DJ Screw dies

Why it matters

Robert Davis Jr. (DJ Screw) was 29 when he was found dead in his Houston recording studio on November 16, 2000. The Harris County medical examiner ruled the cause an accidental codeine overdose. He had drunk an amount of the prescription-strength cough syrup that codeine itself had been making him drink for years. Screw had been making the chopped-and-screwed Screwtapes for ten years by then. He had put out somewhere over two hundred numbered chapters in that time, distributed initially out of his house and his shop. He had codified an entire regional aesthetic. He had also been consuming, as part of the culture he was building, codeine and promethazine at amounts that no human cardiovascular system survives forever. The codeine economy he was inside (and partly created) would go on to kill several more Houston rappers over the next decade, including Pimp C in 2007 and others outside the city. The slow-music aesthetic that the codeine partly explains is now everywhere in modern American popular music. Screw is the originator. He was 29. You can hear what he built on basically every record made in the slowed-down lane since.