From KUTX:
On Dec. 4, 1970, rapper Patrick Lamont Hawkins, better known as Fat Pat, was born in Houston.
Hawkins attended Sterling High in the same class as Beyoncé Knowles and by the 1990s was a foundational figure in DJ Screw’s Screwed Up Click alongside his older brother, the rapper Big Hawk. DJ Screw’s biographer Lance Scott Walker has called Fat Pat “the most complete artist” present when the SUC freestyle era began.
If Screw himself set the soundscape and the vibe, few did more than Fat Pat in defining the Screw tapes’ lyrical themes and feel, their creative focus on hyperlocal Houston slang and stories, and the documentary vibe of listening in to a party in full swing. The 1996 “No Drank” Screw tape is indicative of the style, which Fat Pat begins simply by looking around the room and greeting each of the people who are there with him, in that moment, about to trade off verses. One of the later Screw tapes featuring Fat Pat was 1997’s “It’s All Good,” celebrating his twenty-seventh birthday.
Around the same time, Fat Pat signed with Wreckshop Records as the SUC wave crested in Texas. His 1998 debut album “Ghetto Dreams” introduced one of Houston’s most well-known street anthems, “Tops Drop,” a raucous celebration of the custom car culture of Slabs.
Tragically, Fat Pat would not be around to enjoy the album’s success. He had gotten crosswise with a promoter who hadn’t paid him and was shot and killed just two weeks before the album’s release.
A posthumous video for “Tops Drop” acted as a memorial with its crawling slabs in procession a farewell to one of Houston’s greats. It was the first of many remembrances, as Fat Pat’s voice and memory reverberated in other belated features, like DJ DMD’s iconic “25 Lighters,” drawn from earlier studio sessions.
