It wasn’t too long ago That Mexican Outta Texas was playing to modest crowds during his stops in Austin.
Last year, the Texas rapper, better known as OT, played small South by Southwest shows at Vaquero Taquero and Parish. He had some traction. The fans who showed up were enthused, holding up their phone lights to the stage.
This time around, OT will perform at the city's flagship music festival, standing over a much larger audience and giving Austin its best look yet at the young, rising artist who is still shuffling through his identity. Large numbers of Austin City Limits Music Festival attendees will know the lyrics to songs like “ Johnny Dang ,” a Billboard Hot 100 hit last summer that showcased OT’s Lone Star twang, punctual flow, and cowboy hat. They may also know other songs from the two albums the 25-year-old has released in just over a year.
For OT, the popular attention makes sense. In contemporary America, in rap, ample admiration is afforded to those who embrace their origins.
“Whenever f***ing Biggie and Tupac and all them were coming out and they were talking about the West Coast, the East Coast. They banging hard for where they’re from in the world. And people loved it,” he said. “I’m just from the South.”
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Becoming a 'Texas Meskin'
In his lyrics and interviews, Virgil René Gazca represents his hometown of Bay City, Texas, where he was born in 1999 into a difficult childhood. He lost his mother at the age of 8, visited his father in a prison cell for many years, and jumped around between family members' homes.
He remembers rapping for his grandmother as a young child and later performing over Ghetto Boys tracks for his father and his friends. He counts Lil Wayne and 50 Cent as two of his biggest influences and traces his style, in part, to the Houston tradition of UGK and DJ Screw (whose name is tattooed on his neck).
OT even spent a few of his years of adolescence in the Austin area, living in Round Rock beginning in middle school and attending Stony Point High School before trouble, he said, got him kicked out. He finished his schooling at Round Rock ISD’s alternative Success High School.
It was in the linguistic back-and-forth between friends in Austin that Gazca got the stage name OT. Later, it became That Mexican OT. His venues during that time were “lunch tables,” he said.
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OT’s earliest songs on YouTube are Marshalls-brand examples of gangster rap: the material tolerably spun and assembled; the colors, undefined, already a bit gaudish and outdated.
Over time, his display pivoted to more closely approximate the “Mexican” part of his moniker. He incorporated his talent for rolled-R’s and more frequent code-switches to “loco,” “baboso” and “vato” into his flow. His squad began, more often, to wave the tri-colored flag behind him.
But even this was bound to feel generic. It took a variation of this, a style OT labeled “Texas Meskin,” to distinguish him. He broke it to a broader audience in a viral clip that showed him in a mullet and cowboy hat spitting lines from “Johnny Dang” while holding a chicken. His southern drawl hung slow over the verdant landscape. In the backdrop, a rider guided his horse in a fine-step prance. The image of rural Southeast Texas, even if unstated, was exotic to some, likable to all, and, most importantly, consumable.
OT leaned into that image, releasing songs like “Cowboy in a Escalade,” “Cowboy Killer” and “Bull Riding” in his two most recent albums, flaunting rodeos and ranches in his music videos. For the interview circuit, he brought stories of coked-up fishing and helicopter hog hunting. In New York studios, he explained his habit of packing heat, revealing a rationale of bravado and image, but also of Texan identity. He tattooed his home state’s prideful, if imagined, insularity onto his public image. “Hell no, I’m Texan,” he told the bro-medy podcasters known as Flagrant when they asked if he wanted to travel Europe.
In that same interview, he reflected on how turning to his “authentic” self helped attract popular attention. This, he told the Statesman, puts him in contrast to other artists who are riding the current cowboy wave in imitation. They weren’t doing it before.
"You doing that s*** because it look cool, because I make it look cool,” he said, stopping himself short of listing Beyoncé as one of "those artists.” (“She just gave me a shoutout ,” he said.)
In his interviews as in his music, OT appears as a young artist trying out different personas. Sometimes he talks with a calm, stoned jolliness. When he is serious, as he was at times in his conversation with the Statesman, his eyes narrow and he affirms a desire for respect, acquiescence. Many, he said repeatedly, have wronged him over the past years.
And, like most 25-year-olds, he can find himself ensnared in the spindly web of “authenticity,” its parameters advantageous, then confining. He is certain (“I’m Virgil till I die. No, I can’t be nobody other,” he says in the declarative track “02.02.99” from his most recent album “Texas Technician”), until he isn’t (telling the Statesman That Mexican OT is one of “a bunch of different characters” he inhabits.)
Rap, it's only the start of it
OT's newfound popularity has spurred a heavy schedule of touring. In many ways, the rapper said he's enjoyed the opportunity to create memories because "I don’t have many memories with people ... even the ones that wouldn't be meaningful to anybody else."
But the artist has expressed fatigue and a desire to retire to “cowboy life” back in Southeast Texas. Not immediately, but also not too far down the line. It’d be a lot of work, he told the Statesman, but also an homage to the uncles and male cousins in his family he saw as “very righteous and very respectable.”
Until then, he is certain he wants to try new sounds. He’s increasingly incorporated cumbia and Mexican regional samples into his tracks. This spring, he debuted a mariachi-backed version of his song “Cowboy in a Escalade” for Spotify, featuring somber, almost eerie, violin melodies that produce a sense of heartbrokenness not found in the tune’s album version. He has spoken of his desire to incorporate more blues and country sounds into his music. He’s wondered if he can approximate the rap-rock artists like Limp Bizkit, Audioslave, and Rage against the Machine that he favored in his youth.
“I just do rap music because I happen to be good at it,” he said. Some time in the studio and, "I could do anything."
This article originally appeared on Austin American-Statesman: 'I'm just from the South': Texas rapper That Mexican OT brings 'authentic' style to ACL
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