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Strong medicine
The screwed sounds of Big Moe
BY JON CARAMANICA

Is the sound of Screw the sound of death? There’s something profoundly disorienting about listening to the œuvre of DJ Screw, the late Houston producer and mixtape don who made a career out of pitching down hip-hop tracks to an almost funereal pace, turning excitable rappers into morbid mumblemouths and otherwise tame MCs into inscrutable pools of verbal drip. You’ll have to take my word for it when I tell you it’s a stunning art.

Screw’s death in early 2001 from an overdose of codeine came as a surprise to few. The Houston Screw scene is linked to the use of "syrup," a codeine-laced concoction that does to the mind more or less what Screw did to hip-hop. It’s tough to say which came first, the syrup or the Screw, but by the time Screw came to be known by those outside Houston, in the late ’90s, they were inextricable.

Screw had been operating for the better part of the ’90s, though I didn’t become aware of his tapes until somewhat late in his career. Being unfamiliar with Houston’s gangsta-rap scene beyond, say, the Geto Boys and the Botany Boyz, I gravitated to his mixes of more mainstream hits (B.G.’s "Bling Bling" is a particular favorite). But in Houston, damn near every album released by an artist of note came in two versions: regular and Screwed.

The edition I have of Big Moe’s 2000 debut, City of Syrup (Wreckshop), is labeled "Wreckchopped and Screwed," meaning it’s both screwed down and chopped up, a basic turntable technique that allows you to repeat phrases on a record by cutting back and forth between two vinyl copies of the song, one of which is a half-beat behind or so. The result is spooky. Moe sometimes raps but most often sings — he’s the Nate Dogg of the Scarface set — and his voice sounds like pure liquor, an attribute probably not unrelated to his admitted syrup habit. On the third track (they’re untitled), his chopped-up silky hooks are like death chants from the beyond, a ghost-movie score. The regular version of the album is melodic, and slurred in its own way. Chopped and screwed, it’s ethereal.

Now that Screw is gone, and perhaps because he’s gone (he steadfastly refused to turn his work into the thriving business it could have been), the industry he inadvertently founded is in full swing. New labels adhering to the Screw ethic — Swishahouse, Beltway 8 — have proved prolific. Wreckshop, Big Moe’s label, has gone national through a distribution deal with Priority, with Moe’s second album, Purple World, as its introduction.

Listen to Purple World unscrewed, because it’s one of the most sonically beautiful hip-hop albums in recent memory. Moe is an unlikely vocal maestro — he’s big and sometimes indelicate, and he doesn’t seem too preoccupied with crooning histrionics. But he proves a worthy anchor for this collection of energetic soul workouts that recall the era of black pop just after disco: dance-floor and radio worthy, but harking back to the earnest narratives of classic soul music.

Grover Washington Jr.’s 1980 hit "Just the Two of Us" provides the framework for "S.U.C.," Moe’s anthem for the Screwed Up Click, a song that sounds like Chic playing G-funk. "Confidential Playa" rides on a piano arrangement borrowed from Lisa Lisa & Cult Jam’s "I Wonder If I Take You Home," then adds a second vocalist, Ronnie Spencer, who’s a Ronald Isley doppelgänger.

Moe’s verses aren’t particularly substantial — they’re mostly tributes to women, crew, and, of course, that dastardly purple syrup. "Purple Stuff" toasts the drink itself over kiddie-show production. In fact, childhood is a theme that’s almost as present in Moe’s work as lethargy. He calls himself the Barre Baby, and a song by that name was the most jovial on his first album. This time, on "Still da Barre Baby," he raps toe to toe with an actual young ’un — the next-gen barre baby, it seems — in a lighthearted moment of revelry.

But most often the celebration has a morbid underbelly. On "Confidential Playa," he croons, "I even heard I had a heart attack/But I’m still here, still going strong/You can’t believe what you hear in a song." Even on the regular-tempo Purple World, Moe remains fully screwed. He’s a study in the uneasy confluence of addiction and art, in extracting beauty from unlikely sources. On "S.U.C." he wails, "It’s the screw in us/We gon’ represent with pride/It’s the screw in us/Till we die." Here’s hoping that’s poetry, not prophecy.

Issue Date: May 16 - 23, 2002
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