© Karen Warren, Staff Photographer / Houston Chronicle
ESG’s first thought was that T.I.’s Trap Music Museum, in Atlanta, might be a good fit for a show about DJ Screw’s life and work. But his hometown of Houston, for all its hip-hop glory, didn. Stream Its All Good Mixtape by Various Artists Hosted by DJ SCREW THE LAST SCREW TAPE WIT FAT PAT AND KEKE FLOWIN ON IT.ITS ALSO P.A.T B-DAY home mixtapes Newest Hot Week Celebrated upcoming singles news gear. Chopped and Screwed Tribute. DJ Screw Visual Tribute All Screwed Up Dropping Soon And we know how you can see it before its official release. By Emma Schkloven at 2:42pm. DJ Mix Screw – Michael '5000' Watts Executive-Producer – Tomica Wright Photography By – Jonathan Mannion.
at Screwed Up Records and Tapes, at 3538 W Fuqua, Friday, Sept. 2, 2016 in Houston. Robert Earl Davis aka DJ Screw did only a few interviews during his short lifetime, he died in 2000, and also wasn't often photographed. He opened up Screwed Up Records and Tapes, in the late 1990s. ( Karen Warren / Houston Chronicle )
Like so many other fans of Robert Earl Davis Jr., the musical innovator better known as DJ Screw, when Isaac “Chill” Yowman thinks about Screw’s music it projects a scene from his past.
“On the corner of MLK,” the filmmaker says, “Burger Park, a hood classic. You get your burger, fries, slushy, and sit on the corner watching the cars come down and swang. Playing the music, popping the trunk. Police wouldn’t mess with you: on Sundays, they just let folks be. A Sunday parade.”
Yowman is testament to the cross-generational nature of Screw’s legacy. Now 33, he was just a teen when Smithville native Davis died twenty years ago on Nov. 16 of an accidental overdose. The Houston Cinema Arts Festival hosts two Screw-related events this month including a discussion of Yowman’s new production, “All Screwed Up,” which he describes as a “visual tribute” to the DJ. And at 11:16 p.m. on Nov. 16, Yowman will also present “All Screwed Up,” which can be bought and accessed at allscrewedup.com.
That discussion is just one of the Screw-related activities marking the anniversary of the death of one of the most important music figures to emerge out of Houston. DJ Red will perform a set from Screwed Up Records and Tapes — the retail space on Fuqua that carries on Screw’s legacy and sells his recordings — on Friday. The performance is co-presented with the Contemporary Art Museum Houston’s interdisciplinary exhibit “Slowed and Throwed: Records of the City Through Mutated Lenses.”

In doing so, the DJ’s name rather remarkably lent itself to a musical noun, verb and adjective as Screw screwed music that would be branded as “chopped and screwed.” He created his own corner of the universe. Generals zero hour windows 7.
The celebration of Davis’ life and music will carry on well into 2021 as July 20 would have been his 50th birthday. Also anticipated next year is the release of a DJ Screw biography by Lance Scott Walker, author of “Houston Rap Tapes.”
Music trends come and go pretty quickly. But as DJ Screw, Davis made music that cast a long shadow. Two decades after his death his sui generis sensibility continues to bubble up in popular music, in songs by artists like Beyoncé, Frank Ocean and Vampire Weekend. As a culture raced toward information overload, Screw’s music proved a reminder in the value of slowing things down.
Yowman’s project had been touted as a TV show, but he insists his plan was always to do like Screw and cut his own path with “All Screwed Up.” As a storyteller, he wanted to tell Screw’s tale as “a story of Black excellence.”
“It was just him, his art and his craft,” Yowman says.
A veteran director and cinematographer who has made numerous music videos, Yowman wants his film, for which he was granted the blessing of Davis’ family, to similarly avoid easy categorization. Though tagged early as a TV series, it’s not that, nor is it headed to any of the major streaming services. Yowman says “All Screwed Up” is shorter than a feature film. It mixes the scripted drama of a biopic with animation and found footage into its own entity. “That’s why we’re calling it a visual tribute,” he says. “I don’t want to get entangled in titles about what it is.”
So Yowman’s story is one of the first in what will end up being nearly a year-long celebration of an artist who felt time differently. He was an artist whose music didn’t fit the media parameters of his era, so he made his own parameters and created his own industry along the way. He was an artist whose work started to take shape in the late-1980s, and its resonance is still felt in music being made 30 years later.
andrew.dansby@chron.com
Elements of the sound the Houston native pioneered can be heard in today's music from big-name artists like Beyoncé, Travis Scott, Drake, Kendrick Lama and others
When DJ Screw started trending in August, it wasn’t because of newly discovered music or a coordinated effort by his devoted fans. The chatter surrounded a TikTok video that quickly went viral for all the wrong reasons: a teen attempting to explain a “new” music trend called “slowed and reverb.” The problem — as Twitter unforgivingly pointed out — was that it was nearly a direct copy of DJ Screw’s iconic sound.
That’s why Lil Keke, one of Texas hip-hop’s most influential rappers and a friend of the late DJ, says the approximately 50-minute “visual tribute” “All Screwed Up” debuting Monday is being released at the right moment.
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“It’s people who use this genre…(and put) it in songs. I’m talking about big platinum artists (who are) slowing down records, and they had no idea who this man is and where this came from,” says Keke, whose songs “Southside,” “Pimp tha Pen” and “Still Pimpin Pens” are Texas music staples. “They don’t know that this ‘trend’ came from a very important person to our culture.”
Dj Screw It's All Good News
“All Screwed Up” combines biopic film elements with animation to detail the early years of Screw’s life before his “screwed” music technique exploded in Houston and spread throughout the South. Its release Monday coincides with the 20th anniversary of Screw’s death.
The project will be released on www.allscrewedup.com for $99, which includes a commemorative giftset designed to look like an original DJ Screw grey tape filled with an “All Screwed Up” tribute cassette, a cassette player and other commemorative items.
Plans are to release the video for free at some point.
Born Robert Earl Davis Jr., Screw began slowing down songs on the south side of Houston in the early 90s. At the time, the method involved pitching down his turntables to a sluggish, psychedelic tempo as he scratched and mixed songs. He eventually formed the Screwed Up Click (S.U.C.), a collective of friends that included notable rappers such as Lil Keke, Lil’ Flip, Z-Ro, Trae tha Truth and E.S.G. The sound would be copied on the north side of the city by Swisha House artists such as Slim Thug, Paul Wall and Chamillionaire who eventually burst on to the national scene a few years after Screw died in 2000 of an accidental codeine overdose.
The sound is still prevalent today with native Houstonians such as Beyoncé and Travis Scott incorporating screw elements into their music, along with other huge artists such as Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Kanye West, A$AP Rocky and Bryson Tiller. But the genre has also floated into suburbia, and some critics say discussing “slow and reverb” without properly acknowledging Screw’s blueprint is only gentrifying his sound and whitewashing his legacy.
“All Screwed Up” hopes to put the emphasis back on the innovator himself.
“This history that we made, we made it in the moment,” said Keke, who’s worked with Beyoncé, Scarface, and Birdman in a two-decade independent career and serves as a consulting producer on the project. “We had no idea that these particular tapes and these mixtapes were going to change our lives.”
“All Screwed Up” is a passion project for creator and director Isaac Yowman who grew up in Houston engulfed in its music culture. He focused the visual tribute on Screw’s early life because many Houstonians consider it a special time as the city began establishing its own musical identity and the Rockets were winning NBA championships. And much like the sound, he wanted to make this a homegrown production.
“The problem is you do have some big productions that come here, but people have this mindset of, ‘Oh, you got to bring somebody from New York’ or ‘You got to bring somebody from L.A.,’ said Yowman, whose background is directing music videos. “I wanted to be super intentional about making sure the crew was one 100% based in Texas. So people know, ‘Hey man, you can come to Texas and do major things, major productions.’”
The “slowed and reverb” controversy wasn’t the only time this year that DJ Screw got renewed attention. After George Floyd was killed by a Minneapolis police officer sparking worldwide protests throughout the summer, it was revealed that Floyd, a native Houstonian, was friends with Screw and even rapped on a few Screw tapes.
Keke, who also knew Floyd, said he believes his friend was on the minds of many fellow citizens as they cast their ballots in the presidential election, and he hopes his impact will continue to be felt.
Floyd’s “anniversaries and things will be coming up just in a minute — it’ll be one year and two years and three years,” said Keke. “We’ll see if the world (has) done (anything) different after that.”
Yowman didn’t know Floyd but after his death, he was shocked to discover that Floyd was aware of “All Screwed Up” and said he was “proud” of the project.
Howrah bridge telugu movie download. “I was in tears, bro, because I never met him before,” said Yowman. “It was confirmation for me that what I was doing was the right thing. It was just literally like…an angel just coming, (saying) ‘Bro, I’m proud of you. Keep doing what you’re doing.’”
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