Slab (n.)
Houston term for a custom car, traditionally a big American sedan like a Cadillac, Lincoln or Buick, with candy paint, "swangas" (wire wheels with spokes that poke far out from the hub), a popped trunk with a sign or display, and a loud system. It's usually said to stand for "Slow, Loud And Bangin'."
Every car scene has a sound. In Houston the sound came first. Before slabs were a national image, there was DJ Screw in his house on the south side, taking records and slowing them down until the vocals dragged and the bass got heavy and syrupy. If you've ever wondered why a Houston car rolls the way it does, start there.
DJ Screw and the gray tapes
Robert Earl Davis Jr., DJ Screw, started making mixtapes in the early 1990s. His method was simple to describe and hard to copy: pitch records way down, then "chop" them by cutting back and forth between two copies so phrases stutter and repeat. People bought his tapes straight from him, often custom mixes on blank gray cassettes, and they spread across the city through cars more than radio.
The tempo matters. A screwed song sounds wrong at highway speed. It sounds right at the speed of a slab crawling down MLK or Cullen on a Sunday. The music and the driving fit each other, and that's not an accident people invented later. It's how the tapes were used.
Screw also built a crew around him, the Screwed Up Click, with rappers like Big Moe, Fat Pat, Lil' Keke, Big Hawk and E.S.G. He died in November 2000 at 29. The tapes didn't stop. Michael "5000" Watts and the Swishahouse crew on the north side pushed their own slowed-down mixes, and "chopped and screwed" became a standard version that labels would release alongside regular albums.
What makes a slab
Swangas. The wheel is the signature. Swangas, also called "elbows" or "84s," are wire wheels whose spokes stick out well past the tire. The name "84s" comes from the wheel option on 1983-84 Cadillac Eldorados that the style grew out of. Usually they're wrapped in Vogue tires with that thin gold stripe on the sidewall.
Candy paint. Deep, layered paint with a glow to it. It costs real money and takes real skill, and it's meant to be seen in the sun.
The trunk. A slab trunk pops open and stays up, showing off a sign, neon, the car owner's name, or a speaker wall. "Pop trunk" is as much a part of the vocabulary as anything on the outside.
The fifth wheel. A spare wheel mounted on the back bumper in a chrome kit, called a fifth wheel or continental kit, is another classic touch.
When the rest of the country heard it
Houston rappers had been talking about slabs for a decade before 2004 and 2005, when Mike Jones's "Still Tippin'" with Slim Thug and Paul Wall, and then Paul Wall's own records, put candy paint and swangas on national TV. UGK, out of Port Arthur, had been the Gulf Coast's touchstone the whole time. Bun B and Pimp C's "Int'l Players Anthem" with OutKast in 2007 is still one of the great rolling records.
How it compares
A slab is a cousin of the Oakland scraper and a world apart from the hydraulic lowrider. All three are about being seen at low speed. The scraper leans on rims and attitude, the lowrider on craftsmanship and club structure, and the slab on paint, poke, and that trunk. Houston's own contribution is the tempo. You can hear a slab coming before you can see it, and it'll be moving slow.
Where to start listening
Start with any DJ Screw tape from the mid-1990s, then UGK's Ridin' Dirty (1996), then the Swishahouse era. Play it in the car, not on a laptop. That's the whole point. If your system can't hold that low end together, our Subwoofer Science piece explains why.