Dallas rapper BigXThaPlug has a presence that stands out on a crowded midtown Manhattan street. He and his team walk toward the Rolling Stone offices as a united front, cracking jokes while the fall sun flares off their gleaming 600 Entertainment chains. BigX greets me with Texas hospitality as we head upstairs with an entourage so big it takes two full elevators to carry us.
He landed earlier that day and says he’s considering flying back home to Texas that very night. While there’s plenty for a beloved rapper to get into in New York City, he tells me he’s all business whenever he’s in town. Besides, he’s trying to get back to his seven-month-old daughter, and son, Amar. Anyone who’s listened to the Dallas rapper’s growing catalog, including his recently released album Take Care, can hear that his kids are a heavy priority (his 2021 debut was named after his son).
“I ain’t seen my kids in almost a week and a half right now,” he laments. “I done seen them on the phone, but I been doing this promo shit for about a week and a half, so I ain’t physically been able to touch my kids. And [they’re] the only reason I’m doing it.”
It’s still polarizing for artists to admit that rap is mostly a hustle to them. Purists are often dismayed at the notion that someone would rap purely as a moneymaking endeavor. But if the music is good, the motivations shouldn’t matter. While the popular conception is that money-first artists make lazy art, BigX’s determination to provide for his kids has only sharpened his skills. For the 26-year-old, rap is a job. And Take Care indicates he’s damn good at it.
Born Xavier Landum, BigX grew up in Dallas, where he lived with his mother, who he recalls being more like a friend than a matriarchal figure. He says his father was more strict, carrying a “you going to do what I tell you to do, not what I do” mentality. His father was in the streets but is also an avid Dallas Cowboys fan who pushed BigX to play football, which he excelled at from a young age. During his senior year of high school, he found his way to the Dallas suburb of Ferris, Texas, initially living with his mother, then his grandmother, and then by himself when his grandmother moved out with her partner. “From there on, I been grown,” he says.
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He tells me his Ferris years are when he “jumped off the porch” into the streets. “Once I touched that street, it was just different,” he says. “There’s a bunch of ways you can make some bread.” He befriended some local kids who lived near him on the 600 block of Ferris’ Meadow Ridge Street. Their bond inspired the name of his 600 Entertainment label (which he says he changed from the more controversial TSABB, or “Taliban Shit Al-Qaeda Big Business.”
“Everybody cares for one another, everybody embraced one another,” he says about his friends. “They kind of made me a part of their family, and it just went from there.”
Although the streets got a grasp of BigX, he still graduated from high school in 2016 and enrolled at D3 Crown Junior College in Minnesota for football. He says the Twin Cities were too cold for him to enjoy. During his first semester, BigX was kicked out of school after he was caught smoking weed, which disappointed his family. “I was the one that was supposed to make it, and because I didn’t, I feel like everybody turned their back on me when I got kicked out,” he says. From Minnesota, BigX made his way to Austin, living with a then-girlfriend. He eventually ran into legal trouble and was sentenced to four months in jail. After coming home from that stint, he broke up with his girlfriend just “two or three days later” — but it was enough time for them to conceive his son. He learned he was a father after he had moved back to Dallas, “sleeping on my granny couch, working at UPS, trying to work anyway.”
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While “doing dirt” to provide for his kid, he was hit with burglary and aggravated robbery charges, which got him sent back to Austin for another four months, causing him to miss his son’s first birthday. His absence gave him a new outlook on life. “You would think me having a son would’ve made it click, but it didn’t,” he admits. “I still was on some ‘me’ shit. It took for me to see that I couldn’t be there for my son.”
Let BigX talk long enough, and everything eventually circles back to his kids. He tells me his son “can do anything to make you smile,” adding, “he do little nigga stuff, but he a big nigga.” He gushes about his seven-month-old daughter, noting that there have been times when he’s upset at home and his mother walks up to him holding his daughter, “like a little briefcase,” which instantly brightens his mood. “I could just look at her and stare at her and be good.” For him, having a daughter has made him consider a woman’s perspective in a new way.
He started writing rhymes and poetry while in solitary confinement during his second jail stint but threw them all out once he got home. “I wasn’t trying to be no fucking rapper,” he scoffs. “I was just like, ‘Fuck this rap shit.’” But his desire to provide for his kid the right way led him to pick the pen back up. Still in the streets, he alternated “working” out of a hotel he lived in while writing rhymes in his idle time. He made enough to get a new apartment for his girlfriend and son, though it wasn’t exactly luxury living: “We was sleeping on a mattress, TV on a box, no sheets,” he says. Those meager conditions motivated BigX to start recording music, eventually crafting “Taliban Freestyle“ with longtime friend and collaborator Ro$ama.
The song spurred Big X’s first bit of buzz as a musician, encouraging him to make his debut mixtape, Bacc From the Dead, in 2020. The indie project led UnitedMasters A&R Aaron Hunter to reach out to him (holding their introductory meeting at a Chuck E. Cheese during a birthday party for one of BigX’s cousins). He signed with the distributor in 2021 and got to work on his debut album, AMAR, buoyed by the soulful single “Levels” and his unabashedly twangy track “Texas.” BigX says that the Blondo, Aimonmyneck, and Blazerfxme-produced beat, brought to him by Hunter, initially sounded too gimmicky for him.
“I was like, ‘Nah, I’m not finna’ do that,’” he recalls.
“Then [Hunter] was like, ‘Bro, it’d be so hard.’ I was like, ‘What am I supposed to say? Bitch, I’m from Texas?’ He was like, ‘Yeah, exactly.’”
The song became a breakout single that wasn’t just an ode to the Lone Star State but an introduction to BigX as a beacon of a new era of Texas rap. He exemplifies the region’s devotion to captivating sample loops and full 808s, but he does so with modern cadences and an inimitable baritone bellowing at a frequency somewhere around the depths of a Texas oil reserve.
The hit single was chosen for his hometown Cowboys’ 2024 hype video, which BigX says had him “turnt” — even as a Houston Texans fan. With his jovial personality, distinct voice, and personification of the “everything’s bigger in Texas” mantra, he’s rapidly become a figure of note in the Texas sports world. In July 2023, he threw out the first pitch at the Texas Rangers game, wearing a wide-open baseball jersey that showed off his belly. A week or so later, he did a voice-over for a Big 12 conference promotional video. Later that month, BigX enjoyed what he told me was the closest thing to an “I made it” moment when he was paid $90,000 for a 30-minute performance at an MLB All-Star weekend event. “I was just like, ‘Shit, this rap shit, good,” he says, his platinum grill beaming as he smiles. Last year, BigX also made “BigXFL,” which the on-again, off-again football league used as a theme song. Though his football dreams didn’t come to fruition, his rap stardom has gotten him the fame — and financial security — of a star athlete.
“Texas” is RIAA-certified gold, and he’s gone platinum with “Levels” as well as “Mmhmm,” a banger with a Whispers sample also used in Will Smith’s “Miami.” The glitzy single has so much momentum that he put it on his 2023 release, The Biggest EP, as well as his latest, Take Care, a 15-track project that demonstrates what makes BigX such a compelling artist in the rap landscape.
He tells me he sat down with his team and ideated three predominant themes for the album. The first is, “When it get better, it get worse,” he says, talking with his hands as he points out the project’s stratagem. “Yeah, I got jewelry, I got money, but I don’t get to see my kids that often,” he says. “[There’s] a lot of people begging, people I don’t even know. A lot of people poke the bear.” Another theme is “Do what you gotta do,” he says, adding “I got to make it to where when my kids my age, they don’t want for shit. And the only way to do that is by being where I’m at right now, doing what we doing right now.” The third theme is a focus “growth and success.” “We got money. Yeah, we got cars. We got this. But it’s [discussed in] a more mature way,” he explains. “We’re not bragging about it. We just speaking on it. It’s there, but I care more about taking care of my people and my kids.”
Those topics coalesce throughout the album, including an interlude featuring internet personality Wallo267 explaining, “When you’re goin’ after your dreams, and you’re tryin’ to be successful in life, you’re gon’ miss out on a lot of things … but you gotta make them sacrifices in order to get where you wanna get at in life.” BigX gets vulnerable throughout the album, especially on the aptly named “Therapy Session” and “Lost the Love,” where he rhymes, “Know that I want to check out and just give it up / How I got all these problem? I’m rich as fuck.” Most of the songs on the album are within the two-minute range, give or take, seemingly giving BigX time to vent and hit the next song.
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But Take Care isn’t all pensiveness. “2AM” is a sultry Isley Brothers-sampling track that explores a wayward romance, while “The Largest” is an affirmatory record where he rhymes, “I just got off a tour, finna go on another one / Album done, finna drop me another one.” Take Care, which was recorded over several two- to four-week AirBnB sessions over the past year, dropped 20 months after his debut album and less than a year after December’s The Biggest EP. When I ask him if he wants to keep up a similar pace, he says he’d prefer to do “some Beyoncé shit” and only drop several years at a time. But he says if his career trajectory doesn’t dictate that kind of patience, “every year we gettin’ to it.”
In the meantime, he’s putting effort into 600 Entertainment, with Ro$ama, Murder Gang PB, and Yung Hood as signees; he tells me the latter is the first artist who ever impressed him in person with their off-the-top freestyle skills. Along with music, he filmed a few commercials and was also reached out to for a movie. He colorfully reminds me that these days, he’s down to do whatever it takes for a bag. “OnlyFans could hit me right now,” he jokes (I think). “Let this rap shit not be working. I’m slanging that motherfucker, you hear me? Top .05 percent.” For now, it looks like his career is in such a good place that shirtless BigX is all we’ll be exposed to.