Cowboy Carter, Cow-Free Meat Bans & DJ Screw. From The Barbed Wire

Howdy July survivors, I’m Brian Gaar, senior editor of The Barbed Wire, coming to you from a state that just banned meat that never lived. The sun is trying to kill us, the power grid is begging for mercy, and freedom now apparently only counts if it went “moo” first. Welcome back to The Barbed Wire newsletter, your three-piece combo of heatstroke, heartbreak, and hilarity.

First up, Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour turned Houston into a glitter-soaked rodeo of fandom, proving once and for all that she’s been country (and Texan) from the start.

Meanwhile, Texas banned fake meat in the name of “freedom,” so now you’re legally required to eat something that once mooed. Shout out to big government!

Speaking of politics, a 33-year-old democratic socialist just flipped New York’s mayoral race on its head — and Texas voters struggling with rent, groceries, and crappy wages might be ready for their own populist uprising.

Finally, we look at DJ Screw’s iconic 35-minute freestyle, which still defines Houston hip-hop nearly three decades later.

How DJ Screw’s ‘June 27’ Became a Monument to Houston Hip-hop Culture

Nearly three decades after its release, we talk to author Lance Scott Walker about how DJ Screw’s magnum opus grew from a birthday freestyle into the soul of a movement.

By H. Drew Blackburn

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve blurted out “man, hold up,” or “I done came down,” in my youth and followed it up with some awful, no good, terrible bars. (That’s fine. I’m no rapper, and freestyling is hard.) It’s just a part of our culture — jumping in and out of the cipher, audaciously flexing and representing where you’re from. Hip-hop’s culture is malleable, filling every nook of America and reflecting the little things that make a region unique. 

For the facets that make Texas hip-hop special, our North Star is DJ Screw and the revolving cast of Houston MCs collectively called the Screwed Up Click. Nothing captures their slow-motion revolution better than “June 27,” recorded on one hot, magical summer night in 1996. 

The session began as nothing more than DeMo’s birthday celebration at Screw’s home studio, the Wood Room, according to Lance Scott Walker, author of “DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution” and “Houston Rap Tapes.” It was organized weeks in advance — a do-over of an earlier attempt dubbed “Dancing Candy,” where DeMo rounded up some friends, then drank too much codeine, nodded off, and missed his own recording. No worries, he just figured he’d run it back on his birthday. 

“The day was kind of like the way the recording ended up, which is that there were a bunch of people who kind of scattered in at different times, floated in and out, just like they do in the song,” Walker told The Barbed Wire. “Everybody (who was there) has a loose concept of what time it was, which I think is just probably the case any time you were in that house.”

The finished product is remarkable. The sample Screw chose, Kris Kross’s “Da Streets Ain’t Right,” produced by Jermaine Dupri is a left-field choice, on account that it’s a deep cut on an album by child rappers — a testament to his ear as a musician and producer. “He didn’t think like anybody else and his whole approach and his whole swing — I always describe Screw as a great drummer that never ended up being a drummer, because of his swing and what he’s hearing, where he wants to wind things back, where he wants to dig in and create those new rhythms,” Walker said. “I’m a drummer myself, so I know about how you find these pockets where you swing in and nobody else can find exactly that (the way he did).” ‘Til this day Jermaine Dupri has no idea how Screw got his hands on the instrumental, but I think we’re all happy he did. 

Screw’s beat is the hypnotic foundation, but all that loose, come-and-go energy hardened into one take with DeMo, Bird, Key-C, Yungstar, Big Pokey, Haircut Joe and K-Luv’s voices rotating in the mix, and specifically, Big Moe’s Barry-White-silky-smooth helped catapult this little experiment into legend. “Most Screw mixes have eight-or ten-minute cuts, but this crew went more than half an hour. It turned into a tornado; nobody stopped, everybody fed off the next verse,” Walker said. “Jam bands don’t even hold songs that long — the Dead tap out sooner — but these guys kept pushing.”

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