Last yer, the rapper born Bernard Freeman also teamed with New Era for a Houston hat collection, and in 2015 he served as a lecturer of Hip-Hop and Religion at Rice University. In addition to Bun’s prolific rap career, the 44-year-old rapper is also the host of Trill Meals cooking show. This week, the veteran rapper linked with a couple of Houston’s finest, Lil Keke and Slim Thug, for the album’s first single, “Knowhatimsayin.” With hard snares and synths blaring over the instrumental, Bun, Don Ke and Slim Thug salute Houston’s culture of candy paint and old school slabs. For a decade now, Texas has too.Port Arthur, TX native Bun B is prepping his forthcoming album Return of the Trill. Slim may never have to record another album in his life, but he’ll forever have his outlier, the album that launched him into Beyoncé and Gwen Stefani collaborations and trips overseas to see Nigo stunt with a platinum Rolls Royce. When Williams first met Slim, he remarked that he was already a millionaire before a major rap deal. Whatever edge Williams served up with the monolithic kick drums of “Already Platinum” and “Click Clack,” he used them as a precursor for Clipse’s 2006 classic, Hell Hath No Fury. That’s the version noted culture critic Chris Ryan remarked in his 2005 SPIN review as the album that brought “the beast” out of Pharrell. On it, Pharrell attempted his best to be a Texas rap producer and succeeded in some spaces. Most Slim Thug fans will openly tell him that they loved the heavily bootlegged version of Already Platinum as opposed to the retail version. What Already Platinum challenged Slim to do was match the Neptunes’ pop sound by taking risks, and in turn, it asked the Neptunes to escape their own idea of space and settle inside of Houston’s smoggy, drum-heavy, slab-riding, and slow-contorting musical gumbo.
The trick was trying to match Slim’s voice and Texas background with the shimmer and pop gloss of Chad Hugo and Pharrell Williams’ beats. The marriage between Slim Thug and the Neptunes lasted for one album, and like a marriage, it was beautiful at times and uneven at others. Slim, always able to command a crowd, has a guttural, tumescent rap drawl that sounded like it was meant to hand down Supreme Court decisions, much less raps about being obscenely rich and oblivious to haters and scandalous women alike.
What separated Jones and Paul Wall from Slim were their voices. When “Still Tippin” exploded in 2004 (the final version with Paul Wall, Slim, and Mike Jones), Houston artists were getting deals as if they had a direct line to an A&R and a label. Music labels often cash in on a trend by gobbling up all of the talent condensed inside its parameters as if they were a pair of retro Jordans released on any given Saturday. “ Already Platinum is either my first or second favorite album,” Slim says in the documentary.
Already Platinum was the outlier, one that Slim Thug a near decade later is proud of. If you listened to any other Houston rap tape from 2005, all of them save for one stuck to the laid-back, chunky flip of drum patterns and grooving bass lines. Houston artists, thanks to the local mixtape economy, rarely needed to take risks. But none of them held the world’s collective attention as Already Platinum did in July 2005. To this day, Slim Thug’s retail albums haven’t touched the same wave that his Swishahouse-era and Boss Hogg Outlawz tapes have. He’s lamenting in the latter half of the 38-minute clip that he should have released Boss of All Bosses, his second album, in 2005 as opposed to Already Platinum in the interest of staying true to the Houston sound that was atomic in 2005. In the second part of his Hogg Life documentary, Slim Thug sits in front of a desk, his well-manicured backyard in the background. “Slim Thug will never make another album like Already Platinum.”
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