Lowriding cars are synonymous with rap, but their Chicano drivers prefer sweet soul music. The scene’s movers and musicians explain how they went from being police targets to esteemed cultural cornerstones

‘Low rider knows every street,” chanted War on Low Rider, their 1975 hymn to the customised cars of east and south central Los Angeles whose suspension had been chopped down to allow them to run “slow and low”. Later, Black LA films (Boyz n the Hood) and music videos (Snoop Dogg, Dr Dre) prominently featured lowriders, the camera passing lovingly over the cars’ customised paint jobs and hydraulic systems that allowed them to bounce. But the lowrider was actually invented by LA’s Mexican-American Chicano community after the second world war – and their drivers didn’t listen to rap, but “lowrider soul”, elegiac R&B songs that remain their preferred soundtrack for cruising.

Lowrider soul constitutes a paradox: lovelorn ballads aren’t what you might expect these often extremely macho drivers to listen to. “Well, these lowrider guys were tough dudes, many street-and-prison hardened, but they were also notoriously ‘romantic’,” says Luis J Rodriguez, the celebrated Chicano poet and author who grew up building and driving lowriders. “I think many of us hung on to the illusions of family and home because we didn’t have good families or homes. Those old R&B songs spoke to our depths.”