinpoint what exactly is so Dallas about the music other than the constant shout outs to their hometown: the tempos are slow but not too slow; it’s for the club, but not the kind of stuff you’d want to dance to. The result is music that could be from any city in the South, where the hashtag feels more important than the mixtape.