Texas hasn’t gotten its due as a major piece in the complex puzzle of American art. We’re here to rectify that. Every three weeks, H. Drew Blackburn will conduct a thoroughly scientific analysis of the 254 integral (one for every county) books, movies, tv shows, albums, podcasts, songs, and magazine articles — you name it — that best exemplify the Texas spirit. These texts, products of immense talent, dig into the marrow of our being. When it’s all said and done and we’ve built The Texas Voyager collection, we’ll (figuratively) head to the Johnson Space Center in Houston and shoot it beyond the atmosphere, into the cosmos. A wise person once posed the question: “What if the aliens are hot?” Hold onto that hope — this is our chance to impress ‘em.
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve blurted out “man, hold up,” or “I done came down,” in my youth and followed it up with some awful, no good, terrible bars. (That’s fine. I’m no rapper, and freestyling is hard.) It’s just a part of our culture — jumping in and out of the cipher, audaciously flexing and representing where you’re from. Hip-hop’s culture is malleable, filling every nook of America and reflecting the little things that make a region unique.
For the facets that make Texas hip-hop special, our North Star is DJ Screw and the revolving cast of Houston MCs collectively called the Screwed Up Click. Nothing captures their slow-motion revolution better than “June 27,” recorded on one hot, magical summer night in 1996.
The session began as nothing more than DeMo’s birthday celebration at Screw’s home studio, the Wood Room, according to Lance Scott Walker, author of “DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution” and “Houston Rap Tapes.” It was organized weeks in advance — a do-over of an earlier attempt dubbed “Dancing Candy,” where DeMo rounded up some friends, then drank too much codeine, nodded off, and missed his own recording. No worries, he just figured he’d run it back on his birthday.
“The day was kind of like the way the recording ended up, which is that there were a bunch of people who kind of scattered in at different times, floated in and out, just like they do in the song,” Walker told The Barbed Wire. “Everybody (who was there) has a loose concept of what time it was, which I think is just probably the case any time you were in that house.”
The finished product is remarkable. The sample Screw chose, Kris Kross’s “Da Streets Ain’t Right,” produced by Jermaine Dupri is a left-field choice, on account that it’s a deep cut on an album by child rappers — a testament to his ear as a musician and producer. “He didn’t think like anybody else and his whole approach and his whole swing — I always describe Screw as a great drummer that never ended up being a drummer, because of his swing and what he’s hearing, where he wants to wind things back, where he wants to dig in and create those new rhythms,” Walker said. “I’m a drummer myself, so I know about how you find these pockets where you swing in and nobody else can find exactly that (the way he did).” ‘Til this day Jermaine Dupri has no idea how Screw got his hands on the instrumental, but I think we’re all happy he did.
Screw’s beat is the hypnotic foundation, but all that loose, come-and-go energy hardened into one take with DeMo, Bird, Key-C, Yungstar, Big Pokey, Haircut Joe and K-Luv’s voices rotating in the mix, and specifically, Big Moe’s Barry-White-silky-smooth helped catapult this little experiment into legend. “Most Screw mixes have eight-or ten-minute cuts, but this crew went more than half an hour. It turned into a tornado; nobody stopped, everybody fed off the next verse,” Walker said. “Jam bands don’t even hold songs that long — the Dead tap out sooner — but these guys kept pushing.”
As soon as “June 27” left the Wood Room, it became an instant classic. The tape was released on July 4th weekend in Galveston, soundtracking beach parties, cookouts, and revelry in the sun.
The tape spread rapidly, and everyone was listening to the masterpiece in its entirety, Walker noted. “It was a time that was just a high moment for so many people, where they felt like they could put on this 35-minute track and just really bury themselves in it, wrap themselves in it, and create this vibe,” he said. And when it was over, well, they’d just run it back again.
It sounds grandiose to say, but three decades after its release, Screw’s magnum opus is bigger than a song — it’s the soul of a movement.
Long before streaming made discovery effortless, fans drove to Screw’s house, parked out front, walked up to the gate, and bought tapes directly from the man himself. The sidewalk hustle echoes the blueprint drawn up by Rap-A-Lot Records founder James Prince, but how Screw operated is the crest of Southern rap’s independent spirit.
Screw didn’t discover this style of music either. There were other Houston DJs before him, like the ‘80s-era DJ Darryl Scott, who at first accidentally slowed down house and funk 45 rpm records at 33, and then, when people responded to the sound, he kept at it.
Screw added texture and intentionality, painstakingly choosing the tracks he used. He zeroed in and chopped up the tales weaved by MCs, aware that what the men spoke about on his records functioned as oral histories and political dialogue.
That signature sound became the spark that pushed Houston rap onto the national radar in the early aughts — ”Sittin’ Sidewayz,” one of this era’s greatest songs, takes its hook from a “June 27” verse — and beyond. You hear his influence in everyone from Drake to A$AP Rocky to pop divas.
His style has become so ubiquitous, “chopped and screwed” is used to describe music that’s slowed, chopped with reverb on top, “chopped and screwed.” Yet real heads know that only DJ Screw can do that. It can be “chopped not slopped,” or another variation, but as Walker puts it, “chopped and screwed belongs strictly to him, because that’s what his hands touched.”
Even though he tragically passed due to a codeine overdose in 2000, Screw is always with us, deep into the marrow of our cultures and traditions — so much so that DeMo’s birthday has turned into an annual celebration of DJ Screw’s life and legacy.
Walker told me he considers DJ Screw’s oeuvre a “universe” more than 300 chapters deep, with “close-by stars that still feel light-years away.” If that ain’t the truth.
“June 27” is the brightest of them all.