He numbered his releases and, in a precursor to Screw’s personal tapes, would sometimes release them to a certain few before running off copies to sell at the car wash and MacGregor Park – where he was all too happy to take your $20 over that guy’s $10 if the line was long enough. Scott’s tapes were heavy on funk rather than rap: Cameo, Freedom, and The Gap Band. Before there was DJ Screw, there was Darryl Scott, who was spinning records in the Southside nightclubs of Houston club mogul Ray Barnett in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s while everybody banged his mixtapes. Screw moved the beats around like a drummer, and the voices of the rappers that freestyled on his tapes shifted with it, consciously or not. Their rhythmic sensibilities couldn’t help but be influenced: you can hear it in the styles of Screwtape regulars like Fat Pat, Lil’ Keke, Hawk, E.S.G., Big Pokey, and Big Moe. Hip hop reigned in his playlists, particularly 2Pac, but he wove anything he liked into the tapestry, and an entire generation of rappers grew up accustomed to hearing their voices slowed down more often than regular speed. The storytelling came alive, and the vibration beneath it was built from a vast library of hip hop, funk, soul, reggae and R&B records that Screw would rope together and drag down to the same level, no matter the origin of the sound. Screw towed a whole swarm of analog sound with him into a new dimension: where you could hear the music being torn apart as it rushed by, where you could count the letters of every word being spoken like they were being spoken to you. He was just actually listening to the song through his headphones and hearing a beat count in his mind. The turntable didn’t have a beat counter on it.
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There was no machine that was showin’ him how to do it. But doin’ a blend? Screw was doin’ that straight off his own mind. “They doin’ it now because of Serato, and all these other programs that they got that tell you the beat count. “The technology we have today makes it real simple,” said Lil’ Randy, a DJ who appeared on numerous Screwtapes and still implements the same vinyl to tape methods as Screw. The waves of the music were buried into the natural rattle of the cassette, and that was where Screw found his frequency. Then, he’d run that recording back through the tape deck, slowing it down with the four-track’s pitch control and taking the tape down another generation. This would all be recorded live to tape, with Screw knowing exactly how long he could record for and still stretch it out to fill one side of a 100-minute Maxell gray cassette. He had his fader set to Hamster style, the reverse of most turntable setups, so that he could make quicker stabs between the discs. Screw would have two copies of the same record spinning on the turntables, one playing just behind the other, and he’d “chop” back and forth between them with his crossfader at moments he wanted to bring out scratching and running records back to repeat phrases and double up beats, sometimes dragging a finger alongside the wheel to give it a warble. And then there was the live aspect of it, the unwritten part. The warmth of vinyl records was central to the frequency he carved out, as was the depth of the sound he got by recording to tape. Part of the reason is that most slowed and chopped records are processed digitally now. Screw’s tree is alive and well, even if it’s grown branches that no longer recognize the trunk. The techniques are no longer confined to hip hop, having now been applied to everything from country music to cumbia, even spilling over into the mainstream to adorn the works of pop giants like Justin Bieber and Lady Gaga. Contemporary rappers like Drake and A$AP Rocky have adapted the Houston sound into their own, bringing it to an even wider audience, and the term “screw” has been co-opted to describe any kind of music that has been slowed from its original speed. Screw’s influence spread first through hip hop, fueling the Houston rap juggernaut of 2005 (when the city’s rap game reached heights unseen since Geto Boys broke in 1991), and has now stretched around the world.
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