Artist
DJ Screw
Houston DJ born Robert Earl Davis Jr. who created the chopped and screwed style around 1990, slowing songs to syrupy tempos and applying echo and reverb effects that mimicked the perceptual distortions of codeine cough syrup mixed with Sprite, building a regional phenomenon through hand-dubbed mixtapes that circulated out of car trunks and documented the city's underground scene in marathon sessions where rappers would freestyle over his slowed beats, until his death from a codeine overdose at 29 in 2000 left behind hundreds of mostly undated tapes still being cataloged today, a sprawling archive of a movement built without mainstream attention or industry approval.