Pimp C

Chad Lamont Butler was born on the twenty-ninth of December 1973 at Crosby, Texas, the son of Charles Butler — a small-town Texas musician and bar manager — and Weslyn Butler. He was raised at Port Arthur, Texas, after his parents separated in his early childhood. He attended the Lincoln High School in Port Arthur and met the local rapper Bernard Freeman — subsequently known as Bun B — at Lincoln High School in 1987. The two formed the duo UGK — Underground Kingz — in 1987 at fourteen.

They signed with the local Houston label Bigtyme Recordz in 1991 and released the album The Southern Way in March 1992. The album sold modestly within Texas and brought the duo to the attention of Jive Records, with whom they signed in 1992. They released across the following decade the albums Too Hard to Swallow (1992), Super Tight... (1994), Ridin' Dirty (1996) — widely regarded as one of the principal Southern hip-hop albums of the 1990s — and Underground Kingz (2007).

The 1996 album Ridin' Dirty — produced almost entirely by Pimp C at his Port Arthur home studio — sold over five hundred thousand copies without significant commercial-radio support and became one of the principal documents of the late-1990s Southern hip-hop production aesthetic. The album was the foundational stylistic source of the chopped-and-screwed crossover of the early 2000s and of the broader Southern commercial hip-hop economy of the post-2000 period.

Pimp C contributed across the same period the production and feature-vocal performances to Jay-Z's Big Pimpin' (1999), Three 6 Mafia's Sippin' on Some Syrup (2000) and Drake's Successful (2009) — the latter posthumously.

He was sentenced in 2002 to eight years at the Texas Department of Criminal Justice for aggravated assault. He served four years to 2005.

He was found unresponsive at the Mondrian Hotel in West Hollywood on the fourth of December 2007 of accidental codeine-and-sleep-apnea complications. He was thirty-three.

He is honored here as the co-founder of UGK and the principal Southern producer of his generation.