K-RINO
K-Rino first appears exactly 29 pages into Houston Rap, Peter Beste and Lance Scott Walker's heavily illustrated, hardbound 2013 oral history that, immediately upon its release, became the essential document of local hip-hop culture. As he usually is, the rapper is already firing on all eight cylinders.
"Ever since black people came to this country from day one -- even before we came -- there was always a conspiracy, if you want to use that word, to destroy us," K-Rino says.
And that right there is what trips a lot of people up. Rappers just aren't supposed to talk about stuff like that, not when the politically minded likes of Public Enemy and Boogie Down Productions were selling respectable numbers of records, and certainly not today.
But back in those years is also when K-Rino (born Eric Kaiser) went from winning rap battles at Sterling High School to co-founding the South Park Coalition, Houston's first true and arguably still most important rap collective. The late DJ Screw was an SPC alumnus, as are Dope-E, Ganksta NIP, Klondike Kat, Z-Ro and probably five dozen others. (Among today's better-known Houston rappers, the Mo City Don is probably K-Rino's biggest booster.)
"There are stories about him and Ganksta NIP battling on street corners with like lightning and shyt," says Optimo Ram, also one of K-Rino's main local champions via his Internet portal Optimo Radio. "It's all dramatic."
By Ram's reckoning, between group SPC efforts and solos, K-Rino has released some 30 albums, from Comin' Out Doggin' in the late '80s through more recent works The Maven, Annihilation of the Evil Machine and last year's Plantation Rebellion; he released four albums in 2008 alone. But the way K-Rino delivers his messages is equally astonishing. He manipulates words, syllables and rhythms in ways that his would-be peers aren't even capable of.
"There's a song called "Perpetual Ascension" [that] gets harder and harder, and he's hitting you with these metaphors about being in outer space, punching you into another dimension," says Ram. "Nobody raps about stuff like that.
"He has [another] song called 'Two Sides to a Story,' where each bar is two different stories," he continues. "The first part of the bar is a story and the second part of the bar is a different story. So one's like about a spaceship, and one's about getting robbed in the hood."
In 2009, the Press' Shea Serrano called K-Rino "a genius who happens to be a rapper." But you'll never hear that from him. K-Rino may be the most gifted MC in Houston history, but he's easily the most humble as well. A devout Muslim who still lives in South Park, abstains from drink and drugs of any kind and, Ram says, loves little more than a good game of hoops, K-Rino shuns media attention and pretty much anything else that comes with stardom -- including, tragically perhaps, the big sales someone of his immense talents perhaps deserves.
"He's such a humble and good person," Ram says. "But if you measure him against anybody else, he's just way better when you break down what hip-hop is -- lyrics and the beat and all that kind of stuff. He is scientifically better than anybody. There's nothing like it." [Note: this section has been modified after original publication to correct Ram's name and the titles of "Perpetual Ascension" and Comin' Out Doggin'.]
