DJ Screw

Robert Earl Davis Jr. was born on the twentieth of July 1971 at Bastrop, Louisiana, the only child of Robert Earl Davis Sr. — a Louisiana iron worker — and Ida Mae Deary, a Louisiana waitress. His parents separated when he was an infant. He was raised by his mother across Bastrop and at the southwestern Houston suburb of Smithville, Texas, and from his ninth year at the South Park district of Houston. He attended the Sterling High School of Houston through 1989.

He took up disc-jockey practice at fifteen in 1986 at the small South Park hip-hop circuit. He took the stage name DJ Screw from his characteristic technique of scratching records at deliberately slowed turntable speeds — by approximately twenty to thirty percent — to produce the slowed-and-resonant playback that he had developed across his teens.

He formalised the slowed-playback technique into what would across the following decade be called chopped and screwed — the systematic deceleration of complete commercial-radio hip-hop tracks combined with the systematic chopping of vocal phrases through manual scratch repetition. The technique produced an entirely new aesthetic register for the genre, in which the originally three-minute commercial single was extended to a five-or-six-minute hypnotic ambient piece.

He began across 1990 distributing custom audio cassettes of his chopped-and-screwed mixtapes from his South Park home at six dollars each. Demand grew rapidly through 1991 and 1992 and across the years 1993 to 2000 he produced an estimated three hundred and fifty original mixtapes. The mixtapes were the principal cultural medium of late-1990s southern hip-hop and the foundational stylistic basis of the post-2000 commercial chopped-and-screwed crossover.

He founded around 1994 the Screwed Up Click — the loose-membership association of South Houston rappers who recorded freestyles for his mixtapes and on whose mixtapes he gave the rappers their early audience. The principal Screwed Up Click rappers included Big Hawk, Big Moe, Big Pokey, Lil' Keke, Z-Ro, Trae the Truth, Lil' Flip and Fat Pat. The Screwed Up Click was the principal regional cultural-and-commercial network of Houston hip-hop of the 1990s.

He was found dead at his South Park studio on the sixteenth of November 2000 of an accidental codeine-and-promethazine overdose. He was twenty-nine.

He is honored here as the inventor of chopped-and-screwed.