My name is Screw. In the early s, a teenager named Robert Earl Davis Jr. Just a couple of years later, his music would become impossible to ignore around Houston. 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.
Part of the reason is that most slowed and chopped records are processed digitally now. There were no computers involved. 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. And then there was the live aspect of it, the unwritten part. He had his fader set to Hamster style, the reverse of most turntable setups, so that he could make quicker stabs between the discs.
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 minute Maxell gray cassette. The waves of the music were buried into the natural rattle of the cassette, and that was where Screw found his frequency. Nothing had a beat counter on it. He was just actually listening to the song through his headphones and hearing a beat count in his mind.
There was no such thing as BPM to him. 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. 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.
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. Everything followed his hands.
