Influence can be a funny form of power, particularly in the creative world. It moves ideas and aesthetics but sometimes leaves the works that birthed them behind. Consider the late DJ Screw, who died in 2000 at age 30, but is arguably the most influential hip-hop DJ of this century. Even as the role of the DJ has been progressively marginalized in commercial hip-hop, the Houstonian's technique-- slow speed blends, chopped and doubled-up snares and vocals-- still bullied their way into the genre's evolving vocabulary. This was precisely what Screw dreamed of in life, when he was still a local icon (albeit a major one). In interviews, he spoke of how he wanted to "screw the world." It seemed optimistic at the time. And then it eventually happened.
But as his impact spread, DJ Screw and his music were both left behind in some ways. It'd be easy to fill this space by telling of the Houston rappers and pop megastars and Tumblr goths who have all borrowed and repurposed what can broadly be defined as the Screw sound in the 13 years since his death. Or how that sound has been inexorably (and somewhat inaccurately) linked to the popular rise of the drug that reportedly took his life. We could throw around words like "crawling" and "syrupy" and "psychedelic" to create an easy point of entry for readers who wouldn't otherwise give a fuck about a little old rap mixtape DJ from the Southside of Houston. But to do so would only further this disembodiment of a human artist and his work from his brand and mythology.
The secret about Screw that gets lost in the on-record shout outs and the hashtagged condolences and the godawful slapdash remixes that bear his name all over the internet is that slowness is not the pure essence of Screwness. It's a central element, to be certain, but just one of many. Screw was, after all, a DJ in a time where the role and reception of the DJ was dramatically different from what it is today. DJs made their names not just on account of their taste, but also their personality and craft. Screw was the rare triple threat on these fronts-- a true tastemaker, a masterful technician, and an out-and-out relatable human. His roots were in battle DJing-- transformer scratches and body tricks and beat juggling and all of that. When I interviewed Rob Quest of the group the Odd Squad, for whom Screw briefly DJ'd for, he described Screw's early style as "actually hip-hop-ish." I'd venture to suggest that everything he would go on to accomplish fell directly under that umbrella, even as he warped its dimensions sonically.
For a man so closely identified with all things slow, Screw moved quickly, releasing new mixtapes on a near-weekly basis in his prime. This pace imbued his tapes with an air of autobiography; they were a series of soundtracks for the life of a man whose life mostly involved making soundtracks for himself and his crew. When fellow Screwed Up Click members celebrated their birthdays, the party was handed down to listeners. When Fat Pat died, people felt the clique's pain. Mostly, though, Screw tapes conveyed the general joy of the crew's existence and success, particularly on the later ones where the SUC freestyles were more prominent and developed. History has often linked this work with darkness or drug use-- because that's the direction latter day interpolators have magnified-- but when you get right down to it, what you frequently hear are dudes having fun while rapping endlessly off the top of the dome. What could be more hip-hop?
None of this is to discredit the impact of the slowness. The crawl of a Screw tape was immaculate as well as earth-and-skull-shattering. Hip-hop has always been a genre of quiet innovations, and it makes sense that something as simple as slowing things down would prove to magnify the effect of its most instantly affecting component-- that bass. Screw didn't invent the idea of pitching down rap records to this end-- another Houston DJ by the name of Darryl Scott had been doing it prior, as had more than a few Miami DJs-- but he was the one who perfected it by pushing it to extremes that would've previously defied logic. Everything was slowed and everything had to be slower than it was before.
It was an immersive experience. Though his music is now mostly disseminated via YouTube fragments, Screw's primary medium was the long-form mixtape. Eight or 12 or 20 tracks stretched across a 100 or 120 minute Maxell XLII cassette. Gray Tapes. While full-length Chopped & Screwed mixes still make the rounds today-- acts like OG Ron C and DJ Slim K churn out freebee and sometimes-artist-sanctioned C&S takes on full lengths by everyone from Rocky to Frank Ocean-- they're usually released on the Dat Piff circuit and to very little fanfare[1]. Meanwhile, fan-made single track mixes of recent hits still rack up YouTube views despite their obvious amateurishness. These tracks are tailored directly to neophytes, an audience that seems more interested in the idea of Screw Music than in its execution.
In life, Screw was largely protective of his brand, if not his aesthetic. "It's only a Screw tape if I Screw it," he told The Source in a brief 1995 interview. But there might be an even shorter explanation for why so many of the Screw-style mixes by today's adherents sound outright horrible: It's only a tape if it's a tape. Screw made analog music through and through[2], but it was the cassette in particular that defined his sound. Not just the thump of it but the warmth as well. And there was something almost poetic about this loyalty to the naturally decaying format. Even if he had never actively Screwed his tapes, they might've still eventually slowed to Screwed pace with time, as if by instinct.
His exact recording method has been obscured by myths over the years-- I've heard stories as abstract as him putting a screw on the face of the record, to loosening some sort of a magic screw inside the turntable (never mind that neither of these are actually things that would result in the slowing down of a record[3]). In fact, the effect came much further down in the recording chain, having little to do with the turntables themselves but with a basic pitch shift effect that was common on multitrack cassette recorders (1200s also have pitch shift but they don't go to the extremes that Screw's stuff would end up at). This methodology lent itself to unique and complicated blends. He wasn't just throwing a ccapellas over instrumentals in the pre-mash up era, but playing records on top of previously recorded multitrack mixes to the point where he could be stacking three or four different records all at once, each with a new slight layer of hiss and humanity.
Listen to a real-life Screw tape alongside those latter-day acolytes and it becomes apparent how technology has colored-- and still colors-- the form. By the time the Screw aesthetic had fully disseminated, technology had seemingly caught up to his imagination, but only in the most superficial way possible. Now you can type "how to screw a song" into YouTube and find a bevy of tutorials, most of which don't even acknowledge the act of DJing. One of the few that does is entitled "The correct way to Chop and Screw using Virtual DJ" and features the following comment exchange below the video: "This is gay do not use this method it is too complicated for something so easy."; "This is the method DJ Screw used when he invented screwed music." (It isn't and it isn't.) But that's progress, I guess. This technological democratization has inverted the delicate balance of craft and slop that defined the classic Screw tape-- too polished sonically, too unrefined in terms of performance.
His successors are also lacking in what might've been Screw's greatest strength-- his taste. Like all true tastemakers, he was beholden only to his convictions. This meant banging Bay Area hard head B-Legit in the same space as British reggae stars Steel Pulse and then letting those influences trickle down throughout the scene. "We wasn't really worried about what was going on in the rest of the world," said fellow Texas legend Pimp C in the The Untold Story documentary. "When we did hear the rest of the world, it was cause DJ Screw was putting us up on it. We wasn't checking for nobody unless it was on a Screw tape."
And while Screw might've been brushed off as a regional phenomenon in his time, his taste in rap was anything but. Yes, he showed his city love and rightfully so-- dropping cuts from both local stars like the Geto Boys and Port Arthur ex-pats UGK and unheralded contemporaries like Street Military and Coppertone Conspiracy alike-- but he also reached well beyond his immediate borders. His usual favorites included gruff-voiced Sacramento goon C-Bo, under-heralded Los Angeles G-Funk pioneers Above the Law, and Chicago double-time spitters Do or Die; legend has it he was one of if not the first DJs to spin Cash Money records outside of New Orleans. At the same time it was not uncommon for him to bring contemporary superstars like Pac and Biggie or even critical darlings like Nas and A Tribe Called Quest into the mix. The slowness flattened their differences and highlighted the similarities of these disparate acts. He'd even drive that point home further by reaching back and dropping common 80s influences like Whodini or LL Cool J.
This geographical diversity was a reflection of the culture that produced Screw and artists like him. Hip-hop's largest markets-- New York and, to a lesser extent, Los Angeles[4]-- were so empowered as media hubs that they could sustain an internal dialogue in their rap scenes. So while those media hubs fortified their borders (and eventually feuded vocally), a national network of underground rap spread quietly. Memphis acts were blowing up Chicago, Bay Area rappers were huge in Texas, etc. The biggest of these artists-- the E-40s and Twistas and Eightball & MJGs-- were quietly selling hundreds of thousands of records while rarely earning more than a footnote in The Source or any play on "Rap City"[5]. Screw tapes might be the best standing document of this silent majority's interests.
But you don't hear them. This disconnect can partially be chalked up to a matter of practicality. Screw's catalog is a deep one to dive into. If he's not the most prolific mixtape DJ of all-time he's certainly the best documented one. Two hundred and fifty-six of these tapes have been reissued posthumously as double CDs in the officially sanctioned (though often shoddily produced and mastered) Diary of the Originator reissue series. Past that there are a few dozen piecemeal retail collections of varying degrees of legitimacy along with a countless number of tapes that have yet to be anthologized but are likely still floating around in shoeboxes and glove compartments or as ghosts in the Megaupload machine.
It's an intimidating catalog to parse, but it's definitely worth parsing. If only because it exists. Though we now take artistic sprawl for granted in hip-hop, that was definitely not the case in the 90s. Major-label rappers toiled away for years at a time making grand statements. The independent rap worlds-- and particularly those of the mixtape DJs-- were sometimes more generous with their output, but even then most of that has been lost to time. As such the Screw catalog is one of the purest and more expansive musical snapshots of small culture hip-hop out there. Hundreds of hours of recordings culled from one bedroom studio, breadcrumbs left over the course a decade by a group of friends and their leader tracing back every small step of their creative evolutions while simultaneously providing a running tally of hip-hop trends writ large[6]. As fascinating as Screw's influence has been in the years since his passing, his output might be better used as a lens to the past that we lost with him.
[1] Strangely more notable-- and, in my opinion, competent-- second wave C&S artists like Michael Watts and Beltway 8 have abandoned the form or disappeared completely, perhaps failing to fully make the transition to the internet era.
[2] In a 2010 interview with Jesse Serwer, Screwed Up Click member ESG recalled how then rival Northside DJ Michael Watts was able to gain traction in the late 90s as he transitioned to playing CDs while Screw stubbornly stuck to vinyl. "Screw would not change," he said. "If Serato was out when he was living, he would not do it. It was strictly turntables."
[3] Screw himself maintained that the name had nothing to do with his mixing process at all but instead his rejection process. When he heard a record that he didn't like he'd take a screw to the grooves, rendering it unplayable.
[4] Admittedly, L.A.'s hip-hop borders were always more porous than New York's, particularly on the creative side of things-- there's an entire alternate history to be written about the direct influence that Texas rap had on the rise of Death Row, for example.
[5] Pimp C might've best articulated this division on his underground classic "Top Notch Hoes", a not-so-subliminal shot at vocally anti-jiggy Northeastern rap darlings the Roots and Jeru the Damaja: "They play they videos every day/ Sold 50,000, he swole/ Y'all bitches act like y'all don't know me/ Bitch I always go gold."
[6] The only other semi-accessible archive of that nature that I can think of are the dubs of Stretch Armstrong & Bobbito's legendary Thursday night show on Columbia University's WKCR that have floated around forever. Though the sounds and styles of the two communities are dramatically different, I see a lot of similarities between the WKCR recordings and Screw tapes. Both offer panoramic glimpses of dominant 90s underground rap scenes by way of a bunch of kids-- some of whom were or would become major stars-- spitting rhymes and playing records in a casual environment. The one major and unfortunate difference is that Stretch & Bob tapes are not available commercially, and the once obsessively-fan-curated .rar rips are now mostly buried in the RIAA's dead-link graveyard.