--- title: "Rare 2000 video shows Houston’s DJ Screw, inventor of chopped and screwed, mixing records in his studio" url: https://badiyaa.com/dj-screw-chopped-screwed-mixing-video/ published: 2026-11-10T13:30:00+00:00 modified: 2026-11-10T13:30:00+00:00 section: History publisher: Badiyaa --- # Rare 2000 video shows Houston’s DJ Screw, inventor of chopped and screwed, mixing records in his studio A rare video of Houston's DJ Screw mixing records in October 2000 shows the slowed-down chopped and screwed style he created in the early 1990s. A clip of DJ Screw working two turntables in his Houston studio, filmed on October 29, 2000, is circulating again among hip hop fans. It is some of the only footage of the man who invented chopped and screwed actually doing it: slowing records to a crawl, cutting phrases, letting one track bleed into the next. The video was posted recently to Reddit’s hip hop community under the title “Let my hands do the talking.” The poster described it as historic footage from *Soldiers United for Cash*, a documentary shot in Houston in 2000, and listed the two songs in the mix: Southside Playaz’ “Swang Down” (2000) and DJ DMD’s “25 Lighters” (1998). Replies were short and reverent. “One of the best to ever do it,” one fan wrote. ## Where the footage comes from Filmmaker REL of REL Entertainment shot *Soldiers United for Cash* during 2000. The two-hour film includes long interviews with Screw and his crew, the Screwed Up Click, plus performances and freestyles. Screw’s main interview and performance were filmed across October 28 and 29, 2000. The documentary came out on VHS in 2001, followed by a collector’s DVD in 2004. The same mixing footage later turned up in a 2007 five-part documentary series on Houston rap, which gave Screw a full episode. The footage was shot on October 29, 2000; Screw died in Houston 18 days later, on November 16, at 29. ## How a teenager named Robert Davis became Screw Robert Earl Davis Jr. was born on July 20, 1971, in Smithville, Texas. He started DJing at 12, scratching his mother’s B.B. King and Johnnie Taylor records. The nickname came from a habit: when he disliked a record, he would scratch it up with a screw. His friend Trey Adkins asked who he thought he was, “DJ Screw,” and the name stuck. He began making his slowed-down mixes in 1990, and by late 1991 they were his main focus. Friends paid for personalized tapes; the first sale was ten dollars. Rappers from Houston’s south side, among them Lil’ Keke, Big Hawk, Big Moe, E.S.G. and Fat Pat, came to rhyme over the mixes and became the Screwed Up Click. Fans drove in from Dallas and Waco and lined up outside his house to buy tapes. He later opened his own shop, Screwed Up Records and Tapes. ## What “chopped and screwed” actually means The “screwed” half is the slowdown. Using the pitch control on his turntables, Screw dragged songs down to roughly 60 to 70 beats per minute. The “chopped” half is the editing by hand: skipping beats, stopping time, scratching, and looping a word or phrase so it repeats. To hear the scale of it, take a rap beat at 90 beats per minute and drop it to 65. That is about 28 percent slower, enough to pull voices down into a heavy, syrupy register. Our working: 65 divided by 90 is 0.72, so the song plays at 72 percent of its speed. ## Legacy Screw released more than 350 mixtapes, sold mostly from his house or at shows and later reissued as the “Diary of the Originator” series. His influence spread from Houston across Southern rap and into electronic music, and his crew produced many of the acts that took Houston national in 2004. In the late 2010s, YouTube’s “slowed + reverb” remixes borrowed his basic idea, which led some Houston fans to argue that the newer trend should credit him. Houston native Travis Scott has named Screw as one of his biggest influences and recorded “R.I.P. Screw” on his 2018 album *Astroworld*. You can read about [Travis Scott’s booking for the Grand Theft Auto VI launch festival in Miami](https://badiyaa.com/gta-vi-the-festival-miami-travis-scott-cardi-b/) and [his feature on Future’s single Ya Hit](https://badiyaa.com/future-ya-hit-drake-travis-scott-loe-shimmy/) on Badiyaa. Texas named Screw an official Texas Music Pioneer, and the University of Houston Libraries keeps the DJ Screw Papers, including about 1,500 vinyl records he owned, in its Houston Hip Hop Research Collection. “The DJ Screw papers,” UH hip hop archivist Julie Grob said in a [University of Houston profile](https://stories.uh.edu/dj-screw/index.html), “get requested more than any other collection in the archives.” ## Further reading - [Wikipedia: DJ Screw](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw) - [Wikipedia: Chopped and screwed](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chopped_and_screwed) - [University of Houston: Keeping DJ Screw’s Memory Alive](https://stories.uh.edu/dj-screw/index.html) *Illustrative image. Image: Adrian DuMay, CC BY 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons* *This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. [How we work](https://badiyaa.com/editorial-policy/).*