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A huge influence on today's exploding 'witch house' scene that includes Salem, we examine the legacy of the creator if the Houston hip hop sound, a 'chopped and screwed' take on hip hop that was heavy, slowed-down and sounded particularly good on codeine-laced cough syrup.
ALL SCREWED UP The inventor of Houston’s ‘chopped and screwed’ hip hop sound, DJ Screw died ten years ago this month from a sizzurp overdose. But his slowed-down legacy lives on Text philip mlynar photography Ben Desoto
DJ Screw is one of hip hop’s most unfortunate innovators. Born Robert Earl Davis Jr in 1971 in Texas, he originated a regional take on the music that came to be embraced worldwide, but passed away before he could witness the full impact of his creation. Based around slowing the tempo of a rap song down until it takes on a meditative and mushy new life, screw music – or chopped and screwed music – is now a constant presence in mainstream hip hop, with high-profile albums such as Lil Wayne’s Tha Carter series and Kanye West’s 808s And Heartbreak receiving the screw treatment. Screw’s legacy has recently broken out of hip hop’s bracket too, taking on a fresh life by sparking the eerie, sloweddown sounds of the underground ‘witch house’ movement, typified by artists like Salem and Balam Acab. But Screw’s story differs from that of other unsung pioneers who unfortunately never got to see their influence at large, as he helped architect his own death by pairing screw music with a codeine-based drink said to enhance the listening experience. Colloquially known as drank or sizzurp, the purplehued mix of prescription-strength codeine and carbonated soda took Screw’s life a decade ago with an overdose, making his posthumous iconic status a bittersweet one.
Screw’s musical discovery starts out like that of any other pioneering DJ. While playing around with a rudimentary home set-up, in this case his mother’s Lloyd turntable with a built-in receiver, he became intrigued by a technical niche. “I started messing with the pitch adjusters on the turntables and slowed it all the way down,” he told hip hop magazine Rap Pages in a 1995 interview. “I thought the music sounded better like that.”
The process Screw pioneered alters the fabric of a hip hop song. Where the vocals on a gangsta rap track might originally brim with menace and anger, after going through Screw’s process the words become elongated and abstract, with individual syllables either stretched out and made guttural and grainy, or entire sentences slurred together. Beats and samples that might have been perky and edgy now sound as if they’re being played through a set of speakers submerged in water. Even the funkiest song can take on a lumbering darkness after being screwed.
As Screw graduated to two Technics 1200 turntables and a Gemini mixer, he refined his happy accident and began to piece together mixtapes comprised of popular rap songs of the day combined with tracks and freestyle sessions by local, and often unheralded, artists from the south side of Houston,
Texas. Recorded on an eight-track, he sold his first slowed-down styled mixtape in 1990. It was the start of a cottage industry that would see Screw go on to create over 200 screw tapes, all given sequentially-named titles like Chapter005:StillAGAt 27 and Chapter 221: 2 Pints Deep. Artists who appeared on early Screw tapes soon bandied together as the Screwed Up Click – an expansive collective that included criticallyacclaimed Rap-A-Lot, recording artist Z-Ro and Lil’ Flip, who would later score big with 2004’s Pac-Mansampling “Game Over” song. The tapes became a local phenomenon. “People were more excited about Screw tapes than getting a new pair of Jordans,” recalls Trae, an original member of the Screwed Up Click and an artist who has been awarded his own day, Trae Day, by the city of Houston.
The demand for screw tapes meant that Screw soon found himself a pivotal cog in Houston’s 90s hip hop scene. “You got to understand, if you were coming up, being on a Screw tape was important cause there wasn’t a radio outlet back then,” explains Trae. “Screw himself was a form of radio – people would get the cassette, you wouldn’t even know what song’s gonna be on there, but you’d catch people singing your songs.” (Trae’s first appearance on a Screw tape came in 1999 with “Keep Watching Me”, when he was part of the group Guerilla Maab.)
Paul Wall is another artist who benefitted from growing up to a soundtrack of screw music, having ridden to mainstream recognition with an appearance on the Mike Jones song “Still Tippin’” in the mid-noughties. Hailing from the south side of Houston, he also testifies to Screw’s importance: “Screw was part of the local Houston hip hop community. I mean, some people might even say he was the hip hop community. He wasn’t just a DJ – people would go and hang out at his store, Screwed Up Records And Tapes. Screw made our scene. He meant everything to the people here.”
“I remember a lot of older heads would speak about when Screw sold tapes from his house in Missouri City,” adds Trae, talking about the days before he opened a store. “Screw would be there doing his thing, people would come up and do their thing – it was like a meeting spot.”
The scene that clustered around Screw was aided by the DJ tapping into a style of hip hop music that coexisted with its immediate