Booty Fade

In Dallas, a booty fade is more than just a hairstyle; it’s a local staple and a certified homegrown classic with renown that stretches far beyond the city. Booty Fade, the new club music collaboration between Dallas’ DJ Sober and PICNICTYME, is set to occupy a similar place in the city’s cultural pantheon.

Taking cues from uptempo regional styles like New Orleans bounce and Baltimore club, as well as their city’s own Dallas boogie sound, the duo are crafting music for dance floors worldwide while repping their city first and foremost.

“A booty fade is a popular haircut, but it’s a Dallas thing,” PICNICTYME says of the business-on-top, party-in-the-back cut. “We’re applying that to ass-shaking music.”

Separately, the pair have been fixtures on Dallas’ indie rap scene for years: Sober as the DJ and organizer behind the popular Dallas outfit The Party (R.I.P.) and events such as Big Bang!, and Picnic as one-third of the short-lived but influential local trio PPT (in which he both rapped and made beats) and a member of Erykah Badu’s band, Cannabinoids. In recent years, they joined forces as the musical side of the hotly tipped Dallas rap group A.Dd+. Sober DJed for the duo, while Picnic held down the bulk of the production on projects like 2011’s When Pigs Fly, a critically acclaimed LP that’s been cited as a landmark release for Dallas rap.

Realizing that they shared a common interest in making party records as well, Sober and Picnic formed Booty Fade as an outlet for them to step out of their indie rap personas and create something new. “It’s one of those things that happened naturally like, ‘Yo man, we should create some stuff,’” Sober says. “It’s a cool outlet for us to do something with this completely different energy than what we normally do, while complementing that at the same time. Kind of like how rappers tap into their alter-egos to do projects, whether that’s Kool Keith or MF DOOM or [Ice-T] starting a heavy metal band like Body Count.”

It only took the release of one song, “F#$k Like A Stripper”, a track sampling quick vocal loops from Dallas hood classics by Treal Lee & Prince Rick and M.E. for Booty Fade to make a splash in its city.

“It’s club music and it’s not one type of club music,” Sober says. “Our songs have really varied tempos, but they all have the same type of energy.”

With their records gathering props and love from the very rappers sampled on them, inquiries have begun to pile in from other Dallas MCs wanting to know how they can get the Booty Fade treatment. In 2014, Picnic and Sober released their debut Booty Fade EP, with more songs following the formula of instrumentals sampling Dallas rap staples, and won Dallas Observer Music Awards for Best Song (for "F#$k Like A Stripper") and Best Producer.

The future for hip-hop and partying in Dallas has never been more wide open.