If you’re from Houston, or if you know a little something about Houston rap culture, you might know that June 27th is a local day of celebration. On that day, in 1996, Robert Earl Davis, Jr., better known to the world as DJ Screw, recorded his “Chapter 012: June 27th” mixtape, featuring a now-famous 35-minute freestyle from members of Davis’ elite squad of Southside Houston rappers, the Screwed Up Click, who would go on to collectively transform the vibe, energy, and dynamics of southern hip-hop in the mid- to late 1990s.
“June 27th” became Davis’ most popular-selling mixtape; a rare “instant classic” status in the city’s hip-hop underground, slowly seeping out of the Southside and through the sprawling spaces, and “slab” stereos, of Greater Houston. That tape — among the over 300 in his extensive mixtape catalog — is a notable milestone in the unbridled legacy of the city’s most iconic and celebrated DJ.
(For the uninitiated, this year is your chance to celebrate with the many proud “Screwheads” locally and worldwide. (You could stream the mixtape on YouTube or Spotify, but you’d be better off buying a copy for yourself at the world-famous Screwed Up Records and Tapes, while supporting a Black-owned business. Yes, they take online orders, too.)
In the early 1990s, the creation of Davis’ signature “chopped and screwed” sound, forged in his overworked home studio experiments in South Houston, consisted of his deliberate slowdown of a record through the pitch control on one turntable — “screwed” — while he intermittently cut up, or “chopped,” a duplicate of the same record on the other turntable, manipulating his DJ mixer’s crossfader to reiterate key phrasings and selections from the song, like a stutter. It’s a wobbled sound that only a slow-moving, oil-slicked car city like Houston could conceive.
When the mix was done, Davis further slowed the tempo by using the pitch control on his four-track to produce a final “screw tape.” Though he wasn’t the first DJ to slow or chop — local Southside DJs Darryl Scott and Michael Price tinkered with these techniques before him, and just south of Texas’s border, cumbia rebajada (slowed cumbia) DJs like Sonido Dueñez in Monterrey, Mexico, were also popularizing slow music around the same time — he did advance these techniques to fashion an infectious, signature sound like no other. Indeed, to just call him a DJ is to limit him to someone who spins other people’s records: he was a one-man independent, hip-hop visionary, sophisticated turntablist, producer, and then some.
Davis’ penchant for the disruption of continuity and speed, challenging the conventions of music consumption and turntable instrumentation like the rap world’s John Cage, earned him his reputation as the “originator” whose genius would take years to catch on. Today, his music echoes through the catalogs of rap and pop’s current tastemakers and innovators: Travis Scott, Drake, Beyoncé, and A$AP Rocky, to name a few, borrow from and pay homage to Davis’ decelerated revolution.
Like other Southside DJs before him, Davis first started selling copies of his mixtapes at local car shows and MacGregor Park, later moving his operations to his father’s apartment and then to his first home off Greenstone Street, the “Screw House,” selling hand-to-hand through the iron-clad burglar bars securing his front door. Soon, lines formed down his street in eager anticipation of the latest Screw “chapter.” As his notoriety and wealth ascended, earning some estimated $15,000 or more in a single day at the height of his popularity, Davis became a forceful presence in a city with limited socioeconomic mobility for its underserved Black communities.
In “Invisible Houston,” sociologist Robert Bullard’s impactful history of anti-black discrimination examined through the lens of Houston’s urban planning patterns, Bullard describes the “invisible” presence of African Americans in a city whose driving ideology of unfettered capitalism, long celebrated by local elites and boosters, failed to serve its communities of color.
“They (Black Houstonians) are basically invisible when it comes to power,” Bullard noted in an interview with the Texas Observer. “The power to keep things that other people don’t want out of their neighborhoods, the power to get access to the economic infrastructure, the power to get access to the political infrastructure.”
Davis, like Black Houston entrepreneurs before him, eluded his “invisibility” to innovate economic infrastructures outside of the purview of the corporatizing rap industry and local political-economic order. Rival crews, and the Houston Police Department, were on notice.
The gradual gelling of fandom for Davis’ mixtapes moved at the crawling tempo of his music, growing locally, organically: hand to hand, tape to tape. It’s this “hustle and grind” work ethic which has characterized the local rap music industry since its inception, spearheaded by DIY labels and independent artists, following the success of Houston’s Rap-A-Lot Records which flooded the Texas-Louisiana market with new releases and self-made promotional content. By 1998, the demand for screw tapes led to Davis’ opening of Screwed Up Records and Tapes, the first and only music storefront devoted entirely to a single DJ’s mixtapes.
Today, twenty-two years since its founding and nearly two decades since Davis’ passing, Screwed Up Records and Tapes still stands (briefly closed and then reopened at a different location in 2012), thanks to continued management by Davis’ family members and associates, subsisting entirely on Screw’s back catalog (and Screw tees, and Screw towels, and an all-“candy”-flavored soda machine, too.). If ever there was one, it’s the Houston rap sound.
In his life after death, the now-dominant rap icon of the nation’s fourth-largest city, Davis transcended the limitations and social acceptance of rap music that restricted him in his lifetime. An ongoing DJ Screw exhibition at the Contemporary Arts Museum of Houston, on the heels of Nigerian-Houstonian hip-hop phenom Tobe Nwigwe’s filmed interview and eye-catching music video at the Rienzi, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston’s gallery for European decorative arts, further accentuates the recent strides that marginalized Black Houstonians have made in their long-deserved presence in and repurposing of the city’s flagship institutions of culture.
Regrettably, however, as Davis’ legend continued to rise, popular stereotypes and outsider narratives of Houston rap associated his music with the consumption of liquid codeine (otherwise known as lean, purple stuff, drank, etc.), like psychedelics to psychedelic music, despite the fact that most of his listeners don’t consume pharmaceuticals as a requisite to enjoy it.listening to Screw is a visceral, multi-sensory experience, particularly for the subset of hip-hop aficionados who can appreciate the DJ science behind the mixtape. (In my own first listen as an adolescent, from my older brother’s copy of Davis’ classic 1995 “All Screwed Up Vol. II” mixtape, I recall thinking I might be dying, or the rappers might be dying, or both. Like all effective works of existential art, the giant skull impaled by a foot-long screw on the mixtape’s cover further added to my intrigue and creeping anxiety.)
June 27th is not just significant as a day of local hip-hop lore, a day “something happened” in a city outside of the epicenter of rap’s origins. It’s a testament to the ongoing cultural impact of the screw tape and the endeavor to make visible the “invisible” histories of black Houston life, enterprise, and self-determinacy which have largely failed to materialize in the city’s landscape of cultural landmarks and historical markers. In a reimagined history of Houston, one less dependent on its founding Anglo-Texan elites or rejoicing in its oil, gas and petrochemical industries, one might better understand Davis in the lineage of black Houstonians who have contributed to American popular music within the dreadful social conditions that shaped their lives. Indeed, Houston has a distinct relationship with the evolution of American popular music — haphazardly recognized by the city despite concerted efforts by music historians like Tyina Steptoe, Roger Wood, John Nova Lomax, and Jason Woods, among others, to rescue it and give it its due place and context.
A glimpse into those contributions emerge even in the late 1940s, when African American music moguls Don and Evelyn Robey fostered the environs for which the earliest iterations of rock and roll music would first emerge — the legendary Bronze Peacock nightclub in Houston’s Fifth Ward, where mid-century Black music icons such as Clarence “Gatemouth” Brown, Big Mama Thornton, Louis Jordan, and Johnny Ace once performed. Don Robey, like other Black businessmen of the Jim Crow South who dared defy the conventions of Anglo respectability, became a frequent target of police harassment and club raids. (Sadly, the historic building at 2809 Erastus Street, which once housed the Robeys’ Bronze Peacock nightclub, Duke/Peacock Records, and Buffalo Booking Agency, was razed three years ago without a whimper, rendering invisible one of the most significant historical Black spaces in the city. It still lacks a historical marker.)
A generation later, Fourth Ward native William George “Bubbha” Thomas built a jazz music enterprise through his modest-but-mighty Lightnin’ Records, whose independent 1960s-1970s releases significantly contributed to the shifting, ethereal sounds of spiritual jazz during the political-cultural enlightenments of the black Nationalism era. Thomas and his jazzmen, the Lightmen, epitomized the new heights of Black enterprise and black music in the context of a deindustrializing and racially divided Sunbelt city, agents of a compelling history of revolutionary sounds, public access performances, Black activism, and a summer music workshop for inner-city kids which collectively articulated a lifelong pursuit for the transcendent possibilities of jazz. Thomas and the Robeys, like Davis and rap independents decades later, innovated new modes of economic infrastructures and DIY music management to overcome the otherwise limited opportunities of their daily realities and advance the uncharted sounds they heard and envisioned in their minds.
Today, the social movement for black lives is also a social movement for Black histories: to see them, to hear them, to make them visible. George Floyd’s voice — whose immortalized words, “I can’t breathe,” under the choking constraint of a Minneapolic police officer’s knee, gripped the nation and wider world around it to rise up and denounce the systemic illness of anti-Black racism — is the same voice which, years prior, contributed to black Houston music histories in the era of Davis’ June 27th opus. In the emotional magnitude of our times, we can choose to see and hear Floyd as a victim of anti-Black violence, divorced from the context of his life, or we can choose to see and hear and honor Floyd, a Black Houstonian, in his visibly-obscured history as a father, brother, Yates High School champion athlete, community organizer, and former rapper in Davis’ Screwed Up Click — a “gentle giant,” as those who knew him, who went by the apropos MC alias, “Big Floyd.”
Floyd was raised in a significant space in Black Houston with layered cultural histories around him, but much of which, like him, were largely invisible from the city which enveloped it. In the late 1990s, Houston rap fans first heard Floyd’s voice on Davis’ mixtapes, like “Ballin’ in Da Mall,” where Davis playfully invites Floyd — “Come on Big Floyd” — to lay down a freestyle. In a strange, sad twist of fate, Floyd seemed to have fulfilled a dark prophecy on that particular mixtape — “catch me on the TV, nationwide I went” — delivering a sixteen-bar flow about an otherwise ordinary and laid-back day back at the Screw House, fresh from his return that weekend from college.
If we can see and hear Floyd this way, as an extension of a legacy surrounding June 27th, as part of the cultural-historic fabric of this city, reintegrated into his own life story, and as we consider our own ways to make the invisible black histories around us more visible every day and beyond a “sanctioned” month a year, we might better aspire to the urgent demands before us to protect and honor Black lives.
La Rotta is a postdoctoral research scholar in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University where he teaches U.S. Latinx History and Black/Brown History of Rock & Roll.
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