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Don't Be Like Your Daddy is a memoir about the unintended consequences of raising a generation of Black boys in fear that they would become failed Black men and about what that fear built. It traces the journey and the tools used to escape pending failure: the striving, the performance, the identities assembled in the shadow of a threat.

It examines when those tools and that journey became maladaptive — when the escape route became its own kind of trap. And it arrives at the question a therapist once asked that cracked everything open: who are you outside of calling, purpose, and roles? 

The book is the work of finding out.

 Rap-A-Lot Records, U.G.K. (Pimp C and Bun B), Paul Wall, Beyonce, Chamillionaire and Scarface are all names synonymous with contemporary hip-hop. And they have one thing in common: Houston. Long before the country came to know the chopped and screwed style of rap from the Bayou City in the late 1990s, hip-hop in Houston grew steadily and produced some of the most prolific independent artists in the industry. With early roots in jazz, blues, R&B and zydeco, Houston hip-hop evolved not only as a musical form but also as a cultural movement. Join Maco L. Faniel as he uncovers the early years of Houston hip-hop from the music to the culture it inspired.