The Slow Life and Fast Death of DJ Screw
He was one of the most influential cultural figures in Texas—a generous godfather to a generation of rappers, an entrepreneur of Houston's mean streets, the master of a scene fueled by codeine cough syrup and hip-hop beats.
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Ellis compares the Houston scene to the punk rock revolution of the late seventies, when everybody, it seemed, was starting bands. "The cultural difference is that in Houston, it's not bad to make money," he says. "The goal is not to lose your middle-classness but to achieve it." Although there is plenty of rapping about street violence, guns, and the like, most of the songs concern the vagaries of leisure: ballin' (partying), being a player (one who excels at partying), making money, and hanging out with your buddies in H-town. They rap in detail about the outrageously colorful, candy-coated slabs (cars) with screens (TVs) mounted on the visors, twenty-inch blades (wheels), and wood (wood-grained steering wheels). They sing about swangin' and bangin' (slowly and artfully swerving while cruising and listening to music) and taking drugs, which include marijuana (sometimes dipped in formaldehyde and PCP and called "wet" or "fry") and, especially, codeine cough syrup, which is usually mixed with soda pop or lemonade and poured over ice into a large Styrofoam cup. It's also called lean, because when you drink enough of it you begin to, well, lean. There's a lot of leaning going on in Houston these days. The cover of City of Syrup shows Big Moe pouring a purple drink from a Styrofoam cup over the Houston skyline. "Po' it up," Big Moe sings, "let your mind be free."
And they rap about Screw. In rapper ESG's huge hit, "Swangin' and Bangin'," he sings, "And now you know what my real G's do: sip syrup, swang and bang, jam nothing but that Screw, fool." In Houston they admire Screw because of his mind-boggling success and influence. Nothing has had more effect on what the kids say, wear, drive, and ingest than those Screw tapes. They love him for doing something so obvious, slowing music down, and turning it into an art form. And for taking them along for the ride.
A couple of weeks after Screw's funeral, I returned to Smithville, drove past the railroad tracks and the cemetery, down Hel Kat Lane and then Cemetery Road, and into the rutted passways of the Countryside Mobile Home Park, looking for Ida M. Deary Davis, a.k.a. Mama Screw. This is not, I thought, the Smithville of Hope Floats. The route I took was the same one Screw used to take, though he used to announce his arrival, in his bright blue Impala Super Sport with fifteen-inch blades, five screens, and a monster stereo system, in a different fashion. "When he'd get to the corner down there," Davis told me, "I'd hear that car stereo. He'd turn it up and I'd say, 'Here comes Screw.'" She smiled at the memory, sitting in the living room of the trailer she shares with her longtime companion, Jack Thompson. On the walls, scattered among photos of her grandchildren, are posters from her son's handful of CDs— several featuring a skull with a screw through its head.Robert Earl Davis, Jr., was born July 20, 1971, in Bastrop, not far from Smithville. His father, Robert Senior, was a long-haul truck driver based in Houston. His mother (who had a young daughter from a previous marriage), came to the area to be with her mother when her son was born. She returned to Houston, but the marriage was foundering; soon it would be over, and she and her kids moved to Los Angeles for a couple of years, then back to Houston, and returned to Smithville in 1980.
When Robert Earl was young, he wanted to be a truck driver like his father. That changed the more he heard his mother's music collection. The boy's life was changed forever by two things: seeing Breakin', the 1984 hit movie about rap and break dancing, and discovering his mother's turntable. He would take her B.B. King and Johnnie Taylor records and "scratch" them on the turntable the way deejays did, slowing the spinning disc and then allowing it to speed back up, playing with sound. Robert Earl began buying records of his own and playing deejay with his distant cousin Trey Adkins, who would rap. "Screw had a jam box," Adkins told me, "and he hooked up two turntables to it and made a fader out of the radio tuner so he could deejay." Adkins said if Robert Earl didn't like a record, he would deface it with a screw. One day Adkins asked him, "Who do you think you are, DJ Screw?" Robert Earl liked the sound of that and in turn gave his cousin a new name: Shorty Mac.
The boys rode bikes and played video games. Screw was obsessed with a game called Galaga and could play it so well that he could make the score counter go all the way back to zero. He was a decent student but never excelled at school. "All he had was music in his head," said Davis. In addition to a love for music, Screw picked up something else from her. To support her income (she The Slow Lifehad three jobs as a cleaning lady), she became something of an independent businesswoman. "I'd make tapes from my records," she remembered. "Not many, but people would come by and buy them. He would stand there and watch me."One day Robert Earl Davis, Sr., came and got his son and took him to Houston. That, as it turned out, was probably for the best. There were no jobs for black teenagers in Smithville, and Screw needed an urban environment to perfect his urban art form. He went right to work on it. "When I'd leave home," his father told me, "I wouldn't worry about him being on the street. I knew he'd be up in his room playing his music." Robert Senior was driving for a chemical company and went all over Texas and Louisiana, and during that time father and son lived in a hard-edged black working-class neighborhood near Hobby Airport. Screw dropped out of Sterling High School when he was a sophomore. All the low-key teen cared about was music, he told his skeptical father, and he was going to make it big one day.
At seventeen Screw got his first job as a deejay, at Almeda Skating Rink on the south side. Soon he would be working at clubs like Boomerang, where he refined his turntablism—juggling the beats of two different records, scratching, repeating phrases, improvising, watching the dancers' reactions to certain songs, riffs, and rappers. Screw liked West Coast gangsta rappers like Compton's Most Wanted and Ice Cube. He was always working the turntables at home, studying the techniques of New York deejays and making mix tapes—compilations on which he would string together rap songs, scratches, and various beats—for friends from albums in his huge record collection. One day in 1989, he was mixing in his apartment with some friends. They were drinking and smoking marijuana and, according to Charles Washington, who would become Screw's first manager, Screw accidentally hit the turntable's pitch button, slowing everything down. Screw liked the way it sounded, though he was incredulous when one of his friends offered him $10 to record a slowed-down mix tape. "Screw thought the guy was crazy," said Washington. But he did it, and the next day Screw's friend came back with a couple of friends, who also wanted slowed-down tapes.
For the teenager, it was the beginning of a whole new career. Sometimes on his tapes Screw would get on the mike and call out the names of Houston neighborhoods over the music; then he'd slow the whole thing down and sell the tape or just give it away. Eventually Screw started letting friends and friends of friends rap, or "flow," over the beats. They would bring a list of songs with beats they wanted to rap to; Screw would add his own records. "He'd see what you wanted to flow off of," Shorty Mac told me, "and then find a beat. Whatever mood you were feeling, he'd jump on that with his scratches and beats." Screw had two turntables and would use his right hand to scratch and his left to run the volume crossfader between the two, fast, like a joystick, though he could scratch with both hands at the same time, and even his knees, Houston rapper Al-D told me.
But Screw also had the ear. He knew what beats to use and which would sound good when slowed down later, when to scratch and when to flow. Screw was always in control of the session, directing and coaxing his rappers like a conductor. "He was a true artist," said Russell Washington of BigTyme Recordz (no relation to Charles Washington). "He cared about the minutest of details. The scratches had to be just right. He told me that every song on that tape told a story." Once he had his bass-heavy mixes finished, he would slow the tape down and record it onto a master cassette. He would then dupe copies onto one-hundred-minute Maxell chrome tapes—called grays—which he would buy in bulk from Sams Club. Every tape had a name, like South Side Still Holding or Syrup and Soda. At first Screw would write them by hand on the label, along with his pager number. There was no cover art, no track listings. As he started selling more and more tapes, he began getting the labels printed. And the pager stopped answering.
Everybody wanted Screw tapes. One reason was that you could understand the words, and the rappers Screw chose were all good with words. Another was that Screw picked great songs, usually West Coast gangsta raps that he liked and not whatever was a hit. Plus, he was a homeboy, from their very own south side. Maybe best of all, Screw had found a way to slow down time—he had found another world. So many people were coming to his apartment to buy tapes that the building manager thought he was a drug dealer. The police kicked in his door a couple of times looking for drugs. He moved to a home near Gulfgate Mall and fans followed, knocking on his door at all hours.
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