'It Was Like Flies To Honey': 25 Years Of Rap-A-Lot Records

There might not be another strain of music more perpetually misunderstood than gangsta rap was in its golden age. Though most commonly associated with its superficial negativity — comically absurd slasher film violence (often directed at women) and vulgarity played for laughs that became more problematic as the music was embraced by the American mainstream and left the musicians vulnerable to rhetoric from parental groups and conservative outsiders — the first wave of street-minded hip-hop was also brimming with a more constructive energy.

Its greatest artists took deeply emotional looks at the criminal cultures and ghettos of America while explicitly indicting the systems that created them. For a brief moment, as both a vehicle for a revolutionary message and a source of economic independence, it felt like a legitimate threat to the status quo.

Perhaps no other label embodied this conscious rebel spirit better than Rap-A-Lot Records. Borne in 1987 out of founder J. Prince's used car lot as a way to keep his little brother off the street, the label quickly grew into a pillar of the Houston hip-hop community. Prince was the entrepreneur at the heart of the enterprise, assembling its flagship act, the Geto Boys, who put Southern hardcore rap on the map. Over the next two decades he operated independently within a system created by the major labels to benefit them, and wound up inventing a business model that both circumvented those corporations and used their muscle to his advantage.There might not be another strain of music more perpetually misunderstood than gangsta rap was in its golden age. Though most commonly associated with its superficial negativity — comically absurd slasher film violence (often directed at women) and vulgarity played for laughs that became more problematic as the music was embraced by the American mainstream and left the musicians vulnerable to rhetoric from parental groups and conservative outsiders — the first wave of street-minded hip-hop was also brimming with a more constructive energy.

Its greatest artists took deeply emotional looks at the criminal cultures and ghettos of America while explicitly indicting the systems that created them. For a brief moment, as both a vehicle for a revolutionary message and a source of economic independence, it felt like a legitimate threat to the status quo.

Perhaps no other label embodied this conscious rebel spirit better than Rap-A-Lot Records. Borne in 1987 out of founder J. Prince's used car lot as a way to keep his little brother off the street, the label quickly grew into a pillar of the Houston hip-hop community. Prince was the entrepreneur at the heart of the enterprise, assembling its flagship act, the Geto Boys, who put Southern hardcore rap on the map. Over the next two decades he operated independently within a system created by the major labels to benefit them, and wound up inventing a business model that both circumvented those corporations and used their muscle to his advantage.