The late, great DJ Screw, born Robert Earl Davis Jr., sold mixtapes in high school for lunch money. He went on to open his own record store—the legendary Screwed Up Records & Tapes—sell hundreds of thousands of copies of his albums, and establish himself as the godfather of Houston hip-hop, all before his untimely death in 2000 from a codeine overdose at 29. Now, a new exhibit at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses, explores his artistic legacy. His lunch money mixtapes didn’t have the same sound for which he would become known; Big Bubb, Screw’s cousin and the current owner of Screwed Up Records & Tapes, says as much in a documentary filmed for the exhibit. At that point, he was still experimenting, becoming the artist Houston knows and loves.
By slowing, chopping, and incorporating freestyles from other artists in the Screwed Up Click—his collective of 29 Houston rappers—Screw fractured others’ beats into a sound particular to his time and place. Mimicking the effects of lean—a potent mixture of codeine cough syrup and soda, usually Sprite—Screw tapes bump along at a sedate pace, warping the track’s voices and beat. The style earned him the nickname “The Originator.” Big Bubb puts it simply: “He was the sound of Houston … Screw would take songs that you didn’t like and put them in a mix and make you love them.”
