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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On October 28 the filmmakers returned for another interview and were shocked again, this time pleasantly. Watford no longer feared that Screw was about to overdose. "He seemed so much more alive," he said. Indeed, when I saw the footage, Screw didn't seem like a man on the brink of death. He looked good, younger than his 29 years. He was overweight, about 215 pounds, with a round face, short hair, a mustache, and a flat crop of hair on his chin. He had a big ring on his right pinkie (for being voted best deejay in the South in a 1999 contest) and a big round medallion around his neck with "Screwed Up Click" on the curves and "DJ" in the center. He looked straight into the camera and spoke softly, confidently. "Wassup, TV world?" he began in his comfortable drawl. "Most of y'all don't know me. I been in your tape deck for years, know what I'm saying? My name is DJ Screw, know what I'm saying?"
Two and a half weeks later he was dead on the floor of a toilet stall at his studio, an ice cream wrapper clutched in his hand. The news threw young people all over Houston into despair. "I had to leave work," the rapper Duke told me. "I couldn't take it. He was like a brother to me." At the wake and the memorial service in Houston and then the funeral in Smithville, speakers praised Screw's generosity and work ethic. They spoke of his heart troubles, and they criticized the media for mentioning drugs as the probable cause of death. "The newspapers in the city of Houston were not fair to a great young man," said his cousin Bobby Jerman at the funeral. "Screw did die of a stressful heart attack." I wanted to believe it, as did everyone else. That's what funerals are all about.
The autopsy report, released in January, confirmed what Screw's close friends already suspected: He died of a "codeine overdose with mixed drug intoxication." He had "toxic levels" of codeine—an opiate, like heroin—in his blood, as well as Valium and PCP. Like many users, Screw would blend drugs to enhance the high. There was no mention of heart disease, though he did have an enlarged heart. Yes, Screw did drugs (according to one old friend, he had sipped syrup every day for the past decade); he was also, in his cousin's words, a great young man. If the history of popular music shows us anything, it's that the two are not irreconcilable.
Of course, music and drugs have always gone together, from jazz and heroin to psychedelic rock and LSD to raves and Ecstasy. I know that a beer makes a song by .38 Special go by easier. Music is a dream, especially under the influence of certain drugs. And it was clear to me that I needed help understanding this Screw music. I needed syrup.So, like Joe Friday going underground to understand the hippies and their weird music, I got the hookup (never mind how). I measured two ounces of the mediciney purple codeine cough syrup into a baby bottle, as I had been shown by a devotee of the craft, and then poured that into a bottle of Big Red, slowly down the sides so the carbonated soda pop wouldn't fizz up. I capped and shook it for thirty seconds, slowly unscrewed the top, and sucked off as much of the escaping carbonation as I could. It was, I was assured, part of the ritual. Then I poured the foamy red potion over ice into a Styrofoam cup. I sipped. It tasted sweet, with a kind of metallic edge. I sipped some more. Then I pulled out June 27th, the unofficial anthem of the south side, and popped it into my tape deck.
It began the way all Screw tapes did: his slurring introduction, the dragging beat, the familiar keyboard melody buzzing like a dying gnat. Then, as I sipped my syrup, something happened. Like a shift in the afternoon light, the bass got deeper and the keyboards began ringing like bells. I wasn't thinking about the music; I was feeling it. Everything made sense. I wasn't impatient at all, and the tape was over before I knew it. Next (by this point my cocktail was long gone) I listened to 3 'N the Morning, Part Two. Nothing seemed slow; everything was, for the lack of a better word, mellow. Then, since I have a tape player with pitch control, I screwed some other tapes. Van Morrison sounded great and Lucinda Williams awful. Willie Nelson's "Night Life" was transcendent, an entirely new song. Then, all of a sudden, I got very sleepy.
When I had asked the rappers Mike D, Hawk, Lil-O, 3-2, and Clay-Doe how important syrup and weed are to screw music, there had been a pause. "You want the truth?" asked Mike D. "Yes," I replied, knowing what was coming. "It's everything," he answered, and the room erupted in laughter. "With syrup it sounds so right," said one of the others. "You right on time," said Mike D, to more laughter.
Not everybody agreed, though, about the importance of being screwed up. "I like Screw music, and I don't smoke or drink," Russell Washington told me. "I don't like everything that's screwed. But some songs you hear screwed and it just feels better. Especially if it's something you like." Web site owner and fan Tosin said, "Screw music isn't about doing drugs, but a lot of people smoke or sip syrup and that adds to it. Me, I clean up the house listening to Screw." Screw was of two minds on the subject. In the liner notes of 3 'N the Morning, he wrote instructions for listening: "Get with your click and go to that other level by sippin' syrup, gin, etc., smoke chronic indo, cess, bud, or whatever gets you to that other level." But in that late October interview he said, "People think just to listen to my tapes you gotta be high or dranked out . . . That ain't true. There's kids getting my tapes, moms and dads getting my tapes, don't smoke or drink or nothing."
Screw did, and Washington, his former manager and a recovering crack addict, admitted what Screw's family couldn't: "His lifestyle killed him. Syrup, pills. He probably needed help but didn't know where to turn." The truth is, Screw was surrounded by others living the same life he was, one that he himself had put to music. What might have seemed troubling to normal folks—from his obesity to the tape buyers, high on codeine, crashing into the fence around his house—would not have seemed out of the ordinary or dangerous to the king of the underground. He had created this scene. What could possibly hurt him?
Over at Screwed Up Records and Tapes, the slow life goes on. In January I walked in and stood in front of the dry-eraser board that showed the titles of about 125 Screw tapes. His music throbbed off the walls. I got in line and ordered South Side Still Holding from the man behind the bulletproof glass, who turned out to be Shorty Mac, who has been running the store since Screw's death. He told me the label is going to keep releasing old tapes as well as eight to ten new ones Screw had made before he died—mostly mixes with only a little rapping. The store has recently started putting tapes on CD, in plain plastic cases with no track listings. They're also finally selling them on the Internet (screweduprecords.com).Screw's family is also trying to get his affairs in order, but they're running into the kinds of problems that often accompany a dead rich man, from the woman claiming to have had Screw's baby to squabbling about his store, equipment, and money. Screw was never much of a businessman, and now his two long-divorced parents, neither of whom have had much experience in the business or music worlds, have to deal with the chaos he left behind. Some wonder what became of all the cash Screw kept around. His father told me there is a safe-deposit box, but because of a court order, no one has seen what's inside. His mother just wants to get his jewelry back from one of Screw's cousins. Whatever happens, it's clear that some kind of business plan needs to be made in Screw's world. There are at least 135 master tapes, as well as twenty shoe boxes full of other tapes, some of them unreleased—a potential gold mine. And hundreds of bootleggers, making millions off Screw's good name, to be fought.
It should be obvious by now that screwed music is no gimmick. It is so popular in Houston now—among blacks as well as Latinos and white kids—that every local label releases two versions of every rap CD: a regular and a screwed version. If the label doesn't screw it, someone else will. C-Note had an apt analogy for Screw's influence: "You can't tell everybody to stop using computers," he said. "It's not gonna happen. Well, screwed music is like computers."
One of the things that stuck in my head from Watford and Santschi's documentary was Screw's simple advice that seemed to sum up his career: "Always be yourself. Don't try to be like the next man, know what I'm saying? Be you." Sometimes people need help finding their own voices, especially on the south side of Houston. In February I went to a late-night recording session at a small studio on Telephone Road. It was Al-D's night, but Shorty Mac, a rapper named Trey, and a young woman were all there to rap with him. As producer Watford recorded the beats, the four sat hunched over spiral notebooks silently writing their raps, slapping the air with the cadence of their thoughts, sounding the words that would soon be rushing from their mouths.
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