Hitmaker Kal Banx is fusing Dallas sounds with West Coast hip-hop

Hitmaker Kal Banx is fusing Dallas sounds with West Coast hip-hop.
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Kal Banx spent his 30th birthday in his hometown last October.
The date coincided with rapper Isaiah Rashad’s tour stop at the South Side Ballroom in Dallas. Banx handled production for nearly every song on Rashad’s critically acclaimed 2021 album, The House Is Burning, and the two bonded during the collaboration process.
“My best friend Kal Banx is from Dallas,” Rashad yelled into the microphone before presenting Banx with a birthday cake that the beatmaker eventually heaved into the rowdy crowd.
Banx lives in Los Angeles, where he has made a name for himself as one of hip-hop’s most sought-after producers. He split his childhood between Duncanville and Oak Cliff. And five years after being pulled away from Texas by the West Coast rap label Top Dawg Entertainment (often referred to as TDE), which is famously home to Kendrick Lamar, he realized he had begun to miss his home state.
“I just feel like being out here I lost a lot of time with my people, friends and family,” Banx says. “And now Dallas is growing and blossoming. There’s a lot more cool stuff that I’m into that’s out there.”
But for all the nostalgia and excitement Dallas offers, Banx is likely to stay in Los Angeles for the near future. With a Grammy nomination and a number of star collaborations already under his belt, he’s got talent and momentum on his side, and he’s not finished bringing his Dallas-influenced sound to the West Coast.

A Dallas soundWhen Banx was at Duncanville High School and later at the University of North Texas, a cultural movement called “Boogie” or “Dallas Boogie” was centered on hip-hop music in North Texas.

Overlapping with New Orleans Bounce music and Houston’s Chopped-N-Screwed music and car culture, and symbiotically inspired by Atlanta hip-hop production, Dallas Boogie became nationally known thanks to a few Dallas rappers’ repetitive but catchy songs such as “My Dougie” by Lil’ Wil (2007) and Dorrough’s “Ice Cream Paint Job” (2009). Complete with its own dance moves and a fairly extensive lexicon, it evolved into a sort of local parlance. Fluency meant Dallas credibility.
“That still influences my music now,” Banx says.

SOURCE- Dallas Morning News 

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