BigXthaPlug on Rap Success, Turning to Country Music and What’s Next

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igXthaPlug is standing in front of his six-car garage, trying to decide which of his luxury SUVs to drive. We’re outside his Mediterranean-style estate just north of Dallas on a windy January day, ready to hit the gym. 

BigX picks the Dodge Durango SRT ­Hellcat over the Cadillac Escalade-V, which is ­getting detailed. He takes the wheel of the SUV, and we drive through the countryside to a 24 Hour Fitness, blasting unreleased songs he’s recorded. They’re motivational hip-hop anthems; his ear for choosing beats that fit his bellowing voice remains impeccable. In one, he shouts out both his kinfolk and 600 Entertainment, the independent label he started under UnitedMasters: “I do it for my kids and my family/600 niggas who stay down with me.” 

When we arrive at the gym, we head to a multipurpose fitness space, where Shadow, BigX’s personal trainer and body­guard, leads a full-body circuit. With Pooh Shiesty blaring from a speaker, BigX and the rest of us go through 30 seconds at each station: lunges, throwing a medicine ball up a wall (then slamming it on the ground), dumbbell ­lateral raises, a cardio step-up workout, shadow boxing, and more lunges. Nobody seems to notice Dallas’ most popular rapper is getting his reps in. 

Shadow suggests an ab workout.

“That’s overdoing it,” BigX replies.

Shadow insists. “Just a little bit — you’re gonna lie on the floor.” 

“My client is only human,” says CJ, BigX’s younger brother.

Shadow isn’t taking no for an answer.

“You not dying,” he says.

“You can’t be one of the best artists in the world and have only done one genre,” BigX Surmises. 

“Physically, I am,” BigX says, as the pair erupt in laughter. “Mentally, I just know I’m not dying, so I’m not complaining. But physically, I’m going through it.”

BigX’s nickname isn’t a coincidence: The former college football player is still stout enough to compete on the gridiron. Nowadays, he works out four days a week, a routine he began last year. He changed his diet, dropping from around 470 pounds to 425 while regaining some muscle. He wants to hit his ideal weight — 350 pounds — so he can wear clothes that better show off his style. “All I’ve been doing has been muscle memory from me playing football,” he says. “So now I’m finna get my body back right.”

Jelly Roll, his friend and collaborator on the 2025 track “Box Me Up,” recently underwent his own radical weight loss. I ask if he gave BigX any tips. “He’s like [my] unc,” BigX says. “So any time I’m around him, it’s more of like a ‘Bub, this is what I feel like you should do. I smoke healthier. I eat healthier. I walk every day.’ He’s trying to put me on game.

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“If we’re being honest,” he admits, “I don’t know why I’m in this gym. Like I said, I feel like I look good already. I know I’m healthy. I don’t eat crazy, stupid shit. It’s more of a mental thing. It’s something I said I’m finna do.”

When BigX, 27, sets his mind to something, he sees it through — to life-changing results. Case in point: After years of making rap music brimming with raw authenticity and regional pride, he decided to release a full-on country-rap album last year, I Hope You’re Happy. BigX’s country debut came at a time when country-rap crossovers are more popular than ever (Moneybagg Yo and Morgan Wallen’s “Whiskey Whiskey,” Quavo, Luke Bryan, and Teddy Swims’ “Georgia Ways,” and Graham Barham’s “Oil Money” come to mind), but BigX did something no other artist had done: The album’s lead single, “All the Way,” featuring country star Bailey Zimmerman, became the first song ever to top both Billboard’s Hot Country Songs and Hot Rap Songs charts. 

A cross between the polished hooks of Nashville’s hit factory and hip-hop’s vivid street-life tales, I Hope You’re Happy introduced BigX to a new fan base and has allowed him to check off some impressive milestones: Billboard’s Country Power Players Innovator; a Ryman Auditorium performance in Nashville; closing out the CMA Awards with Luke Combs, performing their song “Pray Hard.”

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BigX made the album after a breakup, opening up about his feelings of resentment by exploring the heartbreak-and-whisky ethos of country music. After several albums full of cinematic street rap, BigX spent more than a year and a half immersing himself in Nashville’s meticulous songwriting process. He was learning to be vulnerable as a songwriter, pouring out all of his emotions as a heartbroken narrator on the title track, with Darius Rucker, which set the direction for the album.

It was a risk to drop a country album, and BigX knew he might face ridicule for swerving outside of his lane. But his country appeal was always there, heard on songs like “Texas” — a 2022 track full of steel guitar, home-state repping, and, in the video, BigX rocking a cowboy hat — and his cameo on Shaboozey’s “Drink Don’t Need No Mix.” His pivot was met with little resistance, especially when Jelly Roll brought him out as a surprise guest at the country-dominated Stagecoach festival in 2025. 

Combs gave BigX some words of wisdom after he doubted his acceptance in country music. “In my head, they can’t be fucking with me for real,” BigX remembers thinking. “But he was the one who was telling me, ‘As much as you feel like they don’t want you here, they want you here. So get that out of your head.’” 

BigX says he wants to be the best artist in the world. To him, this meant he had to venture outside of hip-hop: “You can’t be one of the best artists in the world and have only done one genre.”

“Beyoncé, a GOAT, a queen,” he continues. “She’s done pop, country. Lil Wayne: rock, pop. Snoop Dogg did songs with Katy Perry and shit. All these people are greats, from Eminem to Dr. Dre to Ice Cube. Everybody has stepped out of that lane.” 

I Hope You’re Happy marked the high point of his country era — and the end of it. He vows that his next project will be a return to rap form, fueled by his competitiveness to conquer the genre that made him: “I just feel like right now, I got unfinished business. I’ve done more in country than I have hip-hop-wise. Country Innovator of the Year … I’ve never even been to the fucking BET Awards.” 

“Everybody has a purpose. My purpose is my family.”

THE SKIES HAVE TURNED GRAY and rainy as we head back to Big X’s estate, part of a private neighborhood on acres of tranquil land. This is a multigenerational home: BigX’s grandmother Angela; his mom, Courtney; his son, Carter; and two-year-old daughter, Leilani — whom they affectionately call “Bird” — all live here, along with three of his siblings. A massive island in the kitchen offers ample space for gathering, overlooking the woodscape and creek just beyond the back door. 

YouTube videos of BigX’s songs play on a mounted television that has an IKEA x Virgil Abloh “Keep Off” rug underneath. Angela, a former bodybuilder, has portioned out food for everyone: mashed potatoes with beef and corn, topped with gravy, along with a side salad on the counter. Lemonade Kool-Aid fills a pitcher. On a shelf sits a mini version of a platinum plaque for BigX’s 2023 album, Amar, next to a photo of him labeled “Employee of the month.” There are paintings of BigX throughout the house, gifts from fans. He is the centerpiece here, surrounded by his loved ones.

BigX decides to hang back at home after the gym, letting me know he’s going to disappear for a bit to shower. The rapper, who is generally in constant motion, has remained dormant this week after a New Year’s Day shooting outside of an after-hours club where he was in attendance. 

Instead, Shadow, Courtney, Angela, and BigX’s youngest sister, Zyon, offer to take me on a tour of Ferris and Pleasant Grove, the nearby neighborhoods that shaped BigX’s music. As we pull into a gas station in the Escalade, Courtney and Angela start sharing stories of his upbringing. 

Born Xavier Landum, he played football from age five to 18. It kept him out of trouble. He played on both the defensive and offensive lines, and was strong enough to flip giant tires across the field at age 13. “He was just that popular little boy,” Courtney says. “Everybody wanted to hang around him — or fight him. They wanted something to do with him, so I knew he was going to be something. Whatever it was, he was going to be big.

“Then we got to the teenage years, and I just thought I failed,” she says, laughing. In a past life, Courtney dealt drugs. BigX’s father, Bay, served time in prison for a stretch of BigX’s childhood.

We barrel down U.S. 75 toward Ferris. In the front seat, Zyon throws on recent BigX songs “Meet the 6ixers” and “600 Degrees.” Courtney raps along. A few highway changes later, we get to the low-income housing unit where the family lived for 13 years in the 2000s. With nothing but brown flats, a grocery store, and gas stations within walking distance, there’s not much for distractions in Ferris; for Courtney, the housing offered a chance for some stability for her son.

“When they were little — [BigX] was maybe nine, and the girls were six, five, whatever — we would sit around and rap,” Courtney remembers. “My oldest daughter would do the beat, and me and my son would battle it out…. Never knew it was nothing serious, but he had something in him.

“So when he started rapping and he was cold,” she continues, “I was like, ‘Ah, you got that from your mama!’”

When Xavier was 16, he’d be gone for “the whole day,” as Courtney puts it. She’d drive around looking for him, and often find him in the same spot: the 600 block of Meadowridge Street, which is where we head to next. This was where the neighborhood kids hung out, and it gave rise to BigX’s label, 600 Entertainment. “It’d be like 20 guys outside, and you knew Xavier’s in the middle of that circle,” she recalls. Later, he’d shoot the mic-drop performance of his 2021 track “Safehouse” here.

Courtney tells Shadow to head to South Buckner Boulevard. She recalls where she met BigX’s dad, and points out the apartment she lived in when she was 18 and BigX was three. Next, she nods to an apartment building with neutral exteriors and an unassuming look; this is where she lived when BigX was between five and six. These are the apartments he raps about on his standout track “The Largest”: “Safe to say I’m the biggest, the largest/Been steppin’ on shit since my mama stayed in them apartments, regardless.”

Courtney has some regrets: namely, that she struggled to pay rent and resorted to dealing drugs. She reminisces about the family’s worst days. “All I can do is laugh,” she tells me. “Half this shit you gonna have to turn that recorder off for. On my soul, I’m not playing.”

Angela chimes in. “[Courtney] called me one day and said, ‘The microwave isn’t working. How do I heat my food up?’ I said, ‘Oh, my God, she’s never going to make it.’”

But she did. And when he made it in rap, BigX made good on his promise to buy his mom a house, the one they all live in now. No matter what’s going on in his life, one thing is clear: He takes care of his people. 

Angela mentions that she used to leave BigX voicemails that went unanswered. But she was delighted when she learned that one of them — where she sees him shining and says she’s proud of him — made it on the title track of Take Care, a Top 10 album BigX released in 2024. “He does listen to them!” she remembers thinking with a laugh. Zyon turns the music up; her brother’s songs make for great cruising music as we head up 75 through rush-hour traffic.

NIGHT BEGINS TO FALL, and we arrive back at BigX’s house. Shadow backs into the driveway, careful not to run over the blue-and-white Christmas lights along the path. Up in his office on the second floor, BigX is streaming on Twitch, with Bay watching from the side and smoking a cigarette. 

Bay, a.k.a. Pops, has a deep voice and still calls BigX his “baby.” When BigX was nine, his mom sent him to live with his dad after learning he had been stealing money from her. Bay describes the hardships he had faced while reacclimating to life after prison: securing an apartment and furnishing it for himself and his son, working 12-hour shifts to put food on the table. Still, he and his son found the energy to hold each other up: “He took care of me just like I took care of him,” Bay says.

“I’d rather have been depressed and come out a soldier than have folded and ended up a weirdo.” 

Bay encouraged BigX’s talents early on. Like Courtney, Bay would start rhyming in the car, setting it up for his son to freestyle. He was impressed by his son’s vocabulary: “I [used to] tell somebody, ‘Man, my son freestyles better than y’all.’ And he’ll start rapping, and everybody be like, ‘The fuck? This dude’s too young to be real.’ He out-rapped them.”

 Midway through our conversation, Bay calls a friend who sends him the second song BigX ever made. It’s from 2019, before BigX fully found his voice. “It’s two dudes that I know that can rap pretty good, and I put them on the track with [BigX]. He killed it,” Bay brags, before adding: “He don’t even know I got this.” BigX doubted his own talent at first, but Bay knew his son could make it to the big leagues.  

Bay plays the song on his phone, and Courtney comes in to listen with us. BigX’s verse is drenched in Auto-Tune, far different from the thick baritone of his songs today. All the same, mom and dad nod along proudly.

ABOUT 45 MINUTES LATER, BigX finishes streaming and joins his immediate circle downstairs. The basement has a pool table and arcade machines of NBA Jam and NFL Blitz that stand near his son’s room and BigX’s two sisters’ rooms. In the spacious theater, 600 artists KaineMusic and Ro$ama are watching football, along with CJ and some of BigX’s childhood friends — Bobo, TDot, and Daniel.

600 Entertainment’s roster also includes KevanGotBandz, MurdaGang PB, and Yung Hood. KaineMusic is one of the newest signees to 600 Entertainment. In May 2025, she did a freestyle over BigX’s “Meet the 6ixers” that picked up online, putting her on BigX’s radar. “I just feel like he runs his team way different than most people,” she says. “Way more established, way more family-oriented. I feel like that’s what a lot of labels and teams are missing in their business.”

Ro$ama and BigX go way back: They met at the lunch table in the 12th grade at W.T. White High School in Dallas, after Bobo brought BigX around. They’ve been in a “locked in friendship,” as Ro$ama puts it, ever since; they even found out they’re cousins on their dads’ side. BigX credits Ro$ama for encouraging him to rap, saying he wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for his partner.  

BigX announces he’s eating a salad for dinner, but first, we head up to his office to talk. It’s a two-story library where Courtney put up all of his plaques and accolades. Dress shoes from the “Mr. Trouble” video are on display, as well as his once-signature dreadlocks, housed in a glass box.

We sit down in front of his desk, and he fills me in on the rest of his backstory. After graduating from W.T. White in 2016, he received a scholarship to play football at Crown College in Minnesota, but his NFL dreams were cut short when he was kicked off the team for smoking weed. He’d disappointed his family, he thought, and he felt aimless. But BigX found direction in providing for his son, Carter, who’d been born in 2018, and Carter’s mother. “Everybody has a purpose, a reason, and my reason is my kids,” he says.

BigX had to stretch what little money he had to buy food and pay rent in Austin, where he moved after leaving Minnesota. He worked at a pawn shop and saved up for a shotgun. 

Things got bad. He tried to keep a job at UPS, but hated it. He sold drugs. He was in and out of jail. One low point came when he missed Carter’s birthday while locked up. “I’m supposed to be at the party, but I’m not at the party,” he recalls. “So I’m doing a video call and something happened and the CO made everybody rack up [return to their cells]. And I’m like, ‘Man, it’s my son’s birthday.’ He cut the phone off on me. I got to threatening his ass. Next thing I know, four big-ass people in green walk in. I put my hands behind my back like, ‘I don’t want no problems.’ They took me to solitary.” BigX spent 30 days in solitary confinement, ­counting bricks in his cell to stay sane. He’d get blank medical forms and fill the pages with lyrics. 

After serving his time, survival mode kicked in again: He booked an extended-stay hotel and sold dope to rebuild his life. But once he earned enough to stop, BigX knew it was time to take something else seriously. “This is when [Ro$ama] telling me, ‘You should rap, you should rap,’” he says. “I’m like, ‘Fuck it. This last little $10,000 I got, I’m finna just get me an apartment and I’m gonna pay my bills and try to rap.’”

So BigX officially switched his hustle. “I literally rapped [for] six months, and I had a rap check,” he says. “I don’t even realize how fast it happened. The shit that people spend their whole life fighting for, I did in six months.”

BigX’s evocative portraits of coming up in the streets made him part of a rich tradition of Dallas hip-hop. He sees his rise as something the city needed after one of its most promising rappers, Mo3, was murdered in broad daylight on I-35 in 2020. BigX was making his mark, and it was exciting. “We would go into clubs with three people in them, and we’ll be in there 20 deep,” he says. “We’ll go so crazy that those three people were posting their own videos online.” 

And yet, BigX admits, as Take Care and I Hope You’re Happy climbed the charts, he was depressed. As he began to earn money and fame, he felt obligated to give handouts to people. “I’ve got my hand bit a lot,” he says. “I was putting people on, and they were losing the money, spending the money, and then coming back to me like, ‘Hey, give me some more.’ But I love this person, so I can’t do what I would do to a random person. So now I’m fighting with them myself.”

He had relationship issues on top of that. But he’s in better spirits now, and not making sad music anymore. He wants his journey to serve as a lesson for others. “You’re getting a guy who has been through it all in a short amount of time,” he says. “And still came out OK. A lot of people get into this industry and the shit that I just went through, it tears them up, and they either start doing drugs or they end up catching a lot of charges. Not letting that happen to me caused me to be depressed. But I’d rather have been depressed for a year and come out a soldier than have folded and ended up a dope fiend and a weirdo.” 

In one corner of the office, there’s a guitar signed by Lil Wayne from when BigX and Jay Jones performed “Hip-Hop” at Lil Weezyana Fest in New Orleans. (BigX also appeared on Wayne’s Tha Carter VI.) As with every achievement we’ve talked about today, BigX did it for his family. “That was for my mama,” BigX says, explaining that Wayne is her favorite artist.

“It feels good because a lot of people don’t get to live their lives and see both sides. My parents got to see both sides,” BigX says. “I don’t think my dad has ever had a foreign vehicle in his life. He pulled away in a brand new [Mercedes] AMG. I got my dad a house 15 minutes away from me.” 

So what does the future look like? He describes the next phase of his career as centered around success and wealth, things he’s never flexed about or “popped it” about on songs. “Like [during] Take Care, I was getting all types of new jewelry. I think I had two grills during that era. I was making all types of money, and I never talked about it,” he says.

In 2026, BigX continues to be the fun-loving guy your favorite artists want to be around. He considers Shaboozey his closest industry friend. NLE the Great (formerly known as NLE Choppa) and Fredo Bang frequently check in on him. GloRilla has two upcoming songs with him. He says Bad Bunny’s team reached out about doing a song, too, backing up his statement that he’s a great artist, not just a rapper. “I’m not gonna do all genres, but I definitely showed that I can,” he says. He’s focusing on his 600 Entertainment artists, introducing them with another compilation, 6ixers With Attitudes, due out in March, and planning a new rap album for the fourth quarter. He’s ready for more wins. “Now,” he says, “I get to say, ‘I made it.’”

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Photographs by Sacha Lecca