As of June 27, 2026 · Spring, TX
Every June 27, candy-painted SLABs roll slow through the Southside, trunks open, speakers pulling a record down to a crawl. The city calls it DJ Screw Day. The name on it is Robert Earl Davis Jr., a kid from Smithville who moved to Houston, slowed the world down to about 60 beats a minute, and died in 2000 at 29. Most of the country files him under a sound. Houston files him under a movement, and gives him a day.
The holiday grew out of one technique and the scene it created. Screw took other people's records and dragged the tempo down until the vocals bent and the drums spread out, then chopped the phrases by skipping the beat back on a second turntable. The result crawled and looped and breathed in a way no radio single did. He called the style chopped and screwed. Houston called it the sound of the city.
What actually happened on June 27, 1996
The date the city celebrates comes from one tape. After midnight on June 27, 1996, Screw ran a session for the rapper DeMo's birthday. Big Moe, Key-C, Yungstar, Big Pokey, and Haircut Joe traded verses for roughly 35 minutes, much of it over a slowed flip of Kris Kross's "Da Streets Ain't Right." It was Yungstar's first real introduction on a Screw tape. The recording crawled and looped and breathed, and it became the best-known tape Screw ever made.
It moved the way everything he made moved. By the Fourth of July weekend it was playing out of trunks at Galveston beach parties, carried hand to hand by the people who heard it. No marketing budget, no rollout plan, no radio push. One tape, passed person to person, became the document a whole city points to. The anniversary of that night is the holiday.
The tapes and the Screwed Up Click
Across his life Screw recorded more than 350 tapes. Many of them were personal commissions, built for one buyer who brought a list of songs and a few rappers and a birthday or a block party in mind. The rappers who passed through those late sessions became the Screwed Up Click, and the tapes were where a generation of Houston voices got their first real run at an audience. The crew carried names that still anchor the city's history, and the sessions were the door a lot of them walked through.
Those personalized tapes are part of why the legend runs so deep. A Screw tape made for your birthday, with your name called out in the mix and your neighborhood's rappers on it, was a personal artifact, not a record on a shelf. People kept them. They passed them down. A tape from a specific summer could carry a whole season of someone's life inside it, which is part of why so many survive in glove compartments and shoeboxes a quarter century later.
That local-first instinct is why the sound stayed Houston even as it spread. The slowed tempo, the chopped phrase, the patience of it, all of it carried a specific place. You could hear the Southside in the speed. Screw kept the work close to the people who made it with him, and the scene grew around the tapes.
An archive nobody can finish counting
The 350-plus number is the figure that gets cited. It is almost certainly low. Because so many Screw tapes were private commissions, made once for the person who ordered them, an unknown share never entered any catalog at all. They live in shoeboxes and glove compartments across Texas, copies of copies, half of them unlabeled. Collectors and writers were still trying to map the full body of work in 2026, and the honest answer to how many tapes exist is that no one knows.
The University of Houston Libraries now keeps a formal DJ Screw archive, the kind of academic record usually reserved for a city's official history. In Houston, that is exactly what it is. A young man recording slowed cassettes on the Southside left behind a body of work too large and too scattered to fully count, and the city's main university treats the surviving tapes and papers as a research collection worth preserving.
The tempo became everyone's, and the credit mostly stayed home
Here is where the 2026 part stings a little. The aesthetic Screw built is now ambient across the internet. "Slowed and reverb" edits are a default setting on streaming and short-form video, a whole category of listening that millions treat as a vibe with no author. Producers reach for the crawl without knowing whose hands shaped it. The technique outran the man, which is what tends to happen when an innovation is too good and the innovator was too regional and gone too soon. Wider audiences only really found him around 2005, five years after he died.
The reach is hard to overstate. A generation of artists who never set foot in Houston now build entire records on the slowed, reverb-heavy feel Screw pioneered, and a casual listener scrolling short-form video hears it a dozen times a day with no name to attach to it. The sound traveled much further than the man ever did in his short life. That distance between how far the technique spread and how little credit reached its source is the quiet ache underneath the celebration.
Houston never lost the thread, though. The state recognized Screw as a Texas Music Pioneer. The Screwed Up Records and Tapes shop he opened on Cullen Boulevard in 1998 still moves tapes and merch. And the holiday is the city's way of answering the missing credit. June 27 puts the name back on the sound, once a year, loud, in the place that made it.
Why Houston keeps the day
A holiday is a choice a city makes about what it refuses to forget. Houston could have let chopped and screwed drift into the internet's pile of unattributed vibes, the way most of the country encounters it. The city chose the opposite. Every June 27 the SLABs come out, the speakers drop the tempo, and the neighborhoods that raised the sound put their name on it in public.
The celebration looks like the music. SLABs, the customized cars at the center of it, roll slow on purpose, candy paint catching the light, swangas wide off the wheels, trunks popped so the speakers can do the talking. Slow, Loud, and Bangin', the same patience the tapes taught. Car shows, community gatherings, and tribute sessions fill the date across the Southside and beyond. The point is visibility. For one day the sound is impossible to mistake for anyone else's, in the place that made it.
The deeper inheritance is the posture. Make something that could only come from where you are, keep it close to the people who made it with you, and let the work carry your city's name even after it travels. That is the part of Screw's story Houston actually celebrates, and it is bigger than any one tape.
The sound is still being made here. The city that invented chopped and screwed is still cutting its records in town, and M3 Studios is one room carrying Houston music forward in Spring, north of the city, where songs still get recorded, mixed, and finished close to home. For the wider picture of what the scene is worth now, the Houston creative economy ran past $31 billion in Texas last year, and the city is still minting its own days and its own legends.
Slow it down on June 27. The day belongs to Houston, and so does the sound.
FAQ
What is chopped and screwed?
It is a remix style created by DJ Screw in Houston in the early 1990s. He slowed records to roughly 60 beats per minute, then "chopped" them by skipping the beat back and repeating phrases, creating a heavy, hypnotic crawl. The sound became the signature of Houston hip hop and the root of what the internet now calls "slowed and reverb."
Who was DJ Screw?
Robert Earl Davis Jr., born in Smithville, Texas in 1971 and based on Houston's Southside. He originated the chopped and screwed technique, recorded more than 350 tapes, and built the Screwed Up Click, the crew that launched a generation of Houston rappers. He died in 2000 at age 29. The state later recognized him as a Texas Music Pioneer.
Why is June 27 DJ Screw Day?
June 27, 1996 is the night Screw recorded the "June 27th" freestyle, a roughly 35-minute session for the rapper DeMo's birthday that became his best-known tape. The anniversary turned into an unofficial Houston holiday, marked every year with SLAB car shows and community events across the city.
What made the "June 27th" tape so important?
It captured the Screwed Up Click at full strength, including an early introduction of Yungstar, over a slowed flip of Kris Kross's "Da Streets Ain't Right." It spread hand to hand from Galveston beach parties outward with no marketing, and it became one of the definitive documents of the Houston sound.
How does DJ Screw influence music today?
The slowed, chopped tempo he invented is now everywhere in streaming and short-form video as "slowed and reverb," often used with no credit to its origin. DJ Screw Day on June 27 is how Houston keeps his name attached to the sound and honors the movement he started.
Note on sourcing: Dates, names, and details here are drawn from the Texas Standard and KUTX music-history record, the University of Houston Libraries DJ Screw Collection, and Houston outlets covering DJ Screw Day. Figures such as the 350-plus tape count and the 1998 opening of the Cullen Boulevard shop reflect the documented historical record.
- Texas Standard / KUTX, "This week in Texas music history: DJ Screw lays down the June 27th Freestyle." https://texasstandard.org/stories/dj-screw-june-27-freestyle-mixtape-houston-texas-music-history/
- University of Houston Libraries, "DJ Screw Collection" (finding aid and archive). https://findingaids.lib.uh.edu/repositories/2/resources/14
- CW39 Houston, "June 27 is DJ Screw Day." https://cw39.com/cw39/june-27-is-dj-screw-day/
- City Cast Houston, "Why Houston Celebrates DJ Screw Day On June 27." https://houston.citycast.fm/explainers/why-we-celebrate-dj-screw-day-on-june-27
- Click2Houston, "It's DJ Screw Day: what to know about the originator of chopped and screwed." https://www.click2houston.com/news/local/2025/06/27/its-dj-screw-day-heres-what-to-know-about-the-texas-native-named-the-originator-of-chopped-and-screwed-music/
- Raptology, "The Lost DJ Screw Archive: How Many Screw Tapes Exist And Will We Ever Know?", June 8, 2026. https://raptology.com/2026/06/08/the-lost-dj-screw-archive-how-many-screw-tapes-exist-and-will-we-ever-know/
