Home/Rappers/Male/Trinity Garden Cartel

Trinity Garden Cartel

Trinity Garden Cartel made one of the most notorious album covers in rap history, charted with it, and have been recording out of northeast Houston since 1992.

Origins in Trinity Gardens

The group formed in 1992 and takes its name from Trinity Gardens, a neighbourhood in northeast Houston. The current line-up is D, Gangsta Gee and Herb Mann, with Ice Water Slaughter, Sinister Sam and X-Man among earlier members.

Don't Blame It On Da Music

Released on Rap-A-Lot in 1994, it reached number seventy-five on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart. Its cover was provocative enough that Complex later included it in a survey of the most scandalous rap album covers ever released, and the record is still most often discussed in those terms rather than musical ones.

Album discography

The Ghetto My Hood (1992), Don't Blame It On Da Music (1994), Straight Texas Hoodlum (1995), Game Done Changed (1995), Da Saga Continues (1996), I Love N.I.G.G.A.Z. (1997) and I'd Rather Be Judged by 12 Than Carried by 6 (1999).

Labels

They released through Rap-A-Lot and Priority in the mid 1990s and later through their own Cartel Records and Revolution Records. Like most Houston groups of the period, the independent phase lasted considerably longer than the major-distributed one.

What they are known for musically

Blunt Southern gangsta rap with none of the horror-derived theatricality that other Rap-A-Lot acts leaned on. The writing is neighbourhood-specific and delivered straight, and the titles do most of the provocation.

Position in Houston history

Northeast Houston is under-represented in the standard account of the city's rap history, which runs through the Fifth Ward and South Park. Trinity Gardens had its own scene and Trinity Garden Cartel is the group that documented it.

The cover

The 1994 artwork was provocative enough that it was still being written about two decades later, when Complex placed it in a survey of the most scandalous rap album covers ever released. Rap-A-Lot had form here — the Geto Boys' hospital photograph was three years earlier — and provocation as marketing was clearly understood at the label.

Charting on Rap-A-Lot

Don't Blame It On Da Music reaching seventy-five on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart put them among the label's more successful non-Geto Boys acts of the period, and it came with Priority distribution behind it.

Going independent

After the Rap-A-Lot and Priority years they moved to their own Cartel Records and Revolution Records and kept releasing through the late 1990s at roughly an album a year. The output rate is high and almost entirely undocumented outside Texas.

Trinity Gardens

Northeast Houston barely appears in the standard history of the city's rap. Street Military and KB Da Kidnappa came from the same area, and the oral histories that do cover it treat Trinity Gardens as a scene in its own right rather than an offshoot of South Park or the Fifth Ward.