The Spirit of Hand-To-Hand Screw Tapes: How DJ Screw Seized the Means of Production
The Greater Houston area’s large expanse of highway and prairie makes a public sphere seem unfathomable. In her book of short essays, Trick Mirror, author Jia Tolentino describes Houston, writing, “There’s an irradiated spirit to everything: an impurity that can feel like absolution.” The city’s decentralized spirit and the range of antidotes people find to make sense of its chaos themselves become a sense of security. The recording technique “chopped and screwed,” developed by DJ Screw out of Houston, mimics such dissociative security as his tapes move slowly toward a conclusion you do not need to understand.
By some measures, Houston is the most diverse city in America, but it’s deeply segregated. Houston’s segregated Black neighborhoods are located on the margins of downtown, where oil companies routinely extract natural resources, source cheap labor, and expropriate wealth. Out of the South and West sides of Houston, the Hip-hop scene was born in the 90s. Many people attribute the burgeoning Houston sound to infamous Hip-hop DJ Robert Earl Javis Jr, also known as DJ Screw. Screw’s cousin noticed the way he used a screw to scratch up records he didn’t like, which led to his stage name. He began DJing at a skating rink on the South side of Houston in the late 80s. It is said that in 1989, he hit the wrong button on the turntable, and the tempo slowed. A friend gave him ten dollars to record an entire tape at that tempo, which eventually became his signature sound.
Screw played records on top of previously recorded multitrack mixes, layering three to four different records all at once. Once Screw had his bass-heavy mixes finished, he would slow the tape down and record it onto a master cassette. Using a basic pitch shift he’d then make copies onto one-hundred-minute Maxell chrome tapes, which he would buy in bulk from Sam’s Club. At first, every tape had a handwritten name on the label, like “South Side Still Holding" or "Syrup and Soda." From 8pm to 10pm each night, cars would line up down the block, bringing hundreds of fans, some from other cities, who would crowd the front yard, lining up at the back door where Screw stood to sell tapes and talk with fans. The popularity of his tapes was amazing. In a 2015 interview, Screwed Up Click rapper Lil Flip recalled watching Screw go to car shows with 10,000 to 15,000 tapes and instantly sell out. He didn’t need to sign with a record label; everyone wanted his tapes.
There were more efficient ways for Screw to get his music to people. He could have set up an official distribution network or moved onto the Internet. A music distributor in Houston, Southwest Wholesale, had sprung up for the sole purpose of building a market for independent artists. But Screw insisted on his hand-to-hand method, doing everything in cash with no bank account, hiring friends to manage the crowds. He could never meet the demands for his music. “Some record stores became pirates themselves, duping and selling their own Screw CDs and cassettes.” He was criticized by commercial retailers like Musicmania because of the “lost fortune” he could have made.
Using a capitalist ethic that privileges mechanical reproduction and profit, Screw’s critics deemed his refusal to expand as a failure, saying “he could never get it together.” This perspective fails to consider the value of his hand-to-hand distribution network. He was protective of his aesthetic: "It’s only a Screw tape if I screw it,” he told The Source in a 1995 interview.
According to author Tricia Rose in her book Black Noise, powerful groups maintain and affirm institutional power by concealing or undermining subversive discourses. DJ Screw’s critics, like commercial record stores, disguised their desire to control his means of production and flow of capital by reducing his anti-establishment methods to “failures.” This serves to legitimize the capitalist ethic under which the value of a product is solely determined by its ability to be monetized.
Screw resisted alienation from his craft. Whether by default or design, the accessibility of his tapes privileged those who were closest to him geographically –economically and politically marginalized Black communities in Houston. If commercial record distributors determine which markets are desirable based on profit potential, then DJ Screw threatened institutional control over which groups of people are deemed worthy of access. Thus, the “chopped-and-screw” material production was inherently anti-capitalist.
In Houston, spiritual matters are regulated by Southern evangelicals and extractive oil empires like Exxon and Halliburton. Within Christianity, there are clear prescriptions about who one should be: anything outside of Whiteness and Christianity are deemed corrupt. Southern evangelicalism supports the belief that wealth is a kind of divine right, and those who have it are worth more to God than everyone else.This logic conveniently lends itself to Houston’s multinational oil companies extractive measures, which benefit wealthy white populations while exploiting Black communities.
By the late 90s, Screw had become addicted to codeine cough syrup. The drug has since become associated with rappers and racialized, even though it’s used across all demographics. Screw’s “swamp gospel” created an alternative code for spirituality that undermines Christianity’s domain over faith and piety.
Like codeine, Screw’s music slowed the story down: each word pronounced, dark tunes got darker, with a bass so thick your body could feel weightless. “Chopped-and-screwed” urges the listener to internalize the tempo and its existential qualities. The track “My Mind Went Blank” from his 1995 album All Screwed Up, Vol. II, begins its first verse with: “Every time I wake up, I give the swisha sweet a hit // Sometimes I feel I just can’t survive without that lick,” which slowly builds to the line: “And if that Buddha don’t do ya, then go dippin.’” If religion or faith can’t bring you solace, you can find your way through with a sedative. He presents the feeling of losing control, repeating scenarios where one cannot find stability: “…when you enter // The South Park chamber, you in danger,” which is ultimately resolved in the chorus that repeats, “It’s hard to think, when my mind goes blank // You just can’t think when your mind goes blank.”
In Jia Tolentino’s essay titled, “Ecstasy,” she writes, “There are feelings, like ecstasy, that provide an unbreakable link between virtue and vice. You don’t have to believe a revelation to understand that something inside it was real.” In the state of ecstasy you realize that something both within and outside you will pull you through. This captures the spirit of the “chopped–and–screwed” tempo: The bass is thick enough to hold you; the beat skips and stutters making you feel like your heart is about to stop; and the tempo drones on into absolution.
The “chopped-and-screw” style and DJ Screw’s unrelenting commitment to slowness, continues to influence mainstream Hip-hop. In his 2019 No. 1 hit, “Sicko Mode,” Houston rapper Travis Scott samples Big Hawk, a member of the Screwed Up Click. Ultimately, Screw created a local distribution system, employing his friends and privileging people geographically close to him. An authentic screw tape gives you a sense of spiritual guidance as its slow tempo gives way to a heady and dissociative security. It is undeniable that Screw was a rare triple threat: a tastemaker, a masterful technician, and someone who recognized the cultural value in sharing an unmediated Hip-hop experience.
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