DJ Screw’s music goes well with drugs - I believe this has been well-established - but the underappreciated reason for this is that DJ Screw’s music goes well with everything. I vividly remember my first encounter with it: my first year in college, fresh off an early exit from whatever that insanely bad Intro to Business course was, I found myself in dire need of a restroom. Naturally, I was wearing headphones; while wandering the halls, I absentmindedly threw on DJ Screw’s Vol. 2: All Screwed Up, which I had just downloaded (embarrassingly, I think it was the repeated Houston references in coverage of A$AP Rocky’s LIVE.LOVE.A$AP that caused me to finally investigate). It was then that I found it: an ornately-appointed, single occupancy bathroom approximately two-thirds the size of my current apartment. In my memory it was mostly marble and gold, but I’m willing to accept that this may not be completely accurate. Overcome by the heady undergraduate symbolism of shitting in this shrine to greed, my mind went blank.

I don’t know how long I spent in there, but I’m supremely pleased to reassure you that appreciating DJ Screw’s work requires neither drugs nor entrapment in an insane class warfare metaphor; an ear, ideally two, will suffice. While it’s probably fair to say that the sound was born of an obsession with codeine-based cough syrup (the city of Houston’s, if not Screw’s own), that’s an enormous disservice to its universal applicability - syrup or not, at what other speed can you possibly imagine life in Houston, the country’s sweatiest city, moving? Blessedly, triple-digit temperatures and hellish humidity are usually an either/or situation, but I’ve spent enough summers in Virginia to understand how the pace of existence decreases when the two meet.

Beyond that, a lot of the Screw mythos simply makes you wish you’d been involved: his earliest recordings (often referred to, descriptively, as grey tapes) were often made as gifts for friends, and the infamous June 27 documents an extended freestyle session that broke out during the birthday party of DeMo Sherman. It’s a perfect distillation of the Houston scene at the time, at once better-preserved and more wonderfully spontaneous than most history-in-the-making moments that we get to look back upon. More than that, everything about the recording suggests that being there would’ve been not only enormously historically significant but also fun as hell. The roster of emcees is a veritable who’s who of the Houston sound, but there are also plenty of dudes dropping bars like Off the showroom / them hoes they come soon / I got to sweep my friend / with a surprise like a broom. Wrongly, but plausibly, you feel like you just might’ve been able to hang.

While these freestyle recordings are the rap game’s Dead Sea Scrolls, the real magic of DJ Screw is in his mixes - not in any individual tape so much as the sublime vastness of his catalog. There are something like three or four hundred tapes that have surfaced online, many of which are available for download here; the custom nature of a lot of his work means there’s really no way to estimate how many might have been produced in total. There are some consensus favorites, from which you’ll find a few selections below, but there’s also a tape for everything. Chapter 214: Old School, a personal favorite, starts with The Blackbyrds (although the CD labels it as a song by Robert Plant???) and ends with Bootsy Collins. Chapter 97: Players Choppin’ Game ends with an unbelievable mix of Lil Wayne’s Fuck the World at a time that Wayne would’ve only just been emerging from his status as a regional curio.

While Screw’s influence has touched every corner of the rap world, the man himself has never approached nationwide popularity on the scale of his legacy in Texas (where he’s been named, by Rick Perry no less, an official Texas Music Pioneer and June 27th is a legitimate holiday). That’s ok - I’ve talked at relative length about my enthusiasm for musical and cultural terroir, and I’m wild about the idea that varying degrees of authentic experience can still exist even for an eminently transportable medium. It creates a total mystique about Houston (which I've never visited but very much want to) - what is it about the place that brought about DJ Screw's sound, allowed it to flourish? How does that je ne sais quoi manifest in life beyond music? I have no idea, and it's a welcome uncertainty - I'm not sure that another artist has ever made me wonder.

The Hip Replacement Guide to DJ Screw
01. DJ Screw, Daylight (Chapter 97: Players Choppin’ Game)
02. DJ Screw, Pimp Tha Pen (3 'N the Mornin' (Part Two))
03. DJ Screw, Bump and Grind (Chapter 16: Late Night Fuckin Yo Bitch)
04. DJ Screw, Wild Goose Chase (Chapter 245: Waitin’ On Slant)
05. DJ Screw, Fat Pat Freestyle (Chapter 57: Wineberry Over Gold)
06. DJ Screw, 25 Lighters Freestyle (Chapter 13: Leanin’ on a Switch)
07. DJ Screw, Mackin’ Ain’t Easy (Chapter 251: Stressed Out)
08. OG Ron C, Time After Time (Fuck Action 26)
09. OG Ron C, Marvin’s Room (Chop Care)