I always look forward to the redbud blossoms in the spring, even though I love all the daffodils and tulips and forsythia and blackberry blossoms and phlox spreading further as well. But there’s something about the redbuds once they pop, the days are getting warmer, I can sleep with the windows open at night, and I know I survived another year. Yesterday, I went back in the woods and got a handful to eat, and need to go back out and get more today, too. Such a satisfying crispy flavor full of life and raw energy.
And inevitably, once redbuds season hit, I always think in my mind that it’s proof that Allah loved DJ Screw, because the redbuds are such a lovely purple pink shade, and since my windows are down on the car because it’s warm again, and the roads have all these redbuds showing themselves like a magical mist this time of year, brightening the sides of the human paths and edges of the woods, mystical corpus callosum bridges between nature and man, I end up also starting to bump DJ Screw mixes again. His body of work was immense in his lifetime, having made far more redbud blossoms worth of mixtapes than having lived for less than three decades would suggest. And since my ancient iMac died, killing with it over a decade of musical data, which can’t be reimported because I’ve got too much shit for an internal hard drive, and it has to travel between eras as external vagabond of audio, I’ve been revisiting them Screw tapes afresh, finding myself drawn to some stuff I’d always loved for a while now, and discovering new segments of tapes I never bumped all that much as well. One of my favorites, both old and new exploration, is the tinkering with “Five Minutes of Funk”, originally by Whodini.
One of the great things about Screw becoming so famous is all he did was make mixtapes constantly, for immediate sale, to people who bumped his shit. He did it prolifically and as regular as the sunrise. Eventually he got a shop, to avoid cops harassing him at home for the long lines, and they put out tapes as they could. When you go online, they’re laid out in “chapters” with three-digit numbers, but those aren’t in any chronological order. It’s just how they got reissued or released at the Screwed Up Records Shop, or who the fuck knows. They still keep finding some. The track data for this song on my hard drive claims it’s Leanin’ n The Leans, but that doesn’t match what shows up online now, for Chapter 219 by that name. And it’s a pretty amazing example of DJ Screw’s actual DJ skills, juggling the song, mixing and scratching, working from instrumental and vocal versions, and just generally fucking it up like only he could. Screw was an outsider artist in hip hop, just doing what he did without thinking it needed to be cataloged or categorized. So now, decades later, when the University of Houston has a DJ Screw archive, and is trying to do just that, it’s impossible work. It’s like when Han Shan aka Cold Mountain, the T’ang era poet, was discovered by a bureaucrat, so they sent folks out into the woods to gather what poems of his they could find written on stones and inside caves, and that became what we know now as Cold Mountain’s poetry. I actually emailed the archivist in charge of the Screw collection at Houston, asking her about the chronology of all the tapes, because I was thinking about trying to do that, and she said as far she knew, it hadn’t been done. Folks had rough year ideas for many of the Screw tapes, but no hard dates whatsoever, not even months.
I didn’t follow through with it, because it was more work than I cared to do. I’d rather just be riding down a back road, soaking up another spring’s redbud ambiance, and blasting Screw myself, rather than trying to dissect and analyze and categorize and pin it down further like poking a butterfly to a piece of cardboard to prove how beautiful the wings were, killing the creature in the process. Just ride with it.
And the great lesson of Screw, the great Saint of Southern Gothicc Futurism, is that by slowing it down, you extend the beauty. Five minutes of funk becomes almost nine minutes, thus we extend the goodness of our life, but slowing the fuck down, and letting the good parts ride a little extra, and letting the regular parts, and even the occasional mistakes, just pass on by without calling attention to it. Goddamn, I love me some Screw.
And inevitably, once redbuds season hit, I always think in my mind that it’s proof that Allah loved DJ Screw, because the redbuds are such a lovely purple pink shade, and since my windows are down on the car because it’s warm again, and the roads have all these redbuds showing themselves like a magical mist this time of year, brightening the sides of the human paths and edges of the woods, mystical corpus callosum bridges between nature and man, I end up also starting to bump DJ Screw mixes again. His body of work was immense in his lifetime, having made far more redbud blossoms worth of mixtapes than having lived for less than three decades would suggest. And since my ancient iMac died, killing with it over a decade of musical data, which can’t be reimported because I’ve got too much shit for an internal hard drive, and it has to travel between eras as external vagabond of audio, I’ve been revisiting them Screw tapes afresh, finding myself drawn to some stuff I’d always loved for a while now, and discovering new segments of tapes I never bumped all that much as well. One of my favorites, both old and new exploration, is the tinkering with “Five Minutes of Funk”, originally by Whodini.
One of the great things about Screw becoming so famous is all he did was make mixtapes constantly, for immediate sale, to people who bumped his shit. He did it prolifically and as regular as the sunrise. Eventually he got a shop, to avoid cops harassing him at home for the long lines, and they put out tapes as they could. When you go online, they’re laid out in “chapters” with three-digit numbers, but those aren’t in any chronological order. It’s just how they got reissued or released at the Screwed Up Records Shop, or who the fuck knows. They still keep finding some. The track data for this song on my hard drive claims it’s Leanin’ n The Leans, but that doesn’t match what shows up online now, for Chapter 219 by that name. And it’s a pretty amazing example of DJ Screw’s actual DJ skills, juggling the song, mixing and scratching, working from instrumental and vocal versions, and just generally fucking it up like only he could. Screw was an outsider artist in hip hop, just doing what he did without thinking it needed to be cataloged or categorized. So now, decades later, when the University of Houston has a DJ Screw archive, and is trying to do just that, it’s impossible work. It’s like when Han Shan aka Cold Mountain, the T’ang era poet, was discovered by a bureaucrat, so they sent folks out into the woods to gather what poems of his they could find written on stones and inside caves, and that became what we know now as Cold Mountain’s poetry. I actually emailed the archivist in charge of the Screw collection at Houston, asking her about the chronology of all the tapes, because I was thinking about trying to do that, and she said as far she knew, it hadn’t been done. Folks had rough year ideas for many of the Screw tapes, but no hard dates whatsoever, not even months.
I didn’t follow through with it, because it was more work than I cared to do. I’d rather just be riding down a back road, soaking up another spring’s redbud ambiance, and blasting Screw myself, rather than trying to dissect and analyze and categorize and pin it down further like poking a butterfly to a piece of cardboard to prove how beautiful the wings were, killing the creature in the process. Just ride with it.
And the great lesson of Screw, the great Saint of Southern Gothicc Futurism, is that by slowing it down, you extend the beauty. Five minutes of funk becomes almost nine minutes, thus we extend the goodness of our life, but slowing the fuck down, and letting the good parts ride a little extra, and letting the regular parts, and even the occasional mistakes, just pass on by without calling attention to it. Goddamn, I love me some Screw.
