I’d fallen for Houston early. The slow terror of Geto Boys videos on “Yo! MTV Raps” was enthralling. In college, I’d play UGK’s smooth “Pocket Full of Stones” and “Front, Back & Side to Side” on my 3 a.m. radio show. (Jive, the group’s label, had a very aggressive college promotions rep — thank you, whoever you were.) In 2000, when I discovered Napster, I was working at 360hiphop.com, Russell Simmons’s first web start-up, in a loft office above a Chelsea furniture store. Every morning I would check to see if any new blurry, slow, gloomy, chopped-and-screwed remixes by DJ Screw had popped up on the global pirate underground. (Years later, I found a guy on eBay selling a stack of DVD-Rs with essentially the complete Screw catalog for $100 or so.) Later, when I shared an office at BET.com with the Blackspot, who’d written some of the essential Vibe cover stories of the 1990s, we’d kill hours listening to Big Moe, and I’d use my lunch break to get money orders from the post office to buy CDs from his label, Wreckshop Records, because it wouldn’t take checks.

Houston was both accessible and obscure, a vibrant scene that felt largely cut off from the rest of the country. At least for the first part of the 2000s, it wasn’t an obsession many shared. In 2004, I flew to the South by Southwest conference in Austin, Tex., in hopes of meeting with Bun B. I tracked him down and explained what I wanted to do, and later that year I returned to Texas to write a profile of him for XXL, the mainstream hip-hop magazine most open to Southern rap. He spoke about his struggles with alcohol during his partner’s incarceration, and of the seemingly impossible burden of keeping the UGK ship afloat. At the end of our day together, he drove to a one-room screen-printing shack where he picked up a fresh batch of “Free Pimp C!” T-shirts. I brought one home.

Houston’s leisurely pace was intoxicating, its expanse lyrical — you could lose whole nights cruising around the Loop listening to 97.9 The Box. Hip-hop is car music pretty much everywhere, but with its seeping, oozing sound, Houston was a city where driving slowly made much more sense than speeding.

In 2005, in the wake of the success of “Still Tippin’,” the city’s slurry breakthrough single, by Mike Jones, Slim Thug and Paul Wall — as well as hits like Lil’ Flip’s “Game Over (Flip),” Paul Wall’s “Sittin’ Sidewayz” and Slim Thug’s “Like a Boss” — I spent one week crisscrossing the city for Spin magazine, talking to Paul Wall in a low-lit studio anteroom, Chingo Bling in a Mexican-themed restaurant, Slim Thug folded into the couch in my room at the Hotel Derek while an S.U.V. full of women waited for him downstairs. I spent one night watching dozens of unsigned rappers angle for attention at “Damage Control,” Matt Sonzala and DJ Chill’s public-access radio show and de facto billboard of the city’s rising talent.

The following year, I finally got to Port Arthur — about an hour and a half east of Houston — to write the first profile of Pimp C after his four years in jail. We’d exchanged letters when I was writing about Bun B: He wrote exuberant and detailed missives in meticulous all-caps. In person he was a dynamo. Just two weeks out of jail, and he was already driving around in a Bentley. But flash was just one side of him: Few artists have ever spoken so frankly with me about personal regret and shame. Later that year, I spoke with Bun B for The Believer, to this day one of the most insightful and detailed interviews I’ve ever conducted, full of warm personal details and Paris Review-like insights on craft.

All this time, Houston had remained self-sufficient, resilient and open-armed but a little skeptical. And while it was grateful, it also had been victim to fickleness before, and was prepared to go through it again.