When I’m invited back to the city it’s to experience ‘When I Get Home’, an album and film by Solange Knowles released at the intersection between Black History Month and Women’s History Month.

It’s surreal, as though the store is in a different realm, operating on a different frequency as time slows down around you and the music takes control of your body. Every bass note vibrates through your entire body, every word drags itself slowly across your mind’s eye and each drum is like a controlled explosion. Inside the mural covered store, where visitors can browse huge books of laminated track lists before settling on which ‘Chapter’ they want to purchase, the music was booming at full volume on a sound system unlike any I’ve heard before. With some spare time on my hands I took an Uber out to Screwed Up Records and Tapes, relocated from it’s original location in 2011, but still run by Screw’s estate. It wasn’t until 2017, during a trip to Houston to write a profile on Travis Scott, that I experienced my first true connection with DJ Screw’s sound. Then the sound - which Houstonian’s will tell you should never be referred to as “Screwed” unless DJ Screw, who passed away in November 2000, did it himself - began to penetrate contemporary music, with pitched down vocal samples increasingly appearing in original songs by some of the biggest pop stars on the planet, including Drake and, naturally, Houston’s own Beyoncé.

Later my interest in the technique became aesthetic - I loved the purple drenched, remixed covers of OG Ron C’s reinterpretations of the latest popular albums ‘Channel Purple’, ‘Chop The Throne’, ‘Chop Care’. Their albums often came with a second disc, on which the original was presented in a “chopped not slopped” form slowed in tempo, pitched down, with key phrases from the lyrics highlighted through repetition. Since my early teens Houston’s chopped not slopped music - a sound influenced by DJ Screw and his “screw tapes” - has been something I’ve been aware of, and have tried to understand.Īt first it was contrived, a way to feel more authentically in tune with the music of guys like Lil Flip, Slim Thug, Paul Wall and Mike Jones, who I adored from 4,700 miles away.

Solange when i come home