It’s Paul Wall, baby! The Houston rapper, jeweler and entrepreneur needs no introduction. Since first breaking nationwide with his appearance on Mike Jones’ classic “Still Tippin’,” the peoples champ has been repping H-Town hard. His brand-new album is Slab God, and it brought him to New York to talk to us about passing out flyers, lean, and what he learned from Slim Thug.

I wanted to start by going all the way back to 1996-97. You were 15 years old, and you started getting involved in street promotion for Def Jam. Why did you start to do that? Did you always know you wanted to be a rapper and figured this was a way in?

I used to go to the clubs. Of course, I was too young to get in the clubs, but we still would go. We’d pay the bouncer $10 extra or something and tell him we left our ID at home. I loved at a young age going to the clubs. You were just mesmerized by everything that’s going on, because you’re young, so everything you see is new to you and fresh, so you’re just inspired by everything. I always would hang out in the DJ booth and ask the DJs to give me shout-outs. When they gave me a shout-out on the mic, I felt like I was the man.

Leaving out of the club, I’d always see people passing out flyers or posters or snippet tapes or something. I just thought that was a cool job. I was young, too, at the time, so I had a lot of energy. I could stay out for hours upon hours, go to the other side of town, do whatever I had to do. So my boy Five-Four, who had a lot of accounts, he took me under his wing. He showed me how to do stuff, and that’s how it all started for me.

When you listen to your early records with Chamillionaire, how do they sound to you? To me, your voice sounds very different and your delivery is faster on your old songs than it is now.

Back in the days, I used to write differently than I do now. When I would write songs, I would just write to the tempo of the song, and then I’d go in a corner or go in a room, and I’d write it myself. I would think a lot about what I was writing. Sometimes it wouldn’t come out right. It would sound good in my head, but when I’d go lay it to the beat, it would be too many words, because I was thinking too hard and putting too much into it.

Eventually, I got better. I actually prayed that God would help me get better, and I just worked on it. I listened to people who I liked and said, “Let me see how they do their delivery.” People like Lil Keke and Slim Thug—those were the main people I really listened to. Slim Thug had an incredible delivery. Whatever he would say, he sounded tight saying it.

I had to change up my delivery a little bit. So I just studied different people and practiced, and over time got better with it. But definitely back in them days it was a big difference in a lot of that—in the delivery, in the rhyming pattern, everything.

Three of your many endorsements—a vaporizer [with Trippy Stix], a grinder [with Santa Cruz Shredder] and rolling papers [with Gold Leaf]—are marijuana-related. Are all of the discussions now around medical marijuana and decriminalization good for business?

Oh, hell yeah! The only reason that I’m in this business now is because of all the stuff that’s going on. I saw what Berner did with it [Gilbert "Berner" Milam is a Bay Area rapper who is also part of the "Cookie Family”— a group that introduced the popular "Girl Scout Cookie" strain of marijuana].

Of course, Snoop has always been the spokesman for the hip-hop weed community. He’s the President. But just seeing what Berner’s doing with everything—with the strains, with the products and with the branding of it—he took something and made an empire out of it. He showed us how to do it. A lot of us were accepting of the fact that it was illegal, so we weren’t going to do it.

We were scared to start a strain of weed. We were like, hell no, we’re gonna go to jail. But Berner took it to another level. So seeing how he kicked the doors wide open, it was a matter of, we’ve got to come with our stuff.

On your new album Slab God, you have the song “R.I.P. Act,” which is about the high-end cough syrup Actavis being taken off the market because it was glorified as being used to make lean in songs and by artists even including Justin Bieber. How did you feel when you heard it was going away?

First of all, we didn’t believe it, because people always say that, especially people trying to sell fake drank. So we didn’t believe it at first. We thought it was just rumors—they’ve been saying that forever.

Then they took it off the market, and even then we were in complete denial, because there were so many places we could still get it. It’s not like they took it off the market and had a recall. They just stopped making it, and the people who had it continued to sell it until they sold out.

So we were always in denial—nah, it aint gone, they’re just saying that. But when it finally did, it was a combination of a bunch of thoughts. Maybe it was a sign from God that this was too much and we need to stop. [But] a lot of it was anger. In the Texas community, we feel like we put it out there, but we didn’t really call the brands out. There wasn’t Instagram back then. So if there was, maybe we would have been showing our bottles. But there wasn’t. We looked at it as an underground thing.

It was talked about almost in code.

Exactly. It was talked about in code. The people in Texas feel very passionately that it’s the rappers from outside of Texas who glorified it to the point where they were putting the brand names on and putting the bottles in all of their videos.

Part of that’s true, but I’ve got to be real, too. We were doing that too, a little bit. We were dry-snitching on ourselves and exposing ourselves a little bit too. But the other ones took it a little bit farther than we did. I do have to take some responsibility. But I will say the overwhelming feeling in Texas is, it’s not our fault, it’s they fault.