Candy Paint Goes Official: How Slab Culture Became Houston's Brand in One September

For most of its history, Houston's slab culture lived on the street. Candy paint, swangas poking past the fenders, trunks popped open with neon signs and speakers, rolling slow down Houston streets on a Sunday. It was loved in the neighborhoods that built it and, too often, misunderstood by everyone else. In the space of about three weeks this fall, that changed in a very public way.

On Aug. 25, the Houston Texans revealed a uniform with a candy paint finish on the helmet and a chrome facemask built as an homage to Houston's car culture. On Sept. 5, the University of Houston football team ran onto its home field behind a red slab on swangas. And on Sept. 16, in a garage in Burbank, California's governor signed a bill putting the word Lowrider on a state license plate.

Different cities, different cultures, same message: the custom car scenes that grew up in Black and Latino neighborhoods are now the official identity of the places that once treated them as a nuisance.

The most Houston uniform

The Texans' new HOUSTON/US uniform, part of the NFL and Nike Rivalries program, is built around three things the team calls uniquely Houston: the blue and white street name tiles set into the city's sidewalks, the stenciled lettering of the city's famous "Be Someone" bridge, and custom car culture. The team's release spelled the car details out. The new Liberty White helmet is "polished with a candy paint inspired finish." The facemask, the team wrote, is "an homage to Houston's car culture," finished in chrome H-Town Blue. The sleeve, collar and pant stripes carry a candy paint finish too.

"This is the most Houston uniform that will ever grace the gridiron," Doug Vosik, the Texans' senior vice president and chief marketing officer, said in the release. Team chair Cal McNair, a native Houstonian, said he hoped fans would take pride "in the fact that it is so unique to our city."

The uniform debuts on Thursday Night Football against the Indianapolis Colts on Nov. 19. Merchandise went on sale Sept. 1, and the team took its mobile shop truck out to sell it on Sept. 5, the same day UH played its opener.

A slab leads the Coogs out

That opener is the moment that went national. The Cougars came out of the tunnel behind a candy red vintage Cadillac on swangas, and ESPN's Pat McAfee spent part of his show on it. "I love what happened down in Houston," McAfee said, as PaperCity reported, adding, "Houston's always seemingly ahead of everybody else with everything."

Bun B, the Houston rap legend and Trill Burgers owner, told PaperCity's Chris Baldwin he had never seen anything like it. "We have different car cultures around the country, but I don't know of any university that's done this," he said. "To actually have a slab drive out onto the field, leading the team onto the field, that's an actually new thing." He predicted other programs would try to copy it.

Lil' Keke, one of the rappers most associated with slab culture and a longtime collaborator of DJ Screw, kept it short. "That's something," he told PaperCity. "That's a beautiful thing there."

Why it fits

Bun B pointed out something that outsiders miss. "The University of Houston is set dead center in the middle of the Third Ward," he told PaperCity. "So a lot of that slab culture is dominant in the immediate area." A student could see a slab riding through the neighborhood without leaving the edge of campus.

He also explained the rims, which tie the whole thing together. Swangas trace to the mid-1980s, he said, when the original wire rims came out. "Everybody was really drawn to the '84 (rims). But there was a very limited production of that rim," Bun B said. "They're almost impossible to get now." The swangas on UH's Cadillac, he noted, were newer rims made by a local company.

And he made the point that slab is two things at once. "Slab is not only the car, but the street," he told PaperCity. "If you drove down Westheimer Street, or any street in Houston, you're driving down the slab."

It did not start this year

To be fair, Houston's pro teams have been flirting with slab culture for a while, as PaperCity laid out. Bun B worked with the Astros on a hat with a spinning element meant to represent swangas, and the Astros once made a Bun B bobblehead complete with a slab. The Rockets' Ashtray hat nods to the clean interiors of slabs, and Lil' Keke regularly promotes the team. The Texans did a DJ Screw and slab merch drop last year, according to PaperCity, and Bun B said he was working with the Texans and the Buffalo Bills on a limited collaboration for the season opener.

What is different now is scale. A merch drop is a nod. A candy paint helmet worn on Thursday Night Football and a slab rolling onto a college field in front of a national TV audience are statements.

Meanwhile in California

The same month, California made its own statement. On Sept. 16, Gov. Gavin Newsom visited Jay Leno's Garage in Burbank and signed AB 2541, which creates a Lowrider specialized license plate, along with Jay Leno's Law, a narrow smog exemption for some 1976 to 1985 collector cars. The governor's office described lowriders as "timeless masterpieces that connect art, activism, and cultural identity."

Assemblymember Mark González of Los Angeles, the bill's author, said it plainly in the governor's release. "Lowriding is more than a car; it is cultura, it is art, it's family, and it is a powerful expression of Chicano and Latino pride," he said. He added that "too often, lowriders were treated as a problem to be policed instead of a culture to be celebrated."

The governor's office went further, acknowledging that for decades, fines, restrictions and local cruising bans targeted the lowrider community. Coming from a state government, that is a remarkable sentence.

The catch

Official embrace is not the same as ownership. A helmet finish and a pregame entrance are marketing, and marketing can borrow a look without giving anything back to the people who created it. Even Bun B, who loved the UH entrance, pointed out that driving a slab with long swangas through a stadium tunnel takes real experience, because you have to know exactly how far those wheels poke out.

Bun B's comments to PaperCity carried a quiet warning about exactly that. He called the UH entrance "a great representation of how slab culture is a positive thing in the city of Houston," then added: "A lot times these things can be misrepresented by people who aren't really tied in enough to really understand what it truly represents."

That is the test for everything that came out of this September. Candy paint on a helmet is a tribute if the people who invented the look are part of it, and a costume if they are not. For now, with Bun B and Lil' Keke cheering and a lowrider plate carrying the words of the people who fought cruising bans, it reads like the first kind. Houston and Los Angeles spent decades building these cultures from the curb up. This fall, the institutions finally came to them.