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Choice

Choice was the first woman signed to Rap-A-Lot Records, and made one of the earliest sexually explicit rap albums by a female artist — four years before Hard Core, from Houston rather than New York, and to a fraction of the attention.

Early life and origins in Houston

She emerged from the same Fifth Ward Houston scene that produced the Geto Boys, at a point when Rap-A-Lot was the only label in the city with national distribution and no women on its roster at all.

The Big Payback

Released in 1990, it is a response record in the most literal sense — explicitly answering the sexual content of the male Rap-A-Lot catalogue on the same terms. It was controversial locally and largely ignored nationally, and it predates the wave of explicit female rap that arrived mid-decade.

What she is known for

Being early. The argument that women could write about sex in rap as directly as men was being made in Houston in 1990, and the artists who won that argument commercially were working in New York six years later. Her catalogue is small and hard to find, and her position in the timeline is the reason she is worth documenting.

Legacy in Houston

She remains a footnote in most accounts of Rap-A-Lot, which is a fair description of her commercial impact and an unfair one of her significance. The label's history is almost entirely told through its male artists.

Rap-A-Lot in 1990

The label was four years old, had just put the Geto Boys into a national distribution fight over content, and had no women on its roster. Signing Choice was a commercial decision about an obvious gap rather than an ideological one, and the record she made was pointed enough that the label appears to have been surprised by it.

Answering the men on their own terms

The Big Payback is structured as a direct response to the sexual content of male rap, including the label's own catalogue. Where later explicit female rap was written as assertion, hers was written as retort — which is a different and in some ways sharper proposition, and one reason it made people uncomfortable locally.

Why the record is hard to find

It was never meaningfully reissued, is patchily available on streaming, and sits outside the standard Houston rap narrative that runs from the Geto Boys through DJ Screw to the 2005 wave. Documenting it is most of the point of this page.

Place in the timeline

1990 in Houston is six years before Hard Core in New York. That does not make her more influential — influence requires an audience, and she never had one at scale — but it does make the standard account of when explicit female rap began wrong by some margin.