Project Pat

Juicy J's older brother, whose Memphis pimp-talk drew on men he listened to, not a life he claims to have lived.

Project Pat, born Patrick Houston, is the older brother of Three 6 Mafia co-founder Jordan "Juicy J" Houston and the rapper who carried the group's Memphis pimp vernacular to its widest audience. He grew up in the Hollywood neighbourhood of North Memphis, the son of an evangelical Baptist pastor on Jackson Avenue, as Ben Dandridge-Lemco reported in the Oxford American in December 2023. Before his recording career he served three years of a nine-year sentence for aggravated robbery; he told Complex's David Drake in 2013 that "when I got out on robbery, that's when they were just signing with Relativity," and his debut, Ghetty Green, was released in 1999 through Hypnotize Minds while the group's deal was new.

His breakthrough was Mista Don't Play: Everythangs Workin', released February 27, 2001, on Loud Records with Hypnotize Minds. It reached number 4 on the Billboard 200 and number 2 on the R&B/Hip-Hop albums chart, and the RIAA certified it gold on March 29, 2001. Its single "Chickenhead," with Three 6 Mafia and La Chat, was built around a Memphis street insult and became his best-known song. The pimp talk on that album and its successors comes from a specific source that he has described consistently. The Oxford American reported that he "took sayings from the pimps around the city and infused his music with their ism." He told Complex that Memphis has its own phrase for listening to old soul and funk records: "we call it 'listening to pimping.' That's what I be doing." His stated rule for material, in Dandridge-Lemco's piece, is that he will rap about "something I know, something I been through, or something I know that happened."

The line between the persona and the man has been tested by the courts, but on weapons, not vice. On January 19, 2001, weeks before Mista Don't Play came out, he was arrested with two pistols in his vehicle, and as a felon he received a federal sentence of about three years; Andria Lisle of the Memphis Flyer reported his release in late 2005, and his first post-prison album, Crook by da Book: The Fed Story, in December 2006. He told Complex that the conviction changed his behaviour: "When I got caught up with that gun and did that time, I said I'm not doing that no more. Because you can't win." He also described a planned joint album with Pimp C, discussed after both had been released from custody, that Pimp C's death in December 2007 ended before it began.

No source describes Houston as a pimp. He has never claimed to be one, and the reporting on him is explicit that the language came from listening and from the city. The Oxford American found him, in his fifties, preaching in jails and prisons, having been saved at his father's church as a child. The archive's finding is simple: the persona is the most durable Memphis pimp voice on record, and its author has always said it was a voice.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Patrick Earl Houston (performs as Project Pat)

BORN
Memphis, Tennessee, 1973

STATUS
Living

ERA
1999–present

ASSOCIATED WITH
North Memphis (Hollywood neighbourhood); Three 6 Mafia; Hypnotize Minds; Juicy J; Loud Records

STANDING
Persona