WHAT IT DO?: HOUSTON HIP HOP, CIPHERS, MIGRATION, AND BORDERLANDS
By
Victor Del Hierro

A DISSERTATION
Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of
Rhetoric and Writing—Doctor of Philosophy
2017

ABSTRACT
WHAT IT DO?: HOUSTON HIP HOP, CIPHERS, MIGRATION, AND BORDERLANDS
By
Victor Del Hierro
In this dissertation, I migrate through Houston Hip Hop culture from 1991-2000 to
understand the history and legacy of DJ Screw, Screw Tapes, and Screw and Chopped style. The
purpose of this project is to understand the relationship between local communities and the
Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN) by migrating through the borderland spaces that exists both
physically and metaphorically. Using Hip Hop practices and knowledges, this dissertation
understands Hip Hop as a culture made up of multiple Hip Hop Ciphers. Locating borderlands
between ciphers by purposefully migrating between them, this study combines the analysis of
mixtapes, archival material, and interviews, this project works to create an emic view of Hip Hop
as a culture that has always, and continues to create, re-imagine, and sustain knowledge and
history through technological innovation, writing, and community building. This dissertation
focuses on Houston because of DJ Screw and his development of a style (Screwed and Chopped)
and mixtape series (Screw Tapes) that continues to impact and define a community’s identity.
Through Screw Tapes, DJ Screw and the Houston Hip Hop community negotiation the
relationship between Hip Hop and local styles in the production of diverse forms of
communication.

Copyright by
VICTOR DEL HIERRO
2017

Dedicated to
all my fam who have walked on

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

It is an honor to run through my own shout out track to give thanks to everyone who has
been part of this migration through a PhD. I want to start with all the front office staff in WRAC,
thank you Melissa Arthurton, Diana Shank, Regina Boone, Marsha Edington, and everyone else
who worked in the front office over the past 4 years.
Rest in Peace to DJ Screw and Big Moe. Thank you to the city of Houston, Julie Grob,
UH Libraries and the Screwed Up Click.
I want to say thank you to all my professors during my time in course work. Thank you
Django Paris, your words of mentorship and encouragement have stuck with me and I hope to
sustain that energy you shared. Thank you to Candace Epps-Robertson, not until I took your
class did I finally feel like I belonged in this field. Thank you to Stuart Blythe, 4 years later and I
still think about the lesson I learned from my first ever rhet-comp class. Thank you to Denise
Troutman, every time I taught an 8am I could always count on seeing a friendly face that always
took a minute to check in on me. Finally, thank you Liza Potts and WIDE for making my last
year my best year. I learned so much and appreciated the flexibility as I finished my dissertation
and the job market.
I want to give a special shout out to all the grad students past, present, and future.
Without the community that we built here over the last four years, I would not be where I am.
Especially want to show love to all my POC in the struggle: Suban Nur Cooley, Santos Ramos,
Angelica De Jesus, Everardo Cuevas, my doppelganger Eric Rodriguez, Esther Milu (thank you
Ted and Annette too!), Lehua Ledbetter, Wonderful Faison, April Baker-Bell, Mihn-Tam
Nguyen, and Stephanie Mahnke. I love us! We are in this struggle together and I’m glad we have
each other.

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I want to show love to all the people who made Lansing a better place. Thank you to
Casey Miles, Katie Livingston, Katie Manthey, Brendan Taylor, Denae Friedheim (I miss
picking garlic!), and a very special thank you to Molo, Eyra and becca hayes for always opening
your home and being the most amazing friends. I’ll be dreaming about the lazy summer days
eating delicious food on your back porch.
I want to give a very special What Up Doe! to Sacramento Knoxx. I played Chop so
much while writing this. Thank you for introducing me to Southwest Detroit and reminding me
that Hip Hop is for the people. To all the Nuestros Cuentos and KANO camp youth, I am so glad
the future is in your hands! The best thing I did in Michigan was partnering with you!
To all my homies back home, I love y’all and appreciate your support. Big up P.E.
Acquaman, Juice, Freddy, Alex (and the whole Munoz family), Manny (you up next), Montano
(thanks for leading the way), RIP Luis “Fergie” Fernando Lopez-Amador (you the first PhD no
matter what), RIP Luis Santos, Sam, Jana, Craig Thompson, and so many more people.
To my roomies, Matt Gomes and Heather Noel Turner, its Pigg Haus for life! I could not
ask for more thoughtful-kind-funky-smart people to share a rented house with. I already miss
y’all.
You know I need to start a new paragraph for my cohort boo Roni, Reece, and her Otie
Bear. Roni we did this! Did the market! Got our jobs! I still owe you $5 for the cab we had to
split at recruitment. I’m am so lucky to have done this PhD with you and I look forward to vising
you and your snow globe in North Carolina. We went from driving home in Laura’s car in the
snow after class to walking that stage in a smooth four years.
Thank you to my committee members Bill Hart-Davidson, Malea Powell, and Emery
Petchauer. I know that without your work, I would not have the chance to do mine and I am

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forever thankful. To my co-chairs Estrella Torrez and Dylan Miner, where do I ever begin to
thank you. Since the moment I set foot in Michigan, you have both been there. At recruitment, I
knew I wanted to be like Estrella when I grew up. The day after I moved to Michigan, you
invited me over to the Casa Calabasa and opened up your family and community to me. The day
I picked up Creating Aztlan, I knew I wanted to be like Dylan when I grew up. Y’all are the
artists, activists, community-members, teachers, scholars, and mentors that I had been looking
for. This migration is not possible without your knowledge and medicine. Hit me up again if you
move and need helpers.
To the Del Hierro, Del Gadillo, Camacho, Acosta, Gonzales, Cobos, Wheemos, Rios,
Enriquez-Loya, Driskill, and Haas families, you are my familia whether by blood or from
scratch, I am grateful for your love. Especially my big brother Marcos, I been looking up to you
and following in your footstep for 28 years. You introduced me to Hip Hop and I’ve been
following you ever since. I blame you and Janisa for my foodie-ness.
Four years ago, after you graciously agreed to let me sleep on your couch because I
didn’t make it to my apartment office in time, I locked you out of yours. Even then, you still
brought me a sandwich. I made you lentils and you let me hang out with Zula. Laura there is not
a better person on this Earth then you. I still can’t believe our migrations happened to intersect.
In Michigan, no less! And now we get to migrate together. To El Paso, no less! I think a lot of
people would say this is fate or destiny but I know how hard you work. There is not another
person who makes me feel the way you do. Your love, kindness, support, and heart is more than
I deserve.
Rest in Peace, El Original, Jesus Del Hierro who walked on July 2 nd, 2017.

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LIST OF TABLES ......................................................................................................................... ix
LIST OF FIGURES ........................................................................................................................ x
CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – HIP HOP, HYPERTEXT AND THE CIPHER..................... 1
Entering Hip Hop ........................................................................................................................ 3
Welcome to the Cipher ............................................................................................................... 7
Shout Out to the Hypertext ....................................................................................................... 10
Dissertation is a Cipher, Hypertext, and a Tape ....................................................................... 18
It All Started With a DJ ............................................................................................................ 22
CHAPTER 2: SHOUT OUT WRITING STUDIES, SHOUT OUT HIP HOP, SHOUT OUT
BORDERLANDS ......................................................................................................................... 23
Research Design........................................................................................................................ 24
Background ........................................................................................................................... 26
Research Stance .................................................................................................................... 27
Trajectories and Lineages ..................................................................................................... 31
The Study .................................................................................................................................. 34
Why Houston? .......................................................................................................................... 37
Migration................................................................................................................................... 39
Borderlands ............................................................................................................................... 40
Borderlands Theory .............................................................................................................. 40
Borderlands, Migrations, and their Decolonization .............................................................. 44
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 46
CHAPTER 3: FREESTYLE—THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DJ SCREW ................................... 48
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 48
Method: Hiphopography ........................................................................................................... 49
Background ........................................................................................................................... 51
Data Collection ..................................................................................................................... 53
Data Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 55
Results—DJ Screw’s Legacy .................................................................................................... 56
Four Turntables: The Science of Screw ................................................................................ 58
Analysis – Cars, Flows, and the Screw House.......................................................................... 64
Hyper-Localization in Screw Tapes: We wanna hear about these other streets that we go
down...................................................................................................................................... 67
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 69
CHAPTER 4: SCREW TAPES SIDE A—IMAGINING COMMUNICATION DESIGN
THROUGH HIP HOP................................................................................................................... 71
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 71
Method: Migrating through Screw Tapes ................................................................................. 72
Background on DJ Screw, Screw tapes, and Houston Hip Hop ........................................... 73
Data Collection: 3 In Da Mornin’ ......................................................................................... 75
Data Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 77
Results: From Track-list to Tapes, Writing Across Modalities ................................................ 79
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Analysis: “Swing down sweet chariot, stop, and let me ride” .................................................. 85
Conclusion ................................................................................................................................ 90
CHAPTER 5: SCREW TAPES SIDE B—JUNE 27TH, THE LOCALIZATION OF CIPHERS
AND LANGUAGE ....................................................................................................................... 92
Introduction ............................................................................................................................... 92
Method: Migrating through Houston on Screw Tapes ............................................................. 93
Background – It’s a real ass day bay-beh ............................................................................. 95
Data Collection: June 27th ..................................................................................................... 97
Data Analysis ........................................................................................................................ 99
Results: Anatomy of a Screw Tape ......................................................................................... 102
Narration Moments ............................................................................................................. 103
Screw the World: Looking for Stories ................................................................................ 104
Freestyle Sessions: The Making of a Houston Cipher ........................................................ 107
Analysis................................................................................................................................... 110
Hip Hop Nation Language in Practice ................................................................................ 110
Storytelling .......................................................................................................................... 113
Conclusion .............................................................................................................................. 117
CHAPTER 6: Outro—Implications ............................................................................................ 119
Introduction ............................................................................................................................. 119
Implications-Towards a Hip Hop Migration........................................................................... 120
Conclusion: Future Plans ........................................................................................................ 121
REFERENCES ........................................................................................................................... 125

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LIST OF TABLES
Table 1: Annotated playlist from the back cover of the 3 In Da Mornin’ mixtape ..................... 78
Table 2: Annotated playlist from the back cover of the June 27th mixtape ............................... 101
Table 3: Houston Language ....................................................................................................... 111

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LIST OF FIGURES

Figure 1: Participants and Movement in the Hip Hop Cipher ........................................................ 8
Figure 2:“DJ Screw at Samplified Digital Recording Studio during the recording of 3 N tha
Mornin' in 1996” ................................................................................................................... 56
Figure 3: “DJ Screw’s Car” .......................................................................................................... 66
Figure 4: Back cover of the CD version of 3 In Da Mornin’ Screw Tape. ................................... 75
Figure 5: “Screw tape list for Steve” ............................................................................................ 80
Figure 6: “Screw tape list for Keke” ............................................................................................. 81
Figure 7: Playlists and Tapes are not the same ............................................................................. 83
Figure 8: Tracing Lineages and Creating Paths from DJ Screw, Dr. Dre, and Parliament .......... 86
Figure 9: Houston’s Localization of Hip Hop. ............................................................................. 94
Figure 10: Back cover of the CD version of June 27th Screw Tape............................................. 97

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CHAPTER 1: INTRODUCTION – HIP HOP, HYPERTEXT AND THE CIPHER
What Up Doe!
What It Do?
I was born and raised on the Far Eastside of El Paso, Texas. When I started to seriously
engage with Hip Hop culture in the early 2000s, I did so through headphones and television
screens. Hip Hop was always something that I watched from a distance. Across the rap music I
was interfacing, I was struck by the rapper shouting out the locations they were from. Knowing
the names of cities, neighborhoods, and street-names helped me start to build a knowledge base
of places where Hip Hop was occurring. Today Hip Hop is a global force, by claiming a city or
neighborhood, rappers are asserting and situating themselves within the larger discourse of Hip
Hop. This declaration of self, provides a listener with a way to situate a rapper, initiating a
foundation for understanding what they were about to say. In a live performance, as a gesture of
solidarity, rappers will also shout out the place where they are currently performing. This is one
way a rapper builds a relationship with their audience. In either case, rappers and listeners are
both doing work that helps build a relationship that serves as a foundation for knowledge
building.
Another way to show love and continue to build a relationship is to embrace the language
practices that are distinct to certain places. In Detroit, Michigan and the surrounding areas,
“What Up Doe!” is an example of a greeting that is distinct to the Hip Hop community there. In
the same vein of signification, “What It Do?” is synonymous with Houston Hip Hop culture. In
my experience, these greetings mean more than just a way to express a linguistic handshake.
They are declarations of the cities they embody.

1

Before leaving the Juarez-El Paso Borderlands region, I knew these phrases and
understood their power. I use them here to pay homage and respect to the two Hip Hop
communities that I have had the most proximity to as I have completed my graduate work. I also
use them to situate my work in Hip Hop as that of a product of migration and an attention to
localization. Knowing and understanding these phrases is an acknowledgement of the
sovereignty of each Hip Hop community within the global discourse of Hip Hop. At the same
time, these phrases remind me of my movement and migration into these spaces as built through
relationships both through personal interactions and digital means.
In this opening chapter, I want to establish and situate an entrance point into Hip Hop.
This entrance point is built on the conscious valuing of relationships, a critical understanding of
the Hip Hop Cipher 1, and the introduction of Hypertext to understand the way Hip Hop
practitioners write. Relationships matter to Hip Hop because they rely on embodied experiences.
What or how you relate to Hip Hop culture and communities is always dependent on your own
subjectivity. It both encourages accessibility and feeds the need for authenticity. The Hip Hop
cipher helps us account for the many ways that we can build relationships to Hip Hop. To
visualize the layers of participation in Hip Hop, the cipher reminds us that practicing Hip Hop is
always community based. Finally, Hypertext helps us understand how Hip Hop can be inclusive
of people and texts while maintaining a purposefulness about how this manifest. Often, I hear

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The “cipher” as a concept entered Hip Hop by way of the The Five Percenters or the Five Percent Nation. Founded
by Clarence 13X later known as Allah the Father, the Five Percenters originated in Harlem and have consistently
impacted Hip Hop through concepts like the cipher or by way of rappers who identify as Five Percenters. Within the
Five Percenters concept of Supreme Mathematics, the cipher is represented through the number 0 to signify a 360degree circle made up of 120 degrees of lessons, 120 degrees of Knowledge, and 120 degrees of wisdom (Chang, p.
259). Together, the full 360 degrees represents understanding. Five Percenter’s would cipher (dialogue) together in a
circle as a practice that would later be the basis of Hip Hop’s version of the ciphers.

2

people talking about Hip Hop as “so random” or “without cohesion,” but that could not be
farther from the truth. They just don’t see the ciphers and relationships that led to it.
Entering Hip Hop
Hip Hop is about relationships. In this dissertation, I want to argue and foreground the
importance of relationships to Hip Hop. To study Hip Hop, we must understand how
relationships get formed as well as the relationships themselves. The four original elements of
Hip Hop, DJing, Rapping, Grafitti Writing, and B-boying/B-Girling, are all practices that rely on
relationships. Across the elements, Hip Hop is learned, taught, and performed through
relationships (Schloss 2009; Smith 2013; Dimitriadis 2004; Chang 2007). In its early days,
relationship building as a practice in Hip Hop relied on face-to-face interaction (Smith 2013).
Meaning, nobody was practicing Hip Hop by themselves, it was through observing and
participating in community spaces that led to the development of the culture. By practicing, I
mean it in the sense of participating in Hip Hop. Practitioners of all kinds, practice their craft on
their own but at some point bring their skills out into a community discourse. With the inclusion
and use of mass medias, the face to face interactions are expanded to include differing interfaces
but nonetheless we are still learning and building from others. Throughout this dissertation, I
utilize a range of these interactions to build relationships with Houston Hip Hop and specifically
the Screwed and Chopped translocal style community. These moments of observation and
learning have an important impact on how we build relationships to and within Hip Hop because
of the influence of space and place.
In his book Decoded, Jay Z, tells the story of the first time he encountered a cipher
resulting in an early formative Hip Hop moment stating:

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Like the day when I wandered up to something I’d never seen before: a cipher—but I
wouldn’t have called it that; no one would’ve back then. It was a just a circle of scrappy,
ashy, skinny Brooklyn kids laughing and clapping their hands, their eyes trained on the
center.
The sun started to set, the crowd moved in closer, the next clap kept coming, and he kept
meeting it with another rhyme. It was like watching some kind of combat, but he was
alone in the center. All he had were his eyes, taking in everything, and the words inside
him. I was dazzled. That’s some cool shit was the first thing I thought. Then: I could do
that.
In the excerpt, Jay Z provides a good example and description of what it looks like to enter Hip
Hop culture. In this story, Jay Z has a literal moment of entering Hip Hop by walking up and
joining a group of his peers in a cipher. This initial moment of inquiry or engagement is
important to note because it foregrounds the importance of embodiment to Hip Hop. Although he
did not have the language to understand or name what he was witnessing, there is a level of
accessibility to the cipher that invites Jay Z to engage with the circle of ”scrappy, ashy, skinny
Brooklyn kids.” Among a group of his peers, as Jay Z continues to become a participant, joining
the other kids laughing and clapping, the accessibility of Hip Hop reveals itself through his
description of the young emcee in the middle.
In Jay Z’s description of the rapper at the center of the cipher, Jay Z goes through two
distinct moments of Hip Hop orientation: the analysis and description of the rapper’s
performance as an observer, and the “I could do that” moment. According to Jay Z, the kid in the
middle only needs “his eyes” and “the words inside of him,” to be able to freestyle rap in the
cipher. Meaning, at the most basic level, a freestyle rapper is just speaking from his own

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embodied perspective and experience. His eyes represent everything he is connected to in that
moment, everything he can see is helping him think of the next thing to say. At the same time,
the words inside of him represents everything that helps him make sense of what his eyes are
seeing. What he observes combined with what he knows about the world, helps the kid in the
middle construct raps. By acknowledging “his eyes” and “the words inside of him” as valid
points of invention for rapping, Jay Z, and by extension Hip Hop, validates his distinct voice and
perspective. Because Hip Hop is a space where this site of enunciation is valid, the realization of
“I could do that,” is an important moment for Jay Z as well as important for Hip Hop’s
accessibility and growth for specifically marginalized voices. The combination of being in a
space of your peers and being engaged is a powerful combination for Hip Hop’s foundation as a
culture.
At some point, we are all Jay Z walking up to Hip Hop. While Jay’s memory offers a
literal example of someone physically entering Hip Hop, we are all “dazzled by some cool shit”,
whether that happens through physical engagement, listening to records, or watching videos on
YouTube. In this dissertation, I am interested in articulating and understanding the way that these
moments of engagement lead to the migration of Hip Hop, specifically how that migration has
occurred in Houston. Hip Hop started in the parks and neighborhoods of the South Bronx in New
York City and since then has grown across the globe. I am interested in building and learning
from how and why Hip Hop has been able to grow in these ways. Furthermore, because I believe
these movements are purposeful, I am interested in understanding the relationships that are
developed and their potential for meaning making. While it may seem serendipitous that Jay Z
walked up to a cipher, his attraction and identification with what he was witnessing is not.
Furthermore, as we start to imagine other methods of movement and relationships to Hip Hop

5

that occur through mass medias, our models and methods for articulating these stories must
grow. As we begin to consider this global movement, the potential for and articulation of these
vast networks that forms, requires that we have tools for understanding the formation of these
relationships. As Hip Hop grows, so does its potential for making new connections as well as
forming new connections to old ones. Due to this potential, the Hip Hop Cipher becomes an
important model for visualizing and understanding new connections because it makes space for
new participants through observation. Secondly, I draw upon Angela Haas and her Cultural
Rhetorics reading of hypertext as a tool for understanding embodied human memory to account
for the networks that form and get archived in Hip Hop.
As a Cultural Rhetorics and Hip Hop scholar, I am bringing together hyper-text and
ciphers as tools for readers to understand, how I see Hip Hop functioning as a community and
culture. I believe that my articulation of Hip Hop situates Hip Hop as an embodied practice that
is highly complex in the ways that it manages to move across communities yet maintain a core
set of practices. And through this movement, Hip Hop preserves and archives itself through the
bodies and practices of Hip Hop’s community members. Thus, I want to introduce the Hip Hop
cipher as a core principle to help visualize the many layers of relationships that formed through
various Hip Hop practices, including the four elements of DJing, Rapping, Graffiti Writing and
B-Boying/B-Girling. I then want to introduce hyper-text because of its theorization as a dynamic
storage system that allows for the potentially infinite ways that data is stored and retrieved.
Hyper-text is relevant to understanding Hip Hop because of the potential for entering Hip Hop
and navigating one’s relationship to Hip Hop. There is no single way to engage, participate, and
reproduce Hip Hop, therefore I argue we need to have a grounding for understanding Hip Hop
that allows for more dynamic theorizing and methodologies. Finally, paired together ciphers and

6

hyper-text, allow us to account for complex identities that are often what has made Hip Hop
transcendent and accessible.
Welcome to the Cipher
Inside of Hip Hop communities, the cipher is a sacred space often associated exclusively
with Rapping. Hip Hop purist turn to the cipher as the ultimate benchmark for measuring
authenticity and dedication to the culture. Ciphers are usually described nostalgically as a circle
of rappers in a public space, like a New York City park, surrounded by an audience who
provides beats and validation. Drawing from its Five Percenter history, the cipher in Hip Hop
exists across the elements as a relational practice of coming together in a circle to engage one
another whether that is through b-boying/b-girling or rapping.
Thinking through these different iterations of Hip Hop, asks us to understand what makes
the cipher and why it matters. While the focus of the cipher might be on the center, where
rappers are performing, the wholeness of the cipher depends on the presence of both rappers and
observers or an audience around them. Rap, like the other elements, needs an audience for
validation and to attract new practitioners. Thus, when we think about the cipher, we must value
the audience just as much as the rappers. I understand these two positionalities as active
participants (rappers) and supportive participants (audience). The emphasis here is on
participation and not necessarily on whether a practitioner of Hip Hop is active in the moment.
The difference in classification of participation helps us pay attention to the difference in labor
and its impact. Each level of participation carries its own important set of implications. What the
cipher reveals about Hip Hop is the need to value multiple forms of participation. Furthermore,
demonstrated through the example that Jay Z provides above, the cipher helps us understand the
movement between supportive roles (that’s some cool shit) and active roles (I could do that). As

7

represented in Figure 1 below, through the cipher, participants can visualize the fluidity of Hip
Hop spaces and understand the value of relationships between participants.

Figure 1: Participants and Movement in the Hip Hop Cipher.
In this image is a depiction of a cipher represented by two circles, one is smaller and nested inside of the other, and
various images representing the parts of the cipher. At the center of both circles is an image of a microphone that
represent active participants. Within the space in between the circles, in no particular order, are images of hands
clapping, an eye and headphones meant to depict supportive participants. On the lines of both the larger and smaller
circle is the image of footprints depicting movement from outside of the circle to the inner circle and back out.
Together this diagram is meant to demonstrate the various levels of participation in a Hip Hop Cipher and the
fluidity for participants to move between the levels.

By valuing multiple forms of participation, the importance of the cipher and what it
produces is not just a freestyle rap but instead a community and knowledge building moment.
Each layer has their own moments of building knowledge and community. As Hip Hop
Education scholar Chris Emdin has described, “during cyphers, the multifaceted nature of the
cultural and verbal exchanges among participants leads to the building of communality among
members of the cypher,” meaning that as each rapper takes their turn, they will build upon what
other rappers have said or what they observe in the immediate space (p. 22, 2013). By building
from the other rappers in the space, there is a simultaneous effort to build community while
making new enunciations or knowledge. Supportive participants help in building knowledge and
community through their affirmations but also in the work they do to extend what happens after

8

the cipher ends. Whether that extension is moving into the active role of the cipher or by talking
about what happened, this work of listening and responding after the cipher helps highlight how
a single cipher can have impact beyond its temporal limits.
Recognizing the effort across the layers of Hip Hop, helps us understand how all levels of
participation in Hip Hop are both practicing and preserving the culture. It is because of this
complex participation that I argue we understand these efforts through the relationships that are
present. The relationships that someone builds in the cipher, is influenced by previous
relationships and will influence future relationships. We get a glimpse of this complex network
of relationships in Jay Z’s first cipher description and the impact it had on his future relationship
to Hip Hop. His connection, to that cipher, is built on the relationships that were built by the
bodies present. The embodied experiences present in that cipher, help draw in Jay and have a
lasting impact on his future. Furthermore, we also get a glimpse of the significance of movement
to Hip Hop. Jay Z’s initial migration into Hip Hop, impacts his future migrations and the
influence it will have on future ciphers.
The infinite possibility for what bodies are present in a cipher, and the potential for
meaning making through the constellation of the relationships in that space, helps us theorize the
cipher as a practice in Hip Hop beyond a group of freestylers. Looking for ciphers or thinking
through a cipher, is a way to account for the relationships that exist across all Hip Hop
enunciations. Ciphering becomes a method for understanding and building relationships.
Because at some point Hip Hop practitioners are accountable to their relationships, whether we
are talking about, rapping, DJing, b-boying/b-girling. graffiti writing, or community activism,
whatever outcomes occur are a product of the relationships to previous events or moments and
contributes to future ones. Hip Hop is built on the relationship between passive and active

9

participants. Therefore, when we study Hip Hop, we have to look for the cipher. Who is
participating in this cipher? What relationships are present? Furthermore, when we create
through Hip Hop, we can utilize the cipher to be conscious and purposeful about what we hope
to accomplish by asking: Who do we need to include in our cipher? What ciphers can we build
from?
This dissertation is a cipher built of many ciphers—part study of the localization
practices of the Houston Hip Hop Community; part argument for building of relationships
between Hip Hop studies, Indigenous studies, Writing studies, Chicanx Studies and Digital
Humanities; part memoir of a Chicanx Hip Hop Head sittin’ at the interstices of race, migration,
language, education, and community2.
Opening with the Hip Hop Cipher, I want readers to be grounded in this imagined space
that values practice as much as embodiment. Starting with the example of a rap cipher, I want
readers to think about the image of a group of people in a circle, so that as we think about more
abstract interpretation of a cipher, the center of the circle is still surrounded by the influence of
the bodies and relationships that construct it. To cipher or ciphering, is the collective enunciation
of a set of histories, practices, and communities. The practice of ciphering is foundational to Hip
Hop culture.
Shout Out to the Hypertext
In this cipher—this dissertation—I am bringing hypertext to the circle. The idea of
connecting hypertext and Hip Hop, for me, is grounded in the ways that Hip Hop practitioners
like rappers or DJs can use certain signifiers to call upon specific histories or referents. Through
one word, phrase, or verbal intonation, a rapper can immediately shape the listener’s

2

Shout out to Angela Haas, I adapted her “This is a hypertext...” introductions for the cipher.

10

interpretation. Similarly, through my understanding and use of phrases like “What up doe!” and
“What it do?” I am not simply using a greeting but rather using it to also call upon the places that
those phrases represent. These essential, specific culturally situated moments are easily lost on
the ears of outsiders. Outsiders to Hip Hop communities find themselves not being able to
understand the connections or relationships present that lead to various types of cultural
productions. In turn, the inability to understand the relationships often gets characterized as Hip
Hop being random or accidental. This misreading is extended to the scholarship around Hip Hop,
especially in Writing Studies. Hypertext for me, is an answer to the gap in scholarship around
Hip Hop.
Before talking about Hypertext, I want to situate two instances where Hip Hop is labeled
as random or accidental, ignoring the intellectual work being done. In 2008 Nancy Effinger
Wilson wrote a review essay entitled “The Literacies of Hip Hop” for CCC in where she
reviewed H. Samy Alim’s Roc the Mic Right: The Language of Hip Hop Culture, Kermit E.
Campbell’s “Getting’ Our Groove On”: Rhetoric, Language, and Literacy for the Hip Hop
Generation, Elaine Richardson”s Hiphop Literacies, Geneva Smitherman’s Word from the
Mother: Language and African Americans. These texts are important contributions however
Wilson’s review of them highlights how Hip Hop is under-stood. Wilson begins her review by
talking about Kwame Ture (formerly known as Stokely Carmichael), African American
Vernacular English (AAVE), and a Stephen Schneider article to find a way to talk about the
authors stating:
In his article on Carmichael entitled "Freedom Schooling: Stokely Carmichael and
critical Rhetorical Education,” Stephen Schneider cites Geneva Smitherman and Elaine
Richardson as individuals who "provide productive discussions of the deployment of

11

AAVE in the writing classroom and how best to translate Carmichael's concerns about
language into usable composition pedagogies"( 62). Interestingly, Smitherman and
Richardson have both written books recently about hip-hop, a variety of AAVE…[Alim,
Campbell, Richardson, and Smitherman] carry forward the work that Carmichael began
by doing precisely what he advocated: they use AAVE, they research AAVE, they honor
AAVE, and in the process they have created a community of scholars. (p. 539)
While Hip Hop Nation Language (HHNL) is primarily based in AAVE, Hip Hop as a culture is
not characterized as a variety of AAVE. Wilson’s inference that Hip Hop is a language variety
misses the important relationship that Hip Hop has to AAVE and Black Language (BL) as well
as limits Hip Hop to just spoken and written practices. Part of the confusion and conflation may
stem from the inclusion of Smitherman in this collection. While Word from the Mother is one of
the few book length projects in Writing Studies exclusively written in AAVE there is only one
chapter dedicated to Hip Hop and Wilson’s review of the text does not mention this chapter.
Instead Wilson talks about Smitherman’s argument in support of African American Language
(AAL) and its validity. An argument that Smitherman has been making since 1971. The
conflation of Hip Hop and African American rhetoric as a monolith continues to reproduce a
systemic marginalization of Black scholar’s work, ignoring that this work is distinct or nuanced.
As Wilson continues her review, she characterizes each of the texts as appearing eclectic
in their structure citing a possible lack of market for focusing on one topic per book. She writes:
However, rather than being disappointed that these books do not offer more, perhaps we
should be grateful for what is there. In fact, rather than viewing the chapters’ eclecticism
as an indication that there isn’t a market for entire books on any one of the topics, the

12

other possibility is that the popularity of hip-hop and its dissemination worldwide has
forced scholars to run to keep pace with the language itself. (p. 546)
In this excerpt, we find Wilson looking to make sense of the chapter selections for each book and
continuing to characterize Hip Hop as a language. Wilson’s critique could be construed as
dangerous for its reproduction of discriminatory tropes about scholars of color’s work being
“different” because it follows less linear logic. Through Wilson’s critique we can see the
importance of understanding the ways that Hip Hop makes relationships because they are not
always so obvious. Furthermore, the market for full length books about Hip Hop had existed
prior to 2008 as evidenced by the multiple books published by H. Samy Alim prior to the one
reviewed.
Finally, Wilson goes on, to write that:
[B]ecause hip-hop is a new field of study, hip-hop scholars at Campbell’s level of
understanding are not necessarily as widespread as one would like. Fortunately, the
audience for Campbell’s findings eventually will expand, ameliorating this problem, in
part because Campbell’s work here in building on existing scholarship and expanding
scholars’ awareness of even obscure hip-hop texts. (p. 543)
In this final excerpt, as a Hip Hop scholar I can build on Wilson’s acknowledgement of her
limited knowledge of Hip Hop as she characterizes Campbell’s references as “obscure.” What
Wilson is misunderstanding about Hip Hop culture and practice is that Campbell’s awareness of
“obscure” Hip Hop texts is actually, his relationship to Hip Hop. They appear “obscure” to her
because she is generally unfamiliar to Hip Hop. Furthermore, by stating that Campbell is alone in
his deep understanding of Hip Hop, Wilson is ignoring that Campbell and the rest of the scholars

13

reviewed here are a part of the Hip Hop Generation 3. Whether they are scholars or do Hip Hop
studies, a whole generation of people, in and out of academia, have grown with Hip Hop and
have formed their own deep understandings and relationships to the culture.
Finally, Wilson mentions that future expanding audiences will better understand
Campbell’s “obscure” Hip Hop references. By identifying Campbell’s references as obscure yet
stating that an increase in Hip Hop scholars will remedy this obscureness, Wilson is portraying
Hip Hop as a relatively monolithic culture. Unaware that Campbell’s perspective is based on his
personal relationship, an increase in Hip Hop scholars in the field will not lead to better
understanding of one voice or perspective but rather, will increase the amount of perspectives
and relationships to Hip Hop. Wilson’s own relationship to Hip Hop, as having limited
experience, is common and important to remember as we do this work. Wilson willingness to
engage and review this work does leave space for scholars to learn through their own
relationship to Hip Hop.
In turn, there are also scholars who do engage with Hip Hop directly but fail to
understand the purposefulness of relationships in Hip Hop and how it affects practitioners. Five
years prior to Wilson’s review, Jeff Rice’s article “The 1963 Hip-Hop Machine: Hip-Hop
Pedagogy as Composition” appeared in CCC. Rice argues for the idea of digital sampling as the
foundation for argument based writing. Rice defines sampling as “the hip-hop process of saving
snippets of prerecorded music and sound into a computer memory” (p. 454). Then Rice goes on
to say, “[t]hese sounds become cut from their original source and pasted into a new composition.
In hip-hop, the ‘take whatever you find and use it’ principle acts as the dominant force in

3

According to Bakari Kitwana (2003), the Hip Hop Generation is any Black American born between 1965 and
1984.

14

sampling.” Rice is interested in the presence of random samples juxtaposing each other to create
new meaning stating,
The pedagogical sampler, with a computer or without a computer, allows cultural
criticism to save isolated moments and then juxtapose them as a final product. The
student writer looks at the various distinct moments she has collected and figures out how
these moments together produce knowledge. (p. 465)
In Rice’s example, he picks random or whatever events from the year 1963 to make an argument
based on how these events speak to each other through their juxtaposing challenging the need for
the linear structures of academic writing.
Rice’s adaptation of Hip Hop practices for Composition is proposing “hip-hop pedagogy
as the place to begin such questioning regarding our ability to resist dominant modes of thinking,
to engage with consumerism while working against it, to spark the resistance, whatever” (p.
469). The non-linear matter of which Rice is arguing that Hip Hop operates, contrary to what
Rice argues, is not a random act or a product of taking whatever is available. Rice’s argument
would help Wilson’s confusion as to the eclectic mix of chapters presented by the four scholars
reviewed. However according to Rice’s argument, Campbell is simply picking random
references and making up meaning instead of acknowledging that Campbell has been developing
an embodied archive of references over an extended period of time. Those so called “obscure”
references are the result of Campbell’s relationship with Hip Hop.
Wilson and Rice represent a relatively common understanding of Hip Hop as a culture
that has constructed itself through random samples. The mantra of “something from nothing” or
“making do” is common among cultures that grow from disenfranchised communities. However,
in the adaptation to the classroom, what Rice and others lose sight of is that these conditions are

15

not choices. The material realities of the founders of Hip Hop pushed them to innovate and make
purposeful decisions in response to their environments. Naming this intellectual work as
“obscure”, “random”, or “whatever”, ignores the embodied experiences and histories of the
people participating in Hip Hop. What appears as random in Hip Hop, is the result of leveraging
embodied knowledges, practice, and relationships. Before a computer was ever involved, the DJ
worked from their embodied memory bank of records that could span an entire lifetime of
listening. Through this ongoing listening, DJs develop an ability to choose what works or what
sounds right. To make sense of how embodied knowledge and relationships work in Hip Hop, I
want to make a migration towards Angela Haas’ “Wampum as Hypertext: An American Indian
Intellectual Tradition of Multimedia Theory and Practice.”
Haas’ article “traces a counterstory to Western claims to the origins of hypertext and
multimedia by remembering how American Indian communities have employed wampum belts
as hypertextual technologies” (p. 77, 2007). Haas’ defines wampum belts as hypertextual
technologies because they “extend human memories of inherited knowledges through
interconnected, nonlinear designs and associative storage and retrieval methods.” Conceptually
hypertexts rely on a “system of nodes and links that form information structures vis-à-vis
associative indexing. To explain, nodes can be considered points of information and links the
pathways that connect them” thus “in wampum belt hypertexts, wampum beads serve as nodes to
topics, and the sine, hemp, tree bark twine, or other stringing devices serve as links or pathways
to associated information” (Haas, p. 86). Finally, Haas explains, “[i]n order to retrieve the
encoded communication, an individual must be a part of the community with the cultural context
for accurate retrieval of that information.”

16

Bringing Hypertext to Hip Hop is not random, rather it is intentional. The same way that
Haas describes wampum functioning in American Indian communities, Hip Hop practitioners
also rely on embodied relationships and practice(s) to make and preserve culture. Due to the size
and scope of Hip Hop globally, hypertext allows us to imagine the ciphers that exist. More
importantly, allow us to understand and acknowledge discourses across Hip Hop as purposeful.
The stories, styles, and practices that migrate across the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN) not
only make meaning but through their links and nodes provide tools for further migrations and
relations. For example, when a DJ uses a sample, they are not simply calling about a random bit
of sound but rather a node that is connected to its own set of information. Nodes in Hip Hop
represent a moment of significance that seeks to represent or make reference to something. Even
as we might consider the concept of crate digging or research, DJs are again not making random
decision but rather looking through nodes to consider what links have been or can be made.
Understanding samples as nodes also helps us reimagine what the possibilities are for samples.
DJs can use samples from an infinite amount of source materials. Depending on their
relationships, not only do these source materials come from DJ’s embodied experiences but the
sounds referenced can exist without language. Yet, a sound without language can still function as
a node and are often linked together with other nodes to create a tapestry of meaning. Thus, for a
listener to access the information encoded they must have the tools to follow the links. In turn,
Hip Hop provides these tools as wider community and that allows for migration across more
local occurrences of meaning making. By migrating on links and nodes, Hip Hop practitioners
engage with so called “obscure” references or texts because they understand them as purposeful
acts. Through this engagement, knowledge making produces more relationships, more
hypertexts, more ciphers to draw upon and build from.

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This dissertation is about tracing and understanding through Hip Hop the connections one
can make as they migrate into a particular community. This dissertation wants to demonstrate
what it looks like to migrate by tracing links to nodes and always treating them as purposeful.
Dissertation is a Cipher, Hypertext, and a Tape
Like a cipher, this dissertation has grown and expanded as my embodied experience has
shifted and more discourses have entered the circle. Where this project was initially only
interested in a cipher between Hip Hop and Cultural Rhetorics, the circle has been expanded to
include more fields within Writing studies like Composition and Technical Communication.
Still, at its core this project remains interested in the way that Hip Hop moves and the
communities at the centers of these movements. At the center of this project is the Houston Hip
Hop community that emerged between 1991-2000. Understand the work that DJ Screw and
Screw Tapes created, drives the main arguments and help shape the structure of this project. This
dissertation is modeled after the structure and organization of Screw Tapes.
The Screw Tape mixtape series started as a live recording of DJ Screw remixing various
songs together through his Screwed and Chopped style of DJing. Overtime with the inclusion of
community member voices, Screw Tapes developed into ciphers. Retaining their live recording
while including the input of active and supportive participants. The structure of Screw Tapes also
changed from a mix of songs from a playlist, to a playlist that included intros, shout outs,
freestyles, and outros. These additions helped localize and create new avenues of engagement for
audiences. By following in this structure, this dissertation aims to use intros, freestyles, shout
outs, and outros to create a cipher that creates access for and brings together Houston, Hip Hop,
Rhetoric and Writing. The introduction is an Intro-track, meant to give readers a grounding for
the rest of the tape. DJ Screw used these tracks to introduce himself to the audience and assure

18

them that the tape they were listening to was a Screw Tape. The Intro tracks also helped ease
listeners into the slowed down style, preparing listeners by giving them a chance to orient
themselves to the pitch. In the intro to this dissertation, I situated myself and my understanding
of Hip Hop through a focus on the Cipher and Hypertext. Starting with these tools, I want
readers to think about hypertext and ciphers that emerge throughout their own migration of this
written dissertation mixtape.
Chapter 2, “Shout Out Writing Studies, Shout Out Hip Hop, Shout Out Borderlands,”
locates the important connections that exist between Hip Hop and Writing Studies. Shout out
tracks on Screw Tapes allowed DJ Screw, and those present during the recording session, to
name who was involved or connected to the Screw Tapes’ process. In this chapter, I
acknowledge the current discourses and relationships between Hip Hop and Writing Studies.
Previous scholarship (Pough 2004; Banks 2010; Campbell 2005; Richardson 2006) demonstrates
the ways that Hip Hop has produced feminist rhetorical practices, distinct literacy practices, and
models for digital rhetorics. This chapter makes a case for moving beyond isolated practices and
pushes us to see how Hip Hop emerges in our everyday spaces and places. By incorporating
scholarship from education (Emdin 2013; Love 2012; Pethchauer 2014) and linguistics (Alim
2006; Spady, Alim, Meghelli 2006; Alim, Ibrahim, Pennycook 2009), I argue the affordances of
studying localized versions of these practices because they demonstrate how Hip Hop creates
points of engagement. Finally, I close out the chapter by discussing the significance of including
migration and borderlands into Hip Hop. Initially tracing the history of borderlands theory and
similar movements in Writing Studies, I connect the importance of border crossing to reimagining migration from a finite practice into an ongoing purposeful one. Like the Shoutout-

19

tracks on Screw Tapes, this chapter recognizes and names important works that has influenced
and helped shaped this study.
For this dissertation, I have produced three data chapters that I consider the body of this
mixtape. The body of Screw Tapes were freestyle tracks and slowed down remixes. Freestyle
tracks allowed local voices to develop their skills as rappers and represent Houston from their
perspective. The slowed down remixes allowed audiences to engage with Hip Hop music
through the Screwed and Chopped style creating greater access to the content. Chapter 3 is
freestyle because I wanted to represent for DJ Screw to highlight the important role he played in
developing Houston Hip Hop. In Chapter 4 and Chapter 5, I wanted to slow down and focus on
aspects of the Screw Tapes to create a better understanding of the function of Hip Hop in
Houston.
Chapter 3, “Freestyle: The Life and Times of DJ Screw,” is an analysis of the practices of
DJ Screw as both a DJ and a community organizer from 1990-2001. Credited as the originator of
the Screwed & Chopped style, DJ Screw was the catalyst for the Hip Hop culture that emerged
as distinct to Houston. Through his innovations of technology, this DJ was able to create a voice
for Houston that resonated in both sonic and textual ways. By producing a mixtape series, DJ
Screw’s underground radio broadcast curated a Houston sound while making space for local
voices. DJ Screw serves as a model for how Hip Hop practioners can teach writing studies about
the relationship between community writing, civic engagement, and technology.
Chapter 4, “Screw Tapes Side A—Imagining Communication Design through Hip Hop,”
takes an in-depth migration through the mixtape series that DJ Screw invented. Positioned as a
new genre in Hip Hop, Screw Tapes combine elements of live DJ and Emcee performances with
the intentionality of an utterance in the form of a playlist. In this chapter I situate the 3 In Da

20

Mornin’ mixtape, as an example of user-localization within Hip Hop and argue for its inclusion
in technical communication. The composition of these tapes provides opportunities to engage
with the technological and aesthetic innovations of DJ Screw, while tracing the lineages that DJ
Screw provides throughout the history of Hip Hop. Screw Tapes are living texts built and
sustained on their potential to be engaged hyper-textually across time and place.
Chapter 5, “Screw Tapes Side B—June 27th, the Localization of Ciphers, and Language,”
focuses on the June 27th mixtape and continues to analyze the ways that Screw Tapes localized
Hip Hop. June 27th is distinct from other mixtapes because it includes a diverse range of tracks
including freestyles from local rappers and shout out tracks. In both instances, DJ Screw includes
community voices to localize the work they are doing on mixtapes. In the previous chapter the
focus is on global practices being localized however in this chapter I focus on the practices that
are distinctly local. From the language practices to the influence of living in Houston, this
chapter identifies specific examples of how these mixtapes are distinct to the local community
including the development of freestyle ciphers, Houston vernacular, and the emphasis on slow
movement influence by car culture. In this migration, I emphasize the importance of localized
practices for local needs because of what it can teach us about building relationships with
communities. Through these relationships, we can better communicate and engage with
communities because we learn to listen for specific language practices and strategies.
Finally, in Chapter 6, “Outro—Implications”, the tape ends with the future trajectory of
this work. Because listening to a mixtape was never a finite experience, the outro on Screw
Tapes helped signal an ending while allowing audiences to transition back into the start of the
tape. DJ Screw often repeated a song already used on the mixtape or played a southern style
instrumental track. As a part of the outro in this dissertation, I discuss the implications of

21

Borderlands for Hip Hop as a way to engage and understand the culture. Finally, ending with a
discussion of the implications of this work for pedagogy, cultural rhetorics, and technical
communication research.
It All Started With a DJ
The origin story of Hip Hop has been told well in traditional books (Rose 1994; Chang
2005; Jay Z 2011), comics (Piskor), and by artists like KRS-One, Nas, 9th Wonder and others.
For the purposes of this project, I want to highlight that Hip Hop history started with the DJ.
Between Afrika Bambaataa, Kool Herc, and Grandmaster Flash, the DJ in Hip Hop has always
been at the center of the original and ongoing movements in Hip Hop. Even in the current
rapper-centric culture, DJs and Hip Hop Music Producers are still the main link between rappers
and their audiences.
The focus of this study, Houston Hip Hop from 1991-2000, has DJ Screw at the center.
While there was a rich Hip Hop culture in Houston prior to 1991, it was DJ Screw, Screw Tapes,
and the Screwed and Chopped sound that galvanized a movement in Houston creating a cipher
that has gone on to define its legacy. As I migrate into the circle, this project builds relationships
with the various active participants of the Screwed and Chopped Houston cipher. Through this
work, I understand the cool shit that Houston and Hip Hop do, so that we can develop our
ciphers in Writing Studies. In the next chapter, I will discuss how it is I designed my study and
why DJ Screw became the center of Houston Hip Hop.

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CHAPTER 2: SHOUT OUT WRITING STUDIES, SHOUT OUT HIP HOP, SHOUT OUT
BORDERLANDS
In the previous chapter, I discussed the importance of relationships in Hip Hop and
specifically about the importance of the embodied experience in Hip Hop. Informed by this
grounding, entering discourses represents opportunities to orient and re-orient ourselves. This is
an ongoing reminder that our new relationships are always informed by previous ones. Thinking
about the current cipher between Rhetoric, Composition, and Hip Hop, two main strands of
research present themselves that are divided by how they treat and engage with Hip Hop. On one
side of the divide are scholars who have dedicated monographs to studying Hip Hop from the
perspective of literacy (Richardson 2006), culturally situated rhetorical practices (Campbell
2005; Pough 2015), and as a major part of broader discourse on African American digital
rhetorics (Banks 2010). On the other side are scholars who are either using Hip Hop to teach
writing through isolating certain Hip Hop practices but removing them from their cultural
context (Rice 2003, 2005; Hess 2006; Sirc 2006). These two sides form different ciphers because
their motivations and outcomes are different. Entering the disciplinary conversation, I migrate
and travel between the borderlands of these two ciphers. Acknowledging that both ciphers exist,
the discipline has historically leaned towards the scholars looking to use Hip Hop to teach
writing without engaging in more deeper understanding of why certain practices exist. Within
Writing Studies, Hip Hop has been gentrified as an area of study because while scholars find it
appealing they are unwilling to engage Hip Hop as wider culture.
In this dissertation, I am interested in highlighting and engaging with Hip Hop’s potential
within Writing Studies. By Writing Studies, I mean the discipline that includes Rhetoric and
Composition. At the same time, I want to continue to highlight how an attention to rhetorical

23

practice is an important step for Hip Hop Studies. By bringing these participants into a cipher
together, the borderlands between them, is important to acknowledge because through them we
can see how this work fits together. How participants interact with each other and what they
bring into the cipher determines what gets produced in the cipher. As I carve out the niche of my
project, I want to highlight three features of my work that I use to migrate across this borderland:
1) an emphasis on studying Hip Hop in local contexts, 2) understanding or accounting for the
movement of Hip Hop practices across communities, 3) articulating how Hip Hop practices are
localized within communities. These points of emphasis build on Hip Hop as an ongoing
translocal community. My work seeks to help make apparent how it is that Hip Hop is able to
exist as a global culture yet continue to make space for local expressions, interpretations, and
voices.
In this chapter, I want to situate my study by discussing how this project came about, how
I designed the study, and the importance of migration as a method. First, I will discuss the design
of my study and provide background information for how this project is situated. Then I will
describe how my project was able to blend research in Hip Hop that incorporates Technical
Communication, Rhetoric, and Composition as well as theories from Chicanx and Borderlands
studies. Next, I will discuss why I chose Houston as my site of study. Finally, I will end with a
discussion on the importance of migration as practice for my researcher because it insists on
slow-movement across space to build relationships (Miner 2014) within the borderlands of the
fields and disciplines I aim to engage with.
Research Design
Across Writing Studies, Hip Hop is under-studied and under-utilized. Despite Hip Hop
practitioners 40-year engagement writing through technology, Hip Hop is mostly absent from

24

conversations about multimodal, digital, and technical writing. Furthermore, despite Hip Hop’s
40-year history of empowering disenfranchised voices across the world, it is mostly absent from
studies about social justice, public writing, literacies, and composition. The inclusion of the Remix in writing studies would merit some recognition or mention of Hip Hop but as is the case in
Jason Palmeri’s Remixing Composition: A History of Multimodal Writing Pedagogy, he only
mentions a “remix artist,” and carefully avoids any mention of a DJ. Palmeri and many other
scholars who discuss the remix (Yancey 2008; Ray 2013; Davis, Webb, Lackey & DeVoss
2010), have found adaptations of the remix for Writing Studies across a variety of applications
yet continue to leave out the influence of Hip Hop from their work cited.
Despite the scholarly gentrification of the remix, Hip Hop and Rhetoric and Writing need
a re-orientation. One of the main issues that I encounter as I try to enter this conversation is the
urge, as someone in Hip Hop, to reject the static positions that seem to tether discourses across
the fields and sub-fields that exists in Writing Studies. At its highest level, the divides between
Rhetoric, Composition, and Technical Communication, creates anxiety as I think about how Hip
Hop fits into the discipline because it often cuts across the disciplines simultaneously. Hip Hop
was founded through the correlation of multilingual, multimodal, and digital practices. Writing
Studies has worked to retrofit these practices into its discourses and categorizes them as new
silos or subfields within the discipline. While I recognize that these boundaries are constantly
forming to make space for certain conversation, navigating these boundaries are complex and at
times frustrating. The Global Hip Hop Nation, which exists as “a multilingual, multiethnic
‘nation’ with an international reach, a fluid capacity to cross borders, and a reluctance to adhere
to the geopolitical givens of the present,” (Alim 2007) exists in a space that does not adhere to
academic disciplinary boundaries. However, through this fluidty, Hip Hop gives us tools for

25

migration that can help navigate these boundaries. Writing Studies has derived much of its
identity from the teaching of first year writing, even as an increasing amount of rhetoric and
writing scholars, programs, and sub-fields resist this history, this identity brings about certain
kinds of problems when Hip Hop is introduced. When I say “problems,” I hope to identify them
as issues to be solved and not as an accusation of fault. I firmly believe that the divides between
Hip Hop and Writing Studies is a paradigm problem that can be addressed.
Background
To establish the background for my study in the discipline, I want to highlight the
difference in epistemology and ontology between Hip Hop and Writing Studies through the story
of my initial migration across this borderland. During my time as a graduate student in a
Rhetoric and Writing program, I was consistently approached to talk about how I use Hip Hop to
teach writing. While I am appreciative of these invitations, I know that what is being asked of me
is counter-intuitive to my own pedagogy. What is expected at these types of workshops are tips
on how to do a single lesson or activity centered around Hip Hop. In all fairness, these requests
come from well-meaning instructors wanting to find new ways to relate to students.
Disciplinarily, this approach to Hip Hop pedagogy is supported by what has appeared in the
fields major journals (Rice 2003, 2005; Hess 2006; Sirc 2006), where scholars have taken up the
idea of sampling for teaching writing.
At my home institution, I agreed to lead and facilitate one workshop where I presented
with four graduate student colleagues. At the end of this workshop, not much ground was
covered on how a group of teachers—who do not actively participate in Hip Hop—could
incorporate it into their classes. And while I have declined to participate in anymore Hip Hop
workshops, I have had the opportunity to follow up this workshop with one-on-one meetings

26

with other instructors who were interested in learning more. Some of these instructors have even
given me the privilege of working with some of their students who are interested in Hip Hop
focused projects. I am grateful for these opportunities because they have allowed me to talk Hip
Hop with students of color at a predominantly white institution (PWI). These one-on-one
meetings, with faculty and students, have proved to be exciting and productive conversations that
have given me the space to think through how Hip Hop might be incorporated in Writing studies.
Research Stance
From these experiences, I have learned to be conscious of my own approaches to Hip
Hop as both a teacher and a researcher working within Writing Studies. Reflecting on these
experiences, I have developed a stance towards my work that is situated within both disciplines,
a borderlands space that considers the affordances of Hip Hop while addressing the needs of
Writing studies. I draw from my experiences with teaching writing because this is a common
foundational experience for scholars in Writing Studies. At the same time, the tension that comes
from doing Hip Hop work in Writing Studies reveal themselves in the most material ways
through these spaces.
The most important lesson from these experiences has been learning to value the work
that I have already invested in Hip Hop outside formal schooling. When I did participate in the
workshop mentioned above, I made sure to highlight that even though the panelists were sharing
specific lesson plans or activities, these pedagogical tools come from lived experiences with Hip
Hop. As Tricia Rose notes in the introduction to Black Noise (1994), prior to stepping foot in a
classroom as teachers, we were learning, studying, listening and engaging with Hip Hop. We
were building archives in our minds of lyrics that taught us about a wide range of topics,
communities, places, and practices. By acknowledging that we had already put in this work,

27

through our engagements in Hip Hop, we weren’t necessarily bringing new knowledge into a
space but rather utilizing a tool that was always present. Acknowledging this within ourselves as
teachers also reminds us that students bring this embodied knowledge into the classroom.
In my one-on-one conversations with instructors, I always reminded them that Hip Hop
was already in the classroom. Students in our classrooms are already engaging with Hip Hop as
well as many other knowledges and discourses. Instructors not familiar with Hip Hop always
expressed anxiety about not knowing where to start or not knowing enough. My advice to them
was to let the students guide the conversation, this helps initiate their own migration into Hip
Hop by building a relationship with students who are more engaged with the culture. Through
this simple act, Hip Hop served not only as the content of the class but as the catalyst for a
redirection of flow of knowledge in the classroom. In this example, Hip Hop’s impact on
classroom management helps us reorient what the possibility for Hip Hop is in Writing Studies.
Hip Hop reminds us that knowledges and knowledge-making are not linear processes and are
already present in our classroom. Furthermore, the movement beyond Hip Hop as content,
helped me learn to develop and acknowledge pedagogical practices that come from Hip Hop.
Regardless of whether Hip Hop continues to be acknowledged as a social justice based
culture, it does continue to be a space for new voices to emerge. Building from this, when I talk
about Hip Hop in my classroom, I try to articulate that Hip Hop informs my lesson planning,
syllabus construction, classroom management, and relationship to students more than the
content. This distinction asks us to engage in a Hip Hop paradigm for teaching instead of trying
to retrofit Hip Hop into our classrooms. As a Hip Hop educator, this move away from content is
also informed by choosing content that is relevant to students. My context at a predominantly
white land-grant university in Mid-Michigan taught me to adjust my teaching because the

28

majority of the student population was not actively engaging with Hip Hop. This final lesson is
heavily impacted by Hip Hop Education scholar Chris Emdin. His work on the Hip Hop Cipher
as a pedagogical tool for classroom management (Emdin 2013) reminds us that Hip Hop was
built on cultural practices before it got commodified as a product for purchase. In retrospect, it
makes much more sense for me to use practices in Hip Hop to present content much like a DJ
might incorporate new source material through a Hip Hop heuristic. The re-orientation to
practice for Hip Hop is where Writing Studies can make more meaningful engagements because
of the attention to how these practices are rhetorical and representative of a larger cultural
movement.
This is not to say that this work does not already exist within Writing Studies. Kermit E.
Campbell’s “Gettin’ Our Groove On”: Rhetoric, Language, and Literacy for the Hip Hop
Generation (2005), advocates for the important language work that the Hip Hop Generation is
responsible for because of their innovations and preservation of diverse language practices.
Campbell goes on to argue that rappin’ is the current manifestation and best representation of the
African American rhetorical tradition because it encompasses the historical lineage that draws
from West African griots traditions to spoken word artists of the 1960s-70s. In Check It While I
Wreck It: Black Womanhood, Hip Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (2004), Gwendolyn D.
Pough identifies “wreck” as a rhetorical practice within Hip Hop that purposely intends to be
disruptive. By “bringing wreck,” Pough goes on to argue how Hip Hop has consistently created
ruptures within the public sphere by using rhetorical practices that manifest through language or
dress to create spectacles. Pough goes on to further complicate the notion of “wreck” by
discussing its rhetorical significance as enacted by Black women within and through Hip Hop.
Elaine Richardson’s Hiphop Literacies does the important work of explaining the complex use of

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and relationship to language that rappers practice and audiences learn. Richardson goes on to
examine the role that language plays across a variety of Hip Hop contexts including the use of
African American Language in German online communities and rhetorical analysis of rapper Lil
Kim’s subversion of the jezebel through her use of language in rap performances. Across these
texts are theoretical engagements with the ways that Hip Hop is creating and developing
rhetorical practices that go beyond simply treating a singular artifact as content. Campbell,
Pough, and Richardson represent the few monographs within Writing Studies on Hip Hop and
each one of their context understands the role of Hip Hop within larger social discourses.
This dissertation builds from the work mentioned above and grows from the urge to
continue to celebrate Hip Hop as a complex culture that is always situated and purposeful. Like
the absence of Hip Hop’s representation in the discourse of the remix, this project wants resist
narratives about Hip Hop that encourages further gentrification of its practices. Like Pough and
Richardson, I wanted to portray Hip Hop practitioners as experts of their craft and their decisions
as purposeful no matter how spontaneous or random they may appear. Finally, I wanted to try
and show how these decisions were a response to or built from a collective experience.
Therefore, my research position for this project is modeled after the Hip Hop DJ. On my
turntables, one spinning Hip Hop and the other Writing Studies, I hope to amplify Hip Hop
voices while addressing the needs of my audience needs in Writing Studies. Additionally, in my
crate of records, I also want to layer in discussions about borderlands, identity, localization,
globalization, relationality, and community building. Using the mixer in between my turntables
to migrate across the records, I want to honor and respect the work that Hip Hop practitioners
have done while helping newcomers to the culture understand not only what I am putting
forward but develop listening practices that align with Hip Hop.

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Trajectories and Lineages
In chapter one, I laid a foundation that positioned Hip Hop as massive collections of
ongoing ciphers with the possibility to link hyper-textually to each other as well as other
discourses. The nodes that exist across these ciphers provide the possibility for links that can be
traced. Over the course of my personal engagements with Hip Hop I have learned to recognize
certain nodes that produce familiar patterns. These patterns are often the trajectories or lineages
that members of the Hip Hop community have adopted. These lineages are not limited to texts,
histories, and cultures within Hip Hop. The recognition of nodes and links outside of Hip Hop
have helped understand the history of Hip Hop’s founding as well as directly contribute to the
constant remaking or re-imagining of Hip Hop. This project is designed to highlight that these
patterns and trajectories exist while arguing for their importance to knowledge making.
The inclusion of outside source material offers glimpses into how Hip Hop operates as a
practice or heuristic for knowledge making. Furthermore, as these practices migrate across the
borderlands of Hip Hop, away from their originators, their ability to be read hinges on a complex
system of nodes and links. H. Samy Alim calls this system of nodes and links a translocal style
community, or the “transportability of mobile matrices” which are “sets of styles, aesthetics,
knowledges, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities” (2009). Hip
Hop scholars like Alim, Petchauer (2014), and Pennycook (2007) have advocated for Style as the
unit of analysis in Hip Hop because it represents a more dynamic approach to studying the
culture. Petchauer draws on the work of Tricia Rose (1994) to define style as a list of “shared
approaches to sound and motion,” which include flow, layering, rupture, and others. Petchauer
identifies three major categories of styles, “Sampling and Layering,” “Flow and Rupture,” and
“Affect, Performance, and Embodiment,” as he explains each style he cites examples of each

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style’s use that reach across the four elements of Hip Hop. This understanding of style, across the
elements, is important to remember because style encompasses a level of readability that
transcends language and specific practices. Thus, something like Sampling is not just read as a
DJ practice but rather a style to use across a range of activities. Furthermore, characterized as a
style, Sampling can be understood as something we purposefully engage in as opposed to
absolute inevitability.
Petchauer identifies the practice of styles as a Hip Hop Aesthetic Form meaning “the
situated ways of doing and being that is salient to hip-hop” (p. 79, 2007). Similar to Alim’s
translocal style communities, a Hip Hop Aesthetic Form helps us account for the ways that Hip
Hop practitioners can engage with the world through the leveraging of several styles. In addition
to their theorization of style in Hip Hop, Alim and Petchauer make the important assertion that
“doing and being” Hip Hop is the product of a combination of styles. It is precisely these
configurations of styles that lead to the patterns and trajectories that allow us to not only make
sense of something in Hip Hop but to locate where they are migrating from. Being able to tease
out the styles or understand them as a mobile matrix, helps us see the differences across
practitioners. It’s the differences between practitioners and how they enact them that I am
interested in researching. I understand these differences to be rhetorical sites of study that allow
us to see how and what is being preserved and called upon.
Over time, differences in style create lineages and trajectories that manifest as
communities or movements. Across Hip Hop there are various movements that link local
histories, practices, and cultures. Despite the universal link to Hip Hop through the four original
elements, I am interested in how communities of practice in Hip Hop remain distinct. How do
translocal style communities form and what contributes to them? This interest was originally

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sparked when I listened to participants of the 2012 Houston Hip Hop Conference talk about how
the only music rap fans in Houston heard came from DJ Screw mixtapes. How does a global
culture mediated through mass medias contain communities that remain so insular? What are the
motivations for this? In addition, every time a new trend in Hip Hop emerges, I am interested to
hear how this movement is situated. How are new generations or movements relating to the
history of Hip Hop? When new generations of rappers like Vince Staples talk about 50 Cent and
Lil Bow Wow (Muhammad & Kelley) as the most important rappers of their youth, it makes
space for how Hip Hop can exist as this cohesive culture yet allow for so many interpretations.
In this project, I want to argue for Hip Hop as a purposeful practice that is always situated
within a community to resist the understanding of Hip Hop as a product of whatever or random
juxtapositions (Rice 2003, 2005). By demonstrating that Hip Hop is purposeful, I hope to push
Writing Studies away from treating Hip Hop as a flat text. Away from a culture that can have its
practices gentrified for teaching writing. Away from treating it like content we can use to appeal
to younger or students of color. Instead, asking us to consider how Hip Hop can inform our
understandings of rhetoric or how Hip Hop can teach us to create writing classroom spaces that
value distinct voices. How Hip Hop can teach us to build localized communities spaces that
centered marginalized voices?
Using the space of the dissertation, I wanted to discuss why it mattered to study Hip Hop
in a local context as well as demonstrate what it looked to do this kind of research. To focus my
study, I decided on three major research questions:
What does Hip Hop look like as a localized practice?
What gets localized?
What does it produce?

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In my research, I am interested in arguing for place in studying Hip Hop. The main motivation
for this approach is based in considering the factors that Hip Hop is an embodied practice and
through mass media technologies is constantly migrating. Thus, from a broad perspective I am
interested in understanding how we can identify movements or communities that are local. Then,
by studying these localized versions of Hip Hop, identifying what is widely recognizable as a
universal Hip Hop practices and what is reinterpreted through local influences.
Through this attention to the localization of Hip Hop, I hope to demonstrate what it looks
like to engage Hip Hop. Ultimately, I am interested in understanding the process of localization
to be able to adapt it to Writing Studies research. Hip Hop has been incredibly successful at not
only achieving global popularity but doing so through empowering disenfranchised
communities. At the same time, Hip Hop practitioners are engaging with the core conversations
of rhetoric and composition in vastly complicated ways. Whether that work is interested in
community engagement, writing pedagogies, or rhetorical practices, Hip Hop is perpetually
engaged with these discourses. Finally, you can find examples of these discourses across
cultures, communities, and nation-states.
The Study
This study follows the research paradigm of Hiphopography. James G. Spady (1991)
coined the term hiphopography as a paradigm for research that correlates multiple methods to
ensure that Hip Hop practitioners would be included in the telling of their culture. H. Samy Alim
cites Spady and describes hiphopography as a “paradigm [that] integrates the varied approaches
of ethnography, biography, and social, cultural, and oral history to arrive at an emic view of Hip
Hop culture” (2006, p. 8) Alim argues that hiphopography insists on the direct engagement with
the “cultural creators” in Hip Hop like the rappers, DJs, b-persons, and graphic artists. As a

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project that has an emphasis on place, hiphopography has guided this project to seek ways of reinserting the voices of Houston in my analysis.
If this project is a cipher, at the center of it is DJ Screw, Screw Tapes, and the Screwed
and Chopped style. Each one of these variables in my study have the potential to not only inform
the data collection but also inform how the data is analyzed. DJ Screw’s recorded live
performances known as Screw Tapes are complex pieces of data. Their interpretation as art can
be based in a historical analysis or as part of contemporary discussion. Hip Hop artifacts are
alive and open to interpretation no matter when they were produced. Given this tension of
temporality, Screw Tapes offer ethnographic opportunities for study because they are sonic
distillation of the recording process for a Screw Tape.
Hip Hop’s grounding in call and response provides opportunities to engage with
Houston’s history and DJ Screw’s legacy through audience interpretations of tapes and
performances. Locating the supportive participants of the Houston Hip Hop cipher helps us
understand why DJ Screw resonated. Aside from finding examples of DJ Screw’s own
explanation of his style, what gets communicated and articulated by his audience is just as valid
in Hip Hop because of the call and response relationship. Specifically, the work of journalist fits
within this new space of data. Hip Hop journalists have played a key role in preserving Hip
Hop’s story through their investigative work as well as their interviews. Lance Scott Walker’s
Houston Rap Tapes plays a vital role in my research because of his conversations with key
figures in Houston Hip Hop’s history. Walker’s ability to transgress between active and
supportive participation, produced important conversations with fellow artists and friends of DJ
Screw like Big DeMo and Shorty Mac provide important background/firsthand experiences to
the historical moment of Screw Tapes. Furthermore, Walker’s writings about the legacy of DJ

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Screw, including his 2015 article “DJ Screw: A Fast Life in Slow Motion,” help provide valuable
information that is still present in Screw Tapes but often requires contextual evidence to become
visible.
The archival component of this project serves as a convenient starting point where
various variables are interacting. It hosts the papers of DJ Screw, brings in community members,
and offers a stable home for Houston Hip Hop history. The archive brings concrete examples of
primary resources to serve as landmarks for the relationships I trace between DJ Screw, Screwed
and Chopped style, and the community that formed in Houston from 1991-2000. The Houston
Hip Hop Archive at the University of Houston becomes a space of invention for this project as I
become more aware of the possibilities for what is being preserved and what we can further
highlight.
Through the Screw Tapes, an understanding of Hip Hop practices, the journalism related
to Houston Hip Hop, and the Houston Hip Hop Archive, I work to enact James G. Spady’s vision
for Hip Hop scholarship that centers the voices of its community. As I moved from data
collection to analysis, I found myself correlating parts of data across my analysis to form a full
picture of Houston Hip Hop. Many times, stories from interviews or items from the archive
helped the mixtapes comes alive in ways that made them the central site of the study. Learning to
listen for specific names being shout out or better understanding for song selections came from
the different types of data that allowed me to consider the mixtapes as more complex artifacts.
Evident in the Screw Tapes that I examined, their content captured the listening styles, language,
development of rappers, and many more facets of everyday life in Houston, which is not always
apparent without context. As I completed my study, I have learned that because Hip Hop is
continually making and re-making itself, to find a site of study is really to weave across

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discourses, texts, and stories to find this emic view of a culture that has so many influences and
stakeholders.
Why Houston?
My interest in studying Houston started in 2012 after attending the Awready! Houston
Hip Hop Conference hosted by the University of Houston and Rice University. The event
featured a variety of speakers and panels of scholars, local artists, and historical figures of
Houston Hip Hop. The presentations covered a range of topics that were tied to Houston Hip
Hop such artist roundtables featuring Chingo Bling, Willie D, E.S.G., Lil Keke, K-Rino, and
others. As well as keynotes about the epidemic of cough syrup as a recreational drug in Houston
and an in-depth history of Houston Hip Hop.
The experience of the conference was a welcomed, overwhelming introduction and
orientation into to Houston Hip Hop from an insider’s perspective. It was a unique experience to
hear people talk about Hip Hop from such a localized context. My experiences of Hip Hop had
always been through digital media interfaces and while I could relate to the stories being told, I
had never experienced what the people at this conference were discussing. There was one thing
that stuck out to me the most from this conference that motivated this project, which was the
consensus agreement that the only way you listened to Hip Hop music in Houston was through a
Screw Tape.
Considering the era that Screw Tapes reigned, from 1991-2000, which corresponds with a
time in Hip Hop that was experiencing considerable growth into mainstream markets, the idea
that a city’s Hip Hop community could actively pursue being insular seems counter-intuitive.
Furthermore, what made Houston an important site of study, was that the community was
centered around Screwed and Chopped music. While DJ Screw is at the core of this sound,

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Screwed and Chopped represented a Hip Hop Aesthetic Form to organize this study around. The
signature slowed down sound of Houston is so distinct in Hip Hop, that it pushes us to
understand that even within the United States, translocal style communities exist and challenge
our geopolitical assumptions of culture. Houston’s distinct aesthetic form, represented an
opportunity to pursue questions around Hip Hop and localization that could be grounded in
something that was tangible and recognizable.
When you first listen to Screwed and Chopped music, audiences both within and outside
of Hip Hop, will have a noticeable reaction. It does not sound like anything else in rap music,
thus its distinctness asks us to consider how it represents Hip Hop. At the same, this style asks us
to think about why this sound would appeal to Houston audiences. Screwed and Chopped asks us
to navigate the tension that exists in Hip Hop between a global culture and its local applications.
This tension is precisely where we see styles get practiced and where we can locate nuanced
understandings of Hip Hop.
Finally, for a Hip Hop project in Writing Studies, Houston Hip Hop’s Screwed and
Chopped style was an opportunity to see general Hip Hop practices become localized. By
analyzing the migration of Hip Hop through Houston, we start to understand the value of
translocal practice. Historically, practices like sampling and re-mixing came from a specific
historical moment. I am interested in demonstrating how Screwed and Chopped develops from
Houston while linking it to other ongoing Houston practices like the car culture. Through this
work, I hope to emphasize that practices in Hip Hop are culturally and spatially situated. This is
not to say that these practices cannot be adopted for Writing Studies but the ways in which we
adopt them have to account for Hip Hop’s ways of knowledge making.

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Migration
A central theme that runs throughout this dissertation is the movement across land,
spaces, and places. My focus on the relationship between localization and Hip Hop can also be
understood as the ongoing migration of Hip Hop culture. Migration understood as a purposeful
movement across land, asks us to be conscious of the relationship we form to the spaces we
encounter (Miner, 2014). Migrating through Hip Hop is a movement across ciphers and the
borderlands between them. As we migrate through these space, a conscious purposeful migration
asks us to always acknowledge that every space we encounter contains knowledges and histories
already. Every cipher contains participants and is shaped by embodied experiences. As Hip Hop
grows and forms new ciphers, the borderlands that form help us see the distinctions. For this
dissertation, I pay close attention to two distinct migrations: 1) My migration through Houston
Hip Hop, and 2) Hip Hop’s migration to Houston.
These migrations are ongoing and simultaneous, as I listen and engage with Houston Hip
Hop I am also understanding how Hip Hop has moved into Houston. I use migration because of
the importance that place has on Hip Hop culture. Without the localization of Hip Hop by
diverse communities, Hip Hop would have remained a stagnant culture. Naming my research
process a migration also helps me re-imagine what this migrations looks like and understand it as
ongoing. Because Hip Hop exists across a variety of practices and mediums, migrating through
these various artifacts helps create new paths of migration. Across time, space, and modality,
adding these to possible sites of migration help sustain Hip Hop as a complex non-linear culture
and community. Hip Hop will continue to migrate as its original form from New York City and it
will also migrate from its Houston iteration. These distinct yet simultaneous movements of
culture help Hip Hop continue to grow and be accessible for new iterations.

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Borderlands
Bringing a borderlands perspective to Hip Hop, means that as practitioners of Hip Hop,
we are always in-between discourses. For Hip Hop, this also means that borders are constantly
shifting. These borders could be as granular as competing ciphers in the park or as wide as
geographical regions or defined through more abstract definitions like the styles known as GFunk and Grime. This also acknowledges the borders between Hip Hop and the texts, cultures,
and knowledges produced outside of it. My identification of the simultaneous presence of
borders, borderlands, and the movement across them, is meant to acknowledge the dialectic
nature of Hip Hop. This dialectic is represented through practices like the cipher where active
participants help shape a space as well as their movement between spaces. This orientation to
Hip Hop is useful because nothing in Hip Hop happens in isolation, even though it might appear
as if it might, there are always border crossers.
Borderlands Theory
Xicanx scholars have theorized borders and borderlands to describe not only what has
shaped the experience of Xicanxs but also how Xicanxs have made sense of the world (Anzaldua
1987; Moraga 1983; Castillo 1995). The theorization of borderlands has helped shape
understandings of language, identity, and practice when the conditions for these formations of
culture are impacted by the overlapping presence of competing nation-states. These theorizations
have been especially important towards navigating the influences of power and oppression.
When one influence is hegemonic, being able to recognize or recover what is being oppressed
has proven to be an incredibly powerful tool for liberation. The acknowledgement of borders and
borderlands has created space to have discussions about the material implications of nation-states
and allow for a discursive space to think about how these boundaries exist in the abstract. In both

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cases, this work has helped us understand how borderlands play out on the body and how our
bodies learn to make meaning from these spaces. Building from this work, I hope to emphasize
that by acknowledging that borders and borderlands exists, we can continue to think about border
crossing and/or migration as method for understanding and inquiry. Migration then becomes a
powerful practice because it acknowledges that borders can and are always being crossed.
Gloria Anzaldua’s description of the border between Mexico and the United States as a
“1,950 mile-long open wound” gave the initially grounding for theorizing the significance of this
space and the people who live there. Defining a border “as a dividing line” and the borderland as
“a vague and undetermined place created by the emotional residue of an unnatural boundary,” (p.
25) Anzaldua theorized a landscape for understanding the complexity of this space as well as the
language to make sense of the open wound. The imposition of a border, on a space that was
previously occupied, created the conditions of a borderland space that plays itself out on land and
on the bodies of the people as well as their knowledges and practices. Anzaldua’s work was
groundbreaking because while we were aware that borders demarcate ownership and division of
land, it was the consciousness that a borderlands identity could exist that acknowledged the
influence of multiple discourses converging at once. Embodiment emerges as an important
aspect of borderlands theory because it is often the site of this convergence and the conocimiento
or understanding of it. The atravesado or border crosser, navigates physical, linguistic, cultural,
and other kinds of social structured that are produced in the open wound of a space that is
perpetually in-between.
Anzaldua’s theoretical work is born out of the lived experience of Xicanxs physically
living on the US-Mexico borderlands. The experience of crossing the border is a reminder of its
insistence on demarcating us from them however because our bodies embodied both, we are also

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reminded that these divisions are constructed and can be subverted if not dismantled. Through
these experiences, we learn to locate and navigate other kinds of borderland spaces. From
Anzaldua and other’s work, scholars have turned to borderlands theory to help build frameworks
and tools for navigating cultural and social spaces that specifically engage with shifting relations
to power. Specifically, scholars have looked towards borderlands for discussion on classroom
diversity and multiculturalism.
Henry Giroux’s (1991a, 1991b) work on border pedagogy builds from Anzaldua’s
understanding of borders to further extend the places where we might find “shifting borders that
both undermine and reterritorialize different configurations of culture, power, and knowledge”
(1991b, pg. 510). For Giroux, the recognition of borders as metaphorical and physical
inscriptions of “epistemological, cultural, and social margins” of difference or othering means
that their questioning or critique is a form of border crossing. Giroux’s context of the early 1990s
and the pedagogical responses to learning how to engage with postmodernism and
multiculturalism, is main the motivation for his argument of border pedagogy. By encouraging
students to engage in discursive border crossing, Giroux argues that this “offers the opportunity
for students to engage the multiple references that constitute different cultural codes,
experiences, and languages” (p. 511, 1991b). Ultimately Giroux believes that the recognition of
borders and the critique of them, can enable student’s ability to engage with texts and discourses
through the questioning of the conditions and contexts that inform them.
In Writing Studies, borderlands spaces have been theorized to talk about classrooms as
sites for cross cultural discussions. Mary Louise Pratt’s coined the phrase “Contact Zone” as a
“social space where culture meet, class, and grapple with each other” (1991), noting that often
these clashes occur in “highly asymmetrical relations of power.” Building from Pratt’s work,

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Patricia Bizzell (1994) argued that building English Studies within a contact zones framework
would better integrate diverse literatures as well as rhetoric and composition into literary studies
classrooms. Pratt and Bizzell ultimately argue for the significance of the contact zone as a
pedagogical tool to accommodate changing demographics, navigating diversity in the classroom,
and the inclusion of diverse texts.
Cynthia L. Selfe and Richard J. Selfe Jr. (1994) have extended this into computers and
composition scholarship citing the engagement of interfaces by non-white middle class users as
not only a contact zone but as a borderlands space. While Selfe and Selfe also talk about their
work in the context of classrooms, their use of computer interfaces helps adapt and situate this
work within a more contemporary digital context. Of this early scholarship, Selfe and Selfe are
amongst a small group of scholars to acknowledge these spaces as borders or borderlands, going
as far as mentioning a story of a colleague temporarily denied access at a port of entry on the
US-Mexico border. The physical spaces of borderlands help remind us that these spaces exist
and that borders have real material implications. Conflicts at the sites of entry reveal the
ideologies that constructs borders. At the same time, being conscious that borders are dependent
on social constructs reminds us that they can be and are consistently being crossed.
Borderlands have developed as powerful tool for re-orienting and being reminded of the
metaphorical and ideological borders that are all around us. Yet, as we become conscious of
these borders we are reminded of the connection between border crossing and embodiment. The
adaptation of borders for pedagogical purposes represents transformative implication for helping
students recognize privilege, power, and marginalization. However, aside from Anzaldua, many
of these pedagogical implications decenter the bodies that are already in the borderlands due to
their motivations for decentering dominant discourses. Moving towards the implications of

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borderlands on Hip Hop, the converging discourses are represented as the interpretation and
localization of styles, practices, and cultures. The work that scholars argue border pedagogy or
contact zones enact, is already happening in Hip Hop. Practitioners in Hip Hop are constantly
moving between discourses and spaces recognizing and valuing difference as innovation and
authenticity. In this way, because Hip Hop is often practiced by oppressed communities, border
crossing is about recognizing local sovereignty in communities.
Borderlands, Migrations, and their Decolonization
The perpetual movement and growth of Hip Hop continues to re-imagine the bounds of
Hip Hop possibilities. If the Global Hip Hop Nation (GHHN) can exist in its own imagined
space, then each local style community is entitled to their own space within the nation. However,
because the GHHN is built through shared practices and styles engagement across spaces and
communities is encouraged. As someone who considers themselves as a part of the Global Hip
Hop Nation, I recognize the nearly infinite amount of communities that exist yet I have no claim
to any one. In this sense, not only am I am an atravesado of Hip Hop but I am also constantly
migrating across the borders and borderlands of Hip Hop.
As a Xicano, my atravesado (in-between) status in Hip Hop is familiar and comfortable,
and through this project I have learned to embrace my ongoing migration as valid orientation to
the culture. Understanding the value of borderlands, I have only recently recognized my presence
in them as an ongoing migration. The narrative of migration for Xicanx or Mexican people in my
experience has always been situated as a movement para El Norte (towards the north), from
Mexico to the United States. Implicit in this movement north, includes aspects of assimilation
and upward mobility, reminding us that border crossing is hardly just physical. In this narrative,

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para el Norte reaching the United States is considered the end-point of migration. Yet, simply
landing in the United States does not also accomplish the implicit goals of moving north.
Furthermore, growing up along the Juarez-El Paso borderland displaced my relationship
to migration because I was in an in-between space. Not only did I not acknowledge my constant
movement across the border as migration but because I did not fit the narrative of the farm
worker or day laborer going pa’l Norte, I could not recognize other interpretations of migration.
This understanding of migration is in large part due to honoring the material dangers of
constantly crossing the border. Depending on your subjectivity certain bodies can constantly
cross the border while others are not. This subjectivity informs what method of border crossing is
available. The acknowledgement of embodiment is incredibly important here as we think about
border crossing. Our ability to cross borders is based in our privilege and experiences. Not only
does it matter that we know we can cross borders but knowing what tools are needed to make the
crossing is also as important.
My relationship to migration was shifted as I began to consider my recursive movement
across the border as a migration. Furthermore, this new orientation sought to decolonize or
Indigenize migration as an ongoing purposeful practice (Miner, 2014). As Metis scholar Dylan
AT Miner has argued, because colonization has ruptured Xicanxs relationship to land through
traditional practices, migration offers a new orientation to land. As a detribalized people,
Xicanxs have been disconnected from understanding their practices as Indigenous (Miner 2014;
Rodriguez 2014). By taking a decolonial approach, migration becomes an Indigenous Xicanx
practice. Thus, the process of border crossing re-imagined as an Indigenous migration blurs and
extends the finite threshold to an ongoing straddling of borderlands with constant engagement

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and relationship building. Finally, continuing to acknowledge that subjectivity matters in border
crossing, we must recursively question our orientation and subjectivity throughout this process.
Conclusion
The early movements in Hip Hop studies focused on the legitimization and the disruption
that rap music was causing in popular culture and literary criticism. Specifically focused on rap
music, scholars looked beyond individual lyrics and instead studied the aesthetics that Hip Hop
used to continual make and re-make itself. Challenging modernists understandings of knowledge
making and art, scholars like Houston Baker (1990) and Richard Shusterman (1991) praised Hip
Hop for its embracement of mass media technologies, enthusiastic mixing of source materials,
and disruption of aesthetic autonomy and artistic purity.
Tricia Rose (1994) first discussed the importance of spatial analysis for Hip Hop,
recognizing that the urban background of New York City was instrumental in its development.
Murray Foreman (2000, 2002) argues for the importance of the impact that local “hoods” have
on Hip Hop artists. Noting that often these are the first audiences and influences on artists as they
develop their skills and voices. As Hip Hop scholarship has moved away from legitimizing its
presence in the academy, scholars have increasingly become interested in understanding how
Hip Hop mobilizes across spaces and places. Along with this attention to movement has risen the
importance of style as the emergent variable for studying Hip Hop in a way that honors practice
as well as product. Joining Emery Petchauer’s (2015) call for a second wave of Hip Hop
Education scholarship that’s starts with style, I am calling for a similar movement of Hip Hop in
Writing and Rhetoric research. Inherent with style, is the need to pay attention to how
practitioners and practices are influenced by local communities and the Global Hip Hop Nation.
Moving away from isolated practices, engaging with localized contexts of Hip Hop is a fertile

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space for Writing Studies research that cuts across disciplinary conversations of technology,
public writing, accessibility, and representation that is inherently culturally relevant.

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CHAPTER 3: FREESTYLE—THE LIFE AND TIMES OF DJ SCREW
“Hey, man—I think you gave me a messed up tape,” and he started laughin’.
He say “Naw, it’s supposed to sound like that.”
- Shorty Mac
But every Screw tape—every Screw tape—is somebody’s personal tape.
- Big DeMo
Introduction
Discussions in Rhetoric and Composition that incorporate Hip Hop have trended towards
applying Hip Hop to the teaching of writing. Specifically, these works are interested in applying
concepts of sampling to First Year Writing (Rice 2002, 2003; Hess 2006; Sirc 2006). While
these discussions are mostly interested in practices stemming from DJs, they hardly mention that
these practices were developed by DJs, leaving out the context and conditions for why these
practices exist. Furthermore, by leaving out the DJ, we are also missing the community that a DJ
practices in and the impact these relationships have on their DJing. Despite the increasing
demand for work in digital rhetorics and the disciplines acceptance of the Re-mix as a staple of
writing, Hip Hop and the DJ are almost always left out of the discussion.
The DJ is possibly the most important element in Hip Hop. DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika
Bambaataa, and Grandmaster Flash not only developed the foundation of Hip Hop DJing but
they were also the catalysts of Hip Hop as a culture and community. In the context of Writing
Studies, the DJ is under-theorized and under-utilized. Taking a step back to situate and
acknowledge what the role of a DJ is, as a digital rhetorician, community organizer, and
archivist, we can see the DJ as a powerful culturally relevant model for teaching and making in
writing studies. Current trends in Writing studies around public writing, community writing, and
digital writing all converge at the axis of where a DJ sits. Even extended to the most recent trend

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of maker’s spaces, DJs have been building sound systems and innovating DJ techniques through
their engineering and ingenuity since before it was called Hip Hop.
In this chapter, I look at DJ Screw as an example of a DJ, whose work on the Southside
of Houston catalyzed a movement and carved out an identity for Houston Hip Hop. Born in
Smithville, TX and migrating to Houston because of a custody dispute, Robert Earl “DJ Screw”
Davis Jr. was always “good with his hands” building mixers and sound systems with old
boomboxes (Walker, pg. 24). Through DJ Screw’s work and legacy, I articulate the ways that a
Hip Hop DJ is culturally situated as a community organizer and digital rhetorician. Through this
position, a DJ is constantly responding to their audience and shaping the community through
discourse. Characterized in this way, the DJ can no longer be separated from their practices and
becomes an important model for culturally relevant writing and rhetoric scholarship from
teaching writing to theorizing rhetorical practices.
Method: Hiphopography
Recognizing the importance of the DJ in Hip Hop, is an understanding of the connection
between their practices and the rhetorical implications of those practices. While club DJs had
previously used two turntables, the use of two turntables as instruments for production as well as
consumption is a distinct Hip Hop invention (Holt et al., 2014). The implication of this
technological innovation opened the possibility of practices like extending the break and
inserting samples, to be moments for making space for new voices and bodies. The decision of
which records to play and how they play them, dictates how the space becomes accessible to the
audience.
The performance of a DJ, demonstrates their distinct position in Hip Hop that is always
in-between consumer and producer (Brewster & Broughton, 2000). As someone who plays other

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people’s music they are consuming records, however their DJ performance is a product because
their audience is consuming not only the records being played but the decisions of which records
and the style of the DJ’s performance. As consumers and producers, DJs can create ciphers
through their performances. This simultaneous positioning adds a layer of invention and meaning
making for the DJ because not only does their performance signify active and supportive
participation but they are also accountable to their audience creating another level of input for
the cipher.
The history of a DJ’s relationship to their audience, within the African American
tradition, falls in two camps, the radio personality and the turntablist (Banks, 2011). Both DJ
traditions, according to Adam J. Banks, focus on the curation of stories and tradition while they
compose in and influence the community around them. Specifically, the difference is that a radio
DJ uses their voices to represent the communities they are working in and with, while turntablists
use their hands. Regardless, both types of DJ have the ability to incorporate new voices and
histories while preserving others “binding time as they move the crowd and create and maintain
community” (Banks, p. 24). For Hip Hop practitioners like DJ Screw, his work and legacy fall
migrates between both traditions. Through his mixtapes, DJ Screw incorporated elements of a
radio personality DJ and turntablism to represent Houston and create a distinct space for Houston
in the larger fabric of Hip Hop culture.
To read and analyze a Hip Hop DJ like DJ Screw, I build from James Spady’s
Hiphopography which is a “paradigm [that] integrates the varied approaches of ethnography,
biography, and social, cultural, and oral history to arrive at an emic view of Hip Hop culture”
(1991). Spady’s Hip Hop based research paradigm emphasizes research that works to incorporate
direct engagement with the “cultural creators” in Hip Hop (Alim 2006). Hiphopography aims to

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not only study Hip Hop but to incorporate the voices of Hip Hop practitioners in the ways that
the research gets represented and theorized.
Spady practiced Hiphopography primarily through long-form interviews and physical
migrations through the spaces and places he studied. My undertaking of Hiphopography
modifies Spady’s method to account for differing conditions and an embracement of digital
migrations. Thus, despite DJ Screw’s death, in this chapter I aim to not only discuss the products
of his labor but to create a broader picture of DJ Screw that aims to connect his relationship to
Houston, his mixtape series, and the personal relationship that informed his work and praxis.
Using archival materials, interviews of his collaborators, and the sonic embodiment of Houston
as represented by Screw Tapes, I perform a modified version of Hiphopography that responds to
the conditions of engaging in Hip Hop through various forms of media across time and space.
Through this analysis, I position DJ Screw at the center of Houston Hip Hop’s culture from
1990-2001, to understand how and why this happened.
In the following sections, I describe the role and legacy of DJ Screw to Houston Hip Hop
by analyzing interviews, archival materials, and listening to Screw Tapes. I will first situate this
chapter by giving a brief history of DJ Screw and his relationship with Houston. I will then
discuss the relationship between the Screwed and Chopped sound and its impact on Houston Hip
Hop. Finally, I will conclude by drawing implications for Writing studies on how the DJ can
impact discourses in Digital Rhetorics and Hip Hop’s emphasis on community for invention.
Background
The Screwed and Chopped sound changed the landscape of Houston Hip Hop. Within the
Screwed and Chopped movement, there are four major variables that emerge: DJ Screw, the
Screwed Up Click (SUC), Screw Tapes, and Screwed and Chopped style. In the context of

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Hiphopography, all four of these variables provide distinct parts of the story that make up
Houston Hip Hop from 1991-2000. Prior to the SUC takeover, Houston’s most prominent Hip
Hop voice was Rap-A-Lot Records and their flagship group The Geto Boys. Their “reality rap”
style of storytelling, a precursor to Gangsta Rap, was distinct because of its everyday accounts of
often brutal images of urban life (Faniel). This style of rap, set a foundation for storytelling based
rap music that would go on to continue to influence what Houston audiences preferred and
dominated many of the songs selected for Screw Tapes.
DJ Screw’s understanding of Houston audiences grows out of his initial migration from
his hometown of Smithville, TX. Migrating from a small East Texas town to the sprawling
freeway dense urban space of Houston, had a profound impact on DJ Screw. While he had
already been DJing in Smithville with his cousin and future Screwed Up Click member Shorty
Mac, what set DJ Screw apart was his implementation of the Screwed and Chopped style into the
production of mixtapes. According to Houston Hip Hop Journalist, Lance Scott Walker, this
style was directly influenced by and reflected Houston. Describing DJ Screw’s work, Walker
states, “the sonic texture of [DJ] Screw’s sound was like the air in Houston: reflecting the heat,
radiating the humidity and celebrating the slowness of moving through the long Houston streets,
where it feels like sometimes you’re driving forever” (Walker, 2015). Describing his own style,
DJ Screw states, “[t]he Screw sound is when I mix tapes with songs that people can relax to.
Slower tempos, to feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying” (Screwed Up
Records and Tapes).
Developing a style of DJing and adapting it to mixtape making that is tailored to the
everyday embodied lifestyle of Houston demonstrates DJ Screw’s understanding of the local
culture. Additionally, taking advantage of this style, DJ Screw’s use of slowing down the music

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to create greater access to the lyrical content, adds an important layer to the relationship between
DJ Screw and Houston. Because DJs are both consumer and producers within Hip Hop, DJ
Screw used the Screwed and Chopped sound to develop a platform and space for his voice
initially and then extending that platform to other local voices. Houston’s embracement of the
Screwed and Chopped style, perpetuated through the inclusion of local voices, created an
awareness for the importance of slowness in Houston. Intentional slow movement through space
allows you to be conscious of and make relationship to place (Miner, 2014). For Houston,
through Screw Tapes, they could embrace a slow practice that allowed them to see what they
were listening and form important bonds among the community. Ultimately, DJ Screw’s success
was a community effort that radiated from his attention to relationships interpersonally and with
audience in Houston.
Data Collection
The work of collecting data across various sources for this chapter was recursive and
never linear. Understanding my research process as a purposeful migration, I could move across
the various forms of data to make sense of their significance. Often, while analyzing one source,
something would push me to find another type of data or back into something I had already
looked at. Moving back and forth between data helped me develop an understanding of the
landscape around DJ Screw whether that meant his impact locally in Houston or the influences
he had from Hip Hop outside Houston.
Understanding the work and legacy of a Hip Hop DJ, should take into consideration
technical skills as a turntablist, how they preserve history, and what new voices they insert into
the discourse of Hip Hop. Using these three points of inquiry, allows researchers to gain an emic
view of the Hip Hop DJ because it looks beyond the performance and digs into what influences

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the performance and its impact. This deeper understanding of the DJ and their process,
emphasizes the importance of the DJs relationships.
Therefore, in studying DJ Screw, his mixtapes mattered as much as the establishment of
the Screwed Up Click and as much as the development and legacy of the Screwed and Chopped
sound. To understand DJ Screw, I collected multiple forms of data that helped create a pathway
for making sense of the depth of his impact. In order to start a pathway, I listened to Screw Tapes
as a form of ethnography. Because they were recorded as live performances, Screw Tapes are
sonic preservations of what it is what like to be in the room with DJ Screw. With the untimely
death of DJ Screw, these mixtapes offer the best opportunity to study both the technical skill of
DJ Screw and his relationships from an ethnographic perspective. Supplementing the mixtapes,
my second form of data was journalistic articles from Houston and Hip Hop writers. Many of
these writings appear after the death of DJ Screw, providing important biographic and
retrospective information on the legacy of DJ Screw. My third type of data was the DJ Screw
Collection at the University of Houston Hip Hop Archive. In this collection is a variety of
materials ranging from records and tapes to personal effects including pictures, magazines, and
the program to his own funeral. Finally, my last piece of data was a collection of interviews by
Lance Scott Walker titled The Houston Rap Tapes. In this book of interviews, Walker talked
with important historical figures in Houston’s Hip Hop history. Through these interviews, I was
able to get the perspective from Screwed Up Click members about what it was like to work with
DJ Screw as an artist and as a part of a collective. Specifically, I used two interviews Big DeMo
of the SUC and DJ Screw’s cousin Shorty Mac. These interviews provide first-hand experiences
as collaborators with DJ Screw, artists in Houston and their expertise as Hip Hop practitioners.

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Data Analysis
My analysis of the data for this chapter was driven by understanding how DJ Screw
exemplified the role that a DJ plays in Hip Hop. Through that analysis, I wanted to be able to
trace how DJ Screw was practicing Hip Hop and localizing it. Knowing that his work in Hip Hop
was known for being distinctly Houston, I wanted to understand how that came to be, why its
identified this way and what impact that had on the work being done. While I initially started this
project by visiting the Houston Hip Hop archive, it was listening to Screw Tapes that provided
the best starting point.
Screw Tapes proved to be an important artifact for Houston Hip Hop because of how
dense they are with information, context, and history. Because DJ Screw recorded them as live
performances, they contain examples of DJ Screw as a turntablist. Tracing his uses of scratches,
samples, song selection, and mixing, all provide evidence of his technical skills. At the same
time, these same DJ practices can be evaluated for how well he his engaging with the larger
discourse of Hip Hop music. Song selection and samples, help us understand which histories of
Hip Hop DJ Screw was engaged with and interested in preserving. Finally, the moments where
DJ Screw spoke on his tapes and the live freestyles, provided valuable information including
local Houston slang, what rappers were working with DJ Screw, what rappers developed under
DJ Screw, and what other signifiers of Houston were being preserved.
It was through the names, words, and places named on Screw Tapes that pointed me
towards what interviews could provide the most information about DJ Screw. Learning that the
tape June 27th was Big DeMo’s birthday tape, for example, meant that DeMo’s interview would
be able to provide evidence for DJ Screw’s process. Furthermore, it provides evidence that DJ
Screw worked collaboratively and represented Houston through the insertion of local voices.

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This is one example of how I analyzed across different kinds of data. This style of analysis was
the basis for my migration across Houston and DJ Screw’s legacy. Being able to move through
data and discourses in this way help me see the story around DJ Screw while constructing a
cipher with the voices that were directly involved with the Screwed and Chopped movement.

Figure 2:“DJ Screw at Samplified Digital Recording Studio during the recording of 3 N tha Mornin' in 1996”
Courtesy of the U of H Library(Link). This photograph was taken by DeMo on February 22nd, 1996 during a studio
session for the “above ground” recording of 3 N tha Mornin’. There were several underground versions of 3 N tha
Mornin’ released by DJ Screw but this official release through BigTyme Records sold approxiametly 200,000
copies.

Results—DJ Screw’s Legacy
The DJ in Hip Hop sits at a unique position in the culture. Their participation in Hip Hop
is to be active and supportive, consuming and producing, initiating and responding
simultaneously. In any given performance, a DJ might play something you already love and then
play something you didn’t know you loved. Furthermore, because Hip Hop is larger than music,
a DJ can work across genres and modalities because culture is constantly being shaped by an
infinite amount of influences. The DJ lives in a borderlands or in-between space because their

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decisions have so many implications and stake holders. Because their live performance builds a
space, what happens within that space is dependent on who the DJ is what they stand for. While
their tools and practices allow them to work across genres and modalities, this forces a DJ to
always be migrating in a borderlands space that exists between histories, communities, practices,
and ultimately cultures. On top of the responsibility of sitting at this axis of knowledge, you still
have to make it sound good. Therefore, when studying a DJ, they are evaluated by their cultural
knowledge, their technical ability, and what they build through leveraging of both. The unique
legacy of DJ Screw as a transformative figure in Houston Hip Hop is due to his ability to
seamlessly blend the cultural with the technical to develop the Screwed and Chopped culture that
is so beloved.
DJ Screw died at the age of 29 on November 16th, 2000 from health complications due to
a combination of working long hours making music, a poor diet, and his addiction to promethazine
and codeine cough syrup known as Barre or Lean in Houston. Credited with starting the slowed
down movement in Hip Hop, influenced by his mentor Houston DJ Darryl Scott, DJ Screw
combined Scott’s idea of slowing down music with Hip Hop DJ techniques to create the Screwed
and Chopped style. According to Houston Hip Hop elders, only tapes that passed through DJ
Screw’s hands can be considered “Screwed.” Using this style of DJing, DJ Screw developed a
mixtape series called Screw Tapes. The tapes were embraced by local hustlers on the Southside of
Houston who played them from their cars as they drove down the same neighborhoods that DJ
Screw shouted out. Soon there was a growing demand for DJ Screw and his tapes. Community
members and friends came to DJ Screw with playlists for Screw Tapes or you could buy a dub, or
copy, of a previous tape. As demand rose, DJ Screw would open the gate to his home Monday
through Saturday from 8pm-10pm to sell tapes and take orders for new playlists. Freestyle rap

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sessions started to be included in the recording process, adding a new layer of inclusion for
Houston’s voices on Screw Tapes as well as the demand to have tapes with specific freestyles.
At the time of his death, DJ Screw had over 300 independent official Screw Tape
releases, sold over a million tapes from his home and shop, and had an underground cult
following across the South. DJ Screw’s following and impact in the South was so prevalent that
records companies started directly sending him promo-albums so that he could include their
artists on his tapes, treating his mixtape series like an underground radio station. In addition, DJ
Screw had an official store front named Screwed Up Records and Tapes that exclusively sold his
tapes, regularly recorded at Samplified Digital Recording Studio, and had converted four Screw
Tapes into official album releases with BigTyme Recordz. Through the exposure of Screw
Tapes, a whole generation of Houston rappers got their start or established careers through
working with DJ Screw including local legends Z-Ro, Lil Keke, Big Moe, Key-C, Big Pokey,
Youngsta, Lil Flip and many others. In ten years of making tapes, DJ Screw helped developed a
Hip Hop culture that continues to sustain itself through the embracement of local voices, styles,
and practices.
Four Turntables: The Science of Screw
Mixtapes hosted by DJs are common practice in Hip Hop, however what is unique and
rare about DJ Screw is that his mixtapes were live performances. Tapes of DJ performances had
existed since the days of Grandmaster Flash but DJ Screw was purposefully recording his DJ
performance as the content of the mixtape. The majority of Screw Tapes were recorded in the
living room of DJ Screw’s home Greenstone and Reveille on the Southside of Houston (Walker
2013). This homemade studio was a combination of a DJ booth, recording equipment, an open
mic freestyle space, and the bedroom of at least one SUC member. DJ Screw’s living room was

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never meant to be a traditional studio, by setting up his turntables to record directly into his fourtrack recorder, he could maintain a more open performance space that included an audience of
his friends without compromising the sound he was capturing.
What sets Hip Hop DJ’s apart from other kinds of DJs historically, are the techniques
applied to using two turntables at the same time to create new compositions. Traditionally the
second turntable was used to extend the break of disco and funk beats by playing the same record
on both turntables, queuing one of the them to play when the other ended. The addition of the
second turntable not only allowed DJs to extend time but opened a whole new set of techniques
and practices that transformed the composing power of a DJ. By the time DJ Screw had started
slowing down records, he had already spent years developing his skills as a DJ. From his first
tapes in Smithville—where he figured out how to use a jambox as a mixer for his two
turntables—to his time working with Daryll Scott, by the time DJ Screw had started to slow
down tapes in Houston he already been developing his craft for five years.
Understanding that a DJ would use two turntables to extend time, to further stretch and
slow down time, DJ Screw used two to four turntables and a four-track cassette recorder to make
his Screw Tapes. Julie Grob, from the Houston Hip Hop Archive, has the best description of DJ
Screw’s process stating:
[DJ Screw] used the technology of the time—vinyl records, turntables, a mixer and
multiple cassette decks—to create cassette mixes of strangely slow, murky versions of
existing songs punctuated with repeated words or phrases...To create the sound, [DJ]
Screw used the pitch controls on his turntables to slow down the records, or “screw”
them. He also played two copies of the same record, one beat behind the other, and used
his mixer to switch back and forth in order to repeat certain sounds, or “chop.” After he

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recorded a set, he dubbed copies from his master tape, adjusting the pitch control of a
four-track cassette deck to slow the music even further. On the resulting tapes, midtempo beats sounded like dirges, horns sounded like the cries of elephants and rappers’
voices were deep and murky. (Faniel, p. 131)
Grob’s description of DJ Screw’s process highlights the connection between the live
performance, the strategic use of technology, and adherence to a specific style. Foremost is how
DJ Screw accomplishes his specific slowed down sound through two rounds of slowing music
down. First, recording his live performance with his turntables set to the lowest pitch created one
layer of slowness. Then, taking that live recording and playing it through a four-track cassette
deck with the pitch lowered, DJ Screw was able to get a final recorded version that was slower
than what a turntable could produce while maintaining a master copy to make future copies.
One example of DJ Screw’s ability to slow a record down, from the June 27th tape, was
his mix of the track Crossroads by Bone Thugs & Harmony. The song starts with the hook:
And, Wally, even though you're (gone, gone, gone)
You've still got love from (bone, bone, bone)
My nigga, just rest your (soul, soul, soul)
(and we'll see you at the Crossroad)
Repeated four times, on the original version, the hook takes 31 seconds to complete. On the
Screwed and Chopped version DJ Screw stretches the hook for 72 seconds, more than twice as
slow as the original. DJ Screw’s mix, which includes all four original verses, totaling four
minutes and 51 seconds compares to the original three minutes and 34 seconds. Stretching the
track to be a minute and 17 seconds longer than the original DJ Screw’s mix is not an exact
replica. Using chops to rewrite the verses, sometimes cutting lines in half or skipping forward a

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whole line, DJ Screw’s reimagining of the songs reflects his own artistic perspective. DJ Screw
does seem to favor this beat as the next track is a four minute and 18 second instrumental version
of the song, totaling Bone’s contribution at nine minutes and nine seconds.
As Julie Grob mentioned, playing the same two records in a staggered way (one record is
slightly ahead or behind the other) allowed DJ Screw to produce an echo. This DJing technique
is known as chasing and allowed DJ Screw to further punctuate a murky sound because each
turntable produced a new layer of sound through the echo made by the difference in
chronological time that each record was played. Using the fader, DJ Screw could repeat phrases
quickly and seamlessly without interrupting the continual march of the slowed down track. This
helped the song retain its quality of sound at the lower pitch and could allow DJ Screw more
freedom because he did not have to touch the records that were spinning to create loops or
breaks. For example, if turntable A is playing behind Turntable B, then turntable A is playing
continually with minor interruptions as the primary source of sound. Turntable B is used to
chase, meaning that because it is playing a few seconds or beats ahead of turntable A, DJ Screw
can use it to repeat phrases and make scratches. Knowing that DJ Screw studies his records and
learns them, he can predict what phrases, sounds, or words are coming up meaning he can switch
his fader forward to turntable B, then switch the fader back to turntable A because it is a few
beats behind and will play the same sound that just played on turntable B. In a way, because DJ
Screw could see the future of the records he was playing, he always knew what was coming
meaning he could be creative with his remixing of the record without ever losing his place in the
record.

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DJ Screw’s use of chasing was a strategic and essential to his style of DJing. On the same
Bone, Thugs, & Harmony track “Crossroads,” the first verse on original track by Krayzie Bone is
as follows:
I'll never get over what some nigga told me:
"Did you know your nigga Wally got pap pap and put in a coffin?"
No! Why my nigga took a fall?
Saw my nigga try to swing them dums, (in the war) so we lost him
But, damn, why did ya have to kill 'um?
I never did think it'd be one of my trues to get caught up in redrum
I sit and I pray everyday: God, don't let me get smoked
Oh no, a nigga ain't scared to go, but I still got a lot to live for
But so did my nigga, my nigga--he gone
And all that he left are his memories
But when I die, you gon' see me
One, two, three, Wally rest in peace
On the version that DJ Screw provides the verse goes as follows:
I’ll never get over what some, told—told me,
“Did you know your nigga Wally got pap pap and put in a coffin—coffin?”
No!
Saw my—Saw my fall—fall, Saw my nigga try to swing them
So we—So we, lo…
But—But, damn, why did ya-kill—kill’um
I never did think, it’d be my trues—my trues, redrum—redrum

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I sit—I sit, and I pray everyday: God don’t let me get smoked
Oh, nigga ain’t—nigga aint, scared to go but I still, lot—lot to live for
But so did my nigga, but he gone—gone
And all that left—left his memories
But now you—now you, me—me
Three Wally—three Wally, Peace—Peace
Depicted in the second transcription is the way the same verse appears on the Screw Tape. The
Screwed and Chopped version of the verse contains most of the same words and phrases
however some words were repeated by DJ Screw using his fader. The chasing, like a scratch, is a
technique DJ’s use to re-direct the audience’s attention, a purposeful interruption. I annotated the
repeated moments with bolding and comma dashes. The bolded text represents the word or
phrases that was intentionally repeated into the composition. The comma dashes linked the word
or phrases to its repeated counterpart. For DJ Screw, like many DJs, the repeated parts of songs
could have been moments he felt were necessary to repeat because the line was meaningful or he
was simply playing along with the rhyme scheme. These decisions help represent the range of
compositions DJ Screw makes in a live performance that could have been premeditated or
spontaneous but nonetheless recorded.
In this example, DJ Screw is using at least two turntables with one playing at least one
beat ahead of the other. For example, if turntable A is at 1:01 in the track, then turntable B is at
1:03. DJ Screw always had at least two copies of every record he owned and spent time studying
them before mixing them into a tape. Explaining this process, Lance Scott Walker (2015) says of
DJ Screw,

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He had double copies of every record, and a dozen copies of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. It
was with those multiple copies (he used four turntables on a couple of recordings) that
[DJ] Screw stretched out the experience of music for his ears; so he could hear the words
being put down, and then he could move those parts around between one another,
rewriting the song within its own structure.
Walker reminds us that DJs spend a lot of time listening and committing to memory music that
they eventually play in a performance. DJ Screw demonstrates this listening and restructuring by
re-arranging Krayzie Bone’s verse most notably by removing most of the third line originally
appearing as “No! Why my nigga took a fall” with simply “No!” and then moving on to the next
line. By stretching the music to study it, as Walker suggests, DJ Screw is intentionally slowing
down music to understand it and re-imagine it.
Analysis – Cars, Flows, and the Screw House
“You gotta—like you say, people be in Screw house, and they see people makin’ lists, and then
Fat Pat over there, writin’ him a rhyme. “Man, I’ma do me a song, man! I’m fittin’ to put these
on my tape. Real throwed, man!”
- Big DeMo
“His agenda was to help you the best way he knew how, and that was with the turntables set up
with his style of slowin’ it down, and that’s what he did. And he got a lot of love from a lot of
rappers.”
- Shorty Mac
The slowed down Houston Hip Hop aesthetic that is widely recognized today emerges
from DJ Screw’s relationship with Houston. Based in the call and response, consumer-producer,
relationship that a DJ has with their audience, DJ Screw “put the sound of Houston back into the
streets” through understanding how a slowed down sound and mixtape series could fit into to
Houston’s culture (Walker, 2015). Specifically, DJ Screw took advantage of Houston’s car
culture and the absence of a hyper-localized presence of Houston in rap music to develop a
sound that eventually became the dominant culture in Houston Hip Hop. As result, DJ Screw
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brought to Houston a Hip Hop culture that was inclusive and encouraged participation that could
perpetually re-insert Houston’s voice at every iteration of each new tape.
Swangin’ and Bangin’: Houston’s Car Culture
The Screwed and Chopped style is DJ Screw’s articulation of what a DJ represents as
both a producer and consumer. By screwing or slowing down music, DJ Screw was offering his
method of listening. This method of listening not only afforded him the opportunity to study and
consume music at a slower pace but it also created a space for others to listen in this way. At the
same time, chopping songs or chasing with his fader, DJ Screw was using his turntablist skills to
make distinct statements and produce content from his perspective.
The legacy of DJ Screw is built on a remix of the original founding of Hip Hop. Instead
of parties thrown by DJ’s in rec rooms and parks, DJ Screw was performing “live” across
Houston’s highways and neighborhoods in the tape decks of every car that could a copy of a
Screw Tape. Recorded on unmarked 100 minute tapes, DJ Screw’s recorded live performances
resisted the growing commercialization of Hip Hop centered on the production of discrete songs
(Schloss, 2008). DJ Screw’s slowed down aesthetic, expertly mixed playlists, and unmarked
tapes created a similar experience to the “nonstop flow of music for partygoers and dancers” that
founders like DJ Kool Herc produced during Hip Hop’s inception (Kajikawa, pg 22).
Early technical innovations, like Kool Herc’s extended break-beats, were the result of a
DJ responding to their audience’s needs. In a similar fashion, Houston’s car culture and the long
commutes through slow traffic were easily complimented by these slowed down tapes. In
addition to long commutes, as a part of Houston car culture, drivers that wanted to show off their
cars would engage in Swangin’ and Bangin’ which is the practice of playing loud music and
driving in a slow snake like pattern. The specific style of car known as “Big Bodies” or SLABs

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(Slow, Loud, and Bangin’), build from the low rider style and brandish a “candy paint” popular
across the south.

Figure 3: “DJ Screw’s Car”
Courtesy of the U of H Library(Link). This photograph, from 2006, is of DJ Screw’s 1996 Impala Super Sport on
blades (chrome rims with a propeller-like shape) that he had painted "screw blue." When the car was restored, in
2006, his portrait was added to the hood and displayed at the Screwfest event held at the Pasadena Convention
Center & Fairgrounds.

Like the car depicted in Figure 3, SLABs were meant to be draw attention and a space for
self-expression. Thus, by Swangin’, driving slow and in a snake like pattern, onlookers could
appreciate the custom car but at the same time could listen to what the driver was Bangin’ from
their stereo. It was through SLABs and other cars bangin’ Screw Tapes that helped transform a
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mixtape series into an underground radio station. Soon, along with custom playlists, DJ Screw
also accepted custom shout outs that you could play as you drove through Houston. Through the
combination of the car culture and his Screw Tapes, DJ Screw re-wrote the soundscapes of
Houston streets through an underground radio network that directly involved his audience’s
participation while reflecting their existing cultures and voices.
Hyper-Localization in Screw Tapes: We wanna hear about these other streets that we go down
In his interview with Lance Scott Walker, Screwed Up Click member, Big DeMo
describes the various layers of localization that DJ Screw was accomplishing by describing what
Houston audience’s preferred stating,
You know a lot of guys down South, we wasn’t likin’ that East Coast because of the
beats. They had more of a hip-hop rooted beats, more to the roots of hip-hop, but the
beats wasn’t...you know, we love our cars down South, and if it couldn’t bang in the car
and sound rhythmatic and sounded real good, we wasn’t likin’ it. Because it wouldn’t
sound good in our car.
And then you know, East Coast rappers were still rappin’ about rappin’. You know, they
would rap about rappin’, and people down South didn’t care about Farmers Boulevard.
They ain’t seen Farmers Boulevard. They ain’t even seen the Eastern Time Zone, so they
didn’t care about that. They wanted a good beat to ride to and say somethin’ they could
relate to. (Walker, p. 155)
Big DeMo’s insight into Houston and Southern audience’s preferences for Hip Hop combines
the importance of everyday embodied experience, aesthetics, and representation. DeMo reiterates
that audiences in Houston value the way music sounds in their car and offers some qualifications
for this explaining that the music needed to “bang” and “sound rhythmatic and sounded real

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good.” It is important to note that DeMo’s explanation combines aesthetic needs with
technological needs because the music needs to be rhythmatic even when it is played loud
enough to bang. This explanation is in line with DJ Screw’s own explanation of his music when
he stated that, “The Screw sound is when I mix tapes with songs that people can relax to. Slower
tempos, to feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying.” Linking “rhythmatic”
with “can relax to,” the Screwed and Chopped slowed down sound had to fulfill an aesthetic
quality that fit somewhere within this preference. As Screw Tapes developed, this sound would
find itself represented through an emphasis on a more melodic style with rappers like Big Moe
and Z-Ro singing on their hooks and verses.
DeMo also discusses the content of rap music and Southern ambivalence towards East
Coast rappers. He goes on to explain that just talking about “South Acres” or “Fifth Ward” was
not specific enough, audiences wanted to hear about “Herchelwood, wanna hear about Perry
Street,” the side streets that people drove down daily. This level of hyper-localization is not
distinct to Houston however because of DJ Screw’s close relationship with his audience, he
could provide the space for freestyles and shout-outs to fulfill this need. At first, like a radio DJ,
DJ Screw would talk during intros and drop in shout outs throughout the tape. DJ Screw’s use of
local slang and street references helped his audience start to see themselves reflected in the tapes.
Then, as rappers started to appear on mixtapes, the diversity of voices on Screw Tapes could
amplify the opportunity for audience to feel represented. The inclusion of local voices on Screw
Tapes was the final layer of localization that helped make the mixtape series distinctly Houston.
Having a Houston rapper freestyle on the same tape that contained a Dr. Dre, Tupac, or
Notorious B.I.G. song made an important rhetorical impact on the Houston Hip Hop community.
DJ Screw, like many DJs before him, used his turntables to place histories, communities, people,

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and cultures side by side, in conversation with each other, validating both by acknowledging
them as valid and worth preserving.
Conclusion
Hip Hop DJs have always been at the center of the discourses that intersect writing,
rhetoric, and technology. In this chapter, I argue for the importance of the DJ as an important
cultural figure whose practices are constantly situated within a community. The DJ as
rhetorician, has the unique ability, from a Hip Hop perspective, to spark a movement and sustain
it. Occupying a borderland(s) of production, curation, and preservation the DJ teaches us that we
are constantly engaging in these acts as rhetoricians however we are always accountable to our
community. Adam Banks’ Digital Griot, builds on the rhetorical history and skills of DJs as
rhetoricians who can read across various forms of texts to produce and preserve narratives
mediated through technology. Building from the African American tradition, the Hip Hop DJ sits
as a model for Writing Studies that transcends many of the fields ongoing discourses.
By closely studying DJ Screw, I could trace the ways that his technical skill as a DJ was
impacted and influenced by his rhetorical situation while at the same make a space for those
influences. Combining his cultural understanding with his use of technology he did more than
merely be a “ventriloquist, playing other people’s stories for us; rather” with his “arranging,
layering, sampling, and remixing” was able to invent through Screwed and Chopped a way of
“keeping the culture, telling stories and binding time as they move the crowd and create and
maintain community” (Banks, p. 24).
The early Hip Hop parties in New York City were conducive to the city’s culture and
lifestyle, but in Houston, DJ Screw was working in a different localized context meaning that
instead of partygoers and dancers, he made music for the endless highways and neighborhoods

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of Houston. As Hip Hop’s perception was transformed from a culture of participation to music
genre for consumption, DJ Screw could blend the two because he was working at a grassroots
level. Every Screw Tape passed through DJ Screw’s hands, meaning DJ Screw could still be in
close contact with his audience because his work from production to distribution was
independent and local. Because he was recording live performance, DJ Screw could resist Hip
Hop’s consumer transformation of trying to make discrete songs and include more of Hip Hop’s
community oriented elements like freestyle ciphers and shout outs. DJ Screw’s expertise as a DJ
cannot be overstated however his ability to work within and for a community cemented his
legacy while pushing Houston and Hip Hop forward.
DJ Screw’s work in Houston presents an example of doing digital writing that values the
production and preservation of stories. DJ Screw also reminds us of the importance of audience
participation in the invention of and deployment of Hip Hop. Furthermore, the development of
Screwed and Chopped as a style that resonated with Houston is the result of careful negotiation
between DJ Screws technical skills, understanding of technology, and embracement of existing
listening practices. In a time when CDs were starting to become the dominant technology for
music, DJ Screw remained faithful to cassettes because he preferred their sound and they were
more inclusive to his audience. DJ Screw’s strategic use and engagement with technology
centers style and aesthetic form because it could transcend the many needs of Houston.
Building from this freestyle on DJ Screw’s work, in the next chapter I slowly migrate
through the 3 In Da Mornin’ mixtape to analyze the process of how mixtapes went from written
lists to finalized Screw Tapes. Understanding DJ Screw’s role as a technical communicator in his
community, the next chapter examines the importance of user-localization in Hip Hop as a
translocal practice that theorizes more inclusive models of communication.

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CHAPTER 4: SCREW TAPES SIDE A—IMAGINING COMMUNICATION DESIGN
THROUGH HIP HOP
Introduction
Recent trends in Technical/Professional Communication have made calls for expanding
the field by turning to social justice through culturally sensitive and diverse studies that honor
communities and their practices (Maylath et al., 2013; Haas, 2012; Agboka, 2013). While this
work pushes our field towards important ethical responsibilities, it also helps build rigorous
research and methods that help meet the needs of already globalized and complex
communication praxis (Walton, Zraly, & Mugengana, 2015).
In addition, conversations about cross-cultural design and globalization are increasingly
being highlighted in technical and professional communication scholarship, emphasizing the role
that global users play in the design and dissemination of effective technologies (Agboka, 2013;
Sun, 2012). By merging conversations about globalization and localization with social-justice
driven methods and methodologies, technical and professional communication scholarship
continues to account for the ways that everyday users transform information across media,
languages, spaces, and physical locations, often simultaneously.
Absent from this discussion, yet historically intertwined with all these issues, is Hip Hop
Culture. Over the past 40 years, Hip Hop has globalized across diverse populations, using the
same principles that technical and professional communication would identify as the userlocalization (Sun, 2012) of digital and communicative technologies. DJs and rappers have made
some of the most efficient and revolutionary interventions in communication. By communicating
through a variety practices, Hip Hop has learned to engage across communities through the

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recognition of similar nodes of meaning making interpreted through local expressions known as
translocal styles (Alim 2009).
In this chapter, I look at the Houston mixtape series, Screw Tapes, as an example of the
complex relationship that digital and written texts have in Hip Hop. Looking specifically at the
role that playlists had in the development of mixtapes, I articulate the ways that Hip Hop Nation
Language and DJ practices influence the communication design of playlists to be efficient uses
of text. In this way, I articulate how further analysis and implementation of Hip Hop culture
within technical and professional communication can help the field design and enact socially-just
methods for adapting and disseminating global information.
Method: Migrating through Screw Tapes
Understanding the globalization of Hip Hop as purposeful translocal migration, we
recognize that the practices that make up Hip Hop (DJing, Rapping, Graffiti Writing, and BBoying/B-Girling) are interpreted and then reimagined through local sensibilities. Recent work
in Hip Hop scholarship has pushed for the recognition of style as a “mobile matrix” of
“knowledges, aesthetics, and ideologies that travel across localities and cross-cut modalities”
(Alim, p. 105, 2009). By paying attention to mobile matrices of style in Hip Hop, we recognize
the interplay between local and global influences on Hip Hop practitioners as they create Hip
Hop expressions whether through music or graffiti writing.
To make sense of these mobile matrices, I identify Hip Hop praxis as hyper-textual.
Following Angela Haas’ precedent in “Wampum as Hypertext,” I argue that every expression in
Hip Hop, including words, images, dances, and sounds, “extends human memories of inherited
knowledges through interconnected, nonlinear designs and associative storage and retrieval
methods” (p. 77, 2007). Thus, to study Hip Hop, specifically Screw Tapes, I perform a migration

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through the links and nodes that make up the mixtapes. By listening, reading, and making
connections to other “texts,” my migration identifies the ways that the Houston Hip Hop
community producing Screw Tapes designs their own forms/styles of communications within the
context of a global Hip Hop culture. In this way, through my analysis of Screw Tapes, I position
DJ Screw and his community as technical communicators who understand, repurpose, adapt, and
spread information through their cultural practices.
In the following sections, I illustrate the writing practices of Houston Hip Hop
practitioners by analyzing written lists from the Houston Hip Hop archive, the Screw Tape 3 In
Da Mornin’, and the track-list included on the packaging that comes with the CD version of the
tape. I will first situate this chapter by giving a brief history of Screw Tapes and their creator DJ
Screw. I will then discuss the relationship between the play-lists and the audio tapes. Finally, I
will conclude by drawing implications for technical communicators and instructors interested in
developing content and pedagogies for diverse audiences.
Background on DJ Screw, Screw tapes, and Houston Hip Hop
Originally from Smithville, TX, Robert E. Davis, better known by his stage name DJ
Screw, developed the Screwed and Chopped sound that became synonymous with the city of
Houston in Hip Hop culture. In the “Afterward” of Maco Faniel’s Hip-Hop in Houston: The
Origin & Legacy, Julie Grob describes Screw’s technique:
[DJ Screw] used the technology of the time—vinyl records, turntables, a mixer and
multiple cassette decks—to create cassette mixes of strangely slow, murky versions of
existing songs punctuated with repeated words or phrases...To create the sound, DJ Screw
used the pitch controls on his turntables to slow down the records, or “screw” them. He

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also played two copies of the same record, one beat behind the other, and used his mixer
to switch back and forth in order to repeat certain sounds, or “chop.” (Faniel, p. 131)
DJ Screw developed this style of recording mixtapes in order to make music more accessible for
the Houston community. By making “tapes with songs that people can relax to,” slowing down
the tempos “to feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying,” DJ Screw was
localizing Hip Hop music to be better suited to the listening practices of his community (About).
DJ Screw went on to officially create over 300 tapes now catalogued by The Screw Shop as the
Diary of the Originator series. Recorded from 1990-2001, this mixtape series shaped the sound
of Houston Hip Hop and influenced southern Hip Hop, causing it to maintain a slower tempo
along with a more melodic style of rapping.
One reason this mixtape series resonated so much with the local community was the
relationship that DJ Screw had with his listeners. According to close friend and Screwed Up
Click (S.U.C.) member Big Demo, “every Screw tape, is somebody’s personal tape,” meaning
that every one of those 300 tapes produced had a relationship to somebody besides DJ Screw
(Walker). Because of this close relationship, we can look at the play-lists as important sites of
study within this Hip Hop community. As a part of the Screw Tape making process, these lists
are Hip Hop examples of technical writing.

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Data Collection: 3 In Da Mornin’

Figure 4: Back cover of the CD version of 3 In Da Mornin’ Screw Tape.
In this image “Diary of the Originator” is written diagonally from top to bottom and left to right on the right side of
the image, the background for the back cover is a yellow sheet of lined paper with the track-listing displayed
prominently across the middle, and near the bottom an image of the Screwed Up Records and Tapes building sits on
a record.

One of the most complicated aspects of studying Hip Hop is figuring out how to
represent all the potential sites of meaning making that occur. Because of a DJ or rapper’s ability
to create multiple links with one node, creating an analysis of a Hip Hop artifact will ultimately
be based in what you are oriented towards. There will always be room for other interpretations
and you will ultimately always be leaving something out. Being conscious of the potential of
nodes in Hip Hop, we have to understand that these texts are not composed linearly and should
not be analyzed as such. This potential embodied reaction is what has made Hip Hop so inclusive
and has helped it migrate globally.

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Mixtapes, like Screw Tapes, are valuable texts to study because of they preserve the
experiences and practices of their creators. DJ Screw has curated a listening experience that is
anywhere between 20-25 years old, thus we can treat it as an artifact of the past. However,
because Hip Hop music has always drawn from multiple temporal influence, there is an interplay
between making diachronic and synchronic analysis of texts. Depending on your relationship and
access to resources, the ability to make meaning of a text in Hip Hop could be a result of a
historical lineage. Yet, you can still make meaning of texts without the historical context. Again,
this attention to orientation speaks to Hip Hop’s potential for inclusion based in its hyper-textual
structure. Understanding that DJs preserve history, this mixtape is an example of DJ Screw
making a statement through and about Hip Hop, while preserving it. Thus instead of being an
artifact relying on the year it was created, I treat Screw Tapes as historiographical texts.
In order to make sense of Screw Tapes, I created an orientation by collecting three types
of data. What would traditionally be understood as observation, I listened to the 3 In Da Mornin’
tape. This form of observation involves listening for the different songs that were included in the
mixtape, listening for transitions, paying attention to changes in musical genre, and listening for
moments were DJ Screw talked. The second form of data was archival from the Houston Hip
Hop Archive located at the University of Houston Libraries. At the archive, I looked for any
pieces that could help situate how or why the mixtapes were made. Relevant to this chapter, I
was able to find two hand written lists as well as an image of an original Maxwell tape. Finally,
my last piece of data was the physical packaging that comes from the Screw Shop, because they
contained final track-lists on the back cover. Across my three types of data, I could have
snapshots of the mixtape prior to recording, the recorded mixtape, and the post-recorded playlist
as a final product. Individually, each piece of data told a different part of the story. However, by

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migrating through them and looking for relationships across them, I could discern how each
document functioned. For this project I analyzed two mixtapes (32 tracks totaling 200minutes),
multiple online libraries (Spotify, Tidal, YouTube), two interviews from The Houston Rap
Tapes, and developed a relationship with the University of Houston Libraries Houston Hip Hop
Archive over the course of the last 2 years.
Data Analysis
On the tape 3 In Da Mornin’, DJ Screw presents a 19 track tape featuring mostly West
Coast artists. The CD version of this tape comes with a track-listing presented in Figure 4 above
and rewritten in Table 1 below. Track-listings can be understood as a form of technical writing,
because they are meant to communicate important and specific information. Their accuracy,
especially from a research perspective, as a form of technical writing would potentially provide
an entrance into understanding the music they represent. These documents could be especially
useful for outsiders to Hip Hop who would rely on these lists to provide context or grounding.

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Disc 1

Disc 2

1. Intro

1. Rock the Bell (LL Cool J) [sic]

2. High Powered (Dre, BX, Daz, Rage)

2. Skit

3. City Street (Spice 1)

3. A Nigga with a Motherfucking Gun (Dre)

4. Too Short (Too Short)

4. It’s a Compton Thing (Comptons Most Wanted) [sic]

5. Today was a Good Day (Ice Cube)

5. Sugar Free

6. They Call Me Big Dick

6. Dead in a Year (Street Military)

7. Dre & Snoop

7. In the Ally (Dre)

8. Street Military

8. Everlasting Bass (Rodney O, Joe Cooley)

9. White Horse
10. Let Me Ride (Parliment) [sic]
11. We Want to Play for You
Table 1: Annotated playlist from the back cover of the 3 In Da Mornin’ mixtape.

As an initial point of inquiry, track-listings offer examples for the way Hip Hop shifts the
paradigm for how we might consume texts. For the purposes of this chapter, the main analysis
draws from migrating between listening to the mixtape and comparing it to what appears in the
track-listing. Looking for similarities or departures and marking when that occurs helps us
understand how these two texts correspond to each other. Moreover, this method of analysis
emphasizes that texts within Hip Hop are always in relation to or linking to something else.
Reading this track-list outside of a Hip Hop context would have us assume that the writing
presented in these lists should directly or linearly correlate to what they are representing. Thus
the information not only needs to be reliable in its accuracy but understood through a linear
relationship, should it sufficiently replace what it is signifying. However, in looking at the list,
the information presented here does not consistently provide reliable information. For example,

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the tracks listed as “Dre & Snoop” or “Let Me Ride (Parliament),” signals a certain amount of
information depending on your orientation or familiarity but without more information does not
directly communicate what songs they represent. Working specifically from these two examples,
“Dre & Snoop” or “Let Me Ride (Parliament),” by analyzing the track-listings through a series of
relations, I present how different orientations create relationships, preserve knowledge, and
making meaning in my results.
Results: From Track-list to Tapes, Writing Across Modalities
In Hip Hop, ambiguity and unreliability of writing is an asset for accessibility. You could
potentially know exactly what songs are being played if you are familiar with this Screw Tape,
have some idea what these songs might be if you have certain amount of cultural knowledges, or
have no idea of what’s being played. Regardless each orientation is an entry point. Focusing our
attention to the track-listings on Screw Tapes and their apparent ambiguity, we can trace how
these lists represent a historiographic practice that supports the non-linear nature of Hip Hop
composition and the ways it supports inclusivity. Screw Tapes in their original incarnation as
cassette tapes did not include track-lists. The CD versions do include track-lists, and while this
would seem to present an inauthentic representation of Screw Tapes, these track-listing do seem
to have a similar resemblance to the hand-written lists that were initially turned into DJ Screw.
Furthermore, as listeners play their tapes they are constructing their own play-lists as they
experience each song.
Below are two images from the Houston Hip Hop Archive that demonstrate the
correlation between lists written for production of Screw Tapes prior to recording tapes and the
list we see on the back of the CD versions. Between these two images, there appears to be two
distinct styles of writing. The list in Figure 5 is written on lined paper and appears more detailed

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in comparison to the other list because it contains song titles and artist names for every track.
The list on Figure 5 appears in a similar notation style as the one presented on the CDs with
parenthesis around the artist’s names “Song Title (Artist Name).” In Figure 6, the list is written
on the back of a flyer in red ink and seems to be incomplete because it does not seem to indicate
both the artist and the song title for every track on the list.

Figure 5: “Screw tape list for Steve”
Courtesy of the U of H Library. This is an image of a worn piece of paper that has been ripped out of notebook.
Written on the paper is a playlist of 20 songs in black ink. In blue ink there is a correction to track 18 and the name
“Steve” is written at the bottom of the paper.

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Figure 6: “Screw tape list for Keke”
Courtesy of the U of H Library. This image is of the back side of an old flyer folded approximately in half. On this
paper, in red ink, at the top of the is the name “Keke,”a numbered list from one to 20, and songs appearing next to
the first thirteen numbers on the list.

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The difference between these lists represents distinct writing styles that indicate markers
of relationships to language, Hip Hop, and DJ Screw. Looking at the lists in Figure 4, Figure 5,
and Figure 6 we visualize how each list is written differently expressing each of their orientation
through their styles of notating playlists. Even though every list is visually different, all three are
playlists. They all show how one can have their own style while participating in a larger
discourse. The lists in Figures 5 and 6 are a part of the DJ Screw Collection at the Houston Hip
Hop Archive, meaning that they were in his possession for the purpose of eventually being
turned into tapes. Thus, DJ Screw’s relationship to these lists (and those submitting them) is akin
to an outline for a writer. Even though both of these lists are different, as a part of the invention
process, they are able to communicate the correct information to DJ Screw because within each
style they contain enough information respectively.
Across the different kinds of lists, common traits across notation styles reveal that
incomplete information is a purposeful act. By stylizing or purposely leaving out information, we
see how creating playlists is a form of participation in Hip Hop. For example, on the list for
Figure 6, the first track reads “Back tha Ass Up (Juvy).” The list in Figure 6 appears to be the
most “complete” of the three lists because each track has an artist name and song title. Yet, in
looking at the first track the song is credited to Juvy instead of the official name of the artist,
Juvenile. Like many rappers, the New Orleans rapper does go by shortened and stylized versions
of his name like Juvy or Juvie. Additionally, the title of the song as it would appear on the
official album is “Back that Azz Up featuring Mannie Fresh & Lil Wayne.” The reason why it is
sufficient to just write “Juvy” is because it is linked to the title of the song. In context, “Juvy”
and “Back that Ass Up” are linked because the actual song features the lyrics and the song is
credited to Juvenile. All participants involved in making the Screw Tape list in Figure 6 would

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be aware of these links and nodes otherwise it would not have been written in this way. Hip Hop
Nation Language (HHNL), based in African American Language, is able to convey essential
information through efficient uses of writing. Because HHNL is “suitable and functional for all
communicative needs” (Alim, p.533, 2004), these playlists serve as important examples of how
Hip Hop exchanges technical information.
Continuing to utilize ambiguity, technical writing in Hip Hop relies on HHNL to continue
to sustain potential hyper-textual links for accessibility. Moreover, written lists are incomplete
proxies for what ultimately appears on the tape because they simply cannot be accurate
representations. While they might be representative of the same thing, they are different modes
of communication and operate under the limitations or affordances of those modes as represented
in Figure 7 below.

Figure 7: Playlists and Tapes are not the same.
In this image the same playlist from Figure 2 appears next to an image of a cassette tape from the Houston Hip Hop
Archive, between them from top to bottom appears the mathematical symbol for “approximately equal to,” the word
“or,” and the mathematical symbol for “not equal to.” The arrangement of these images and symbols suggests that
written lists are similar but not equal to their digital counterparts.

As illustrated in the image above, written lists and cassette tapes are not the same thing
but they maintain a working relationship. Focusing on play-lists as working documents—a part
of the invention process—the writing in them, like all nodes in Hip Hop, function as
placeholders or bookmarks for DJ Screw to have something to come back to as he makes the
tape. Like an outline, these written lists are not meant to be authoritative, but rather to aid the
compositional process. Alphabetic writing in Hip Hop is a part of the process, but hardly ever the
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end product. This then shifts Hip Hop’s relationship to writing, resembling more of a hypertext,
writing is a node between links for meaning making. As a result, alphabetic texts are not treated
as stable or static sites of meaning but in turn are used for their instability and unreliability to
contain whole meanings. They are used in specific ways to carry efficient messages, like “Back
tha Ass Up (Juvy).” The purposeful movement across links and nodes allows for practitioners of
Hip Hop to extend “Juvy” beyond the name of a rapper and create potential links to his music,
his career, his relationships, his community, and beyond. This potential for links is then
narrowed by the context of the communication. The relationship between DJ Screw, list makers,
and listeners helps frame and narrow (or expand) what eventually gets communicated.
Migrating from entry points and further into 3 In Da Mornin’, DJ Screw’s motivation was
based in making, “tapes with songs that people can relax to” and slowing down the tempos “to
feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying” (About). DJ Screw is interested in
making the music more accessible by slowing it down as well as by slowing it down so that
people can relax. By slowing a record down and chopping it up, DJ Screw is creating a space that
allows for the potential links and nodes to co-exist. This metaphorical space is a byproduct of
DJs using other artists work and voices to make their own versions of meaning. Screwing and
chopping records creates space between the original version and what appears on Screw Tapes.
By creating this intentional distance, DJ Screw is creating space for both his new message and
preservation of what the record represents.
Digging further into the difference in the experience of reading the playlist and listening
to the tape we find the efficient use of written text and the richness of mixtapes. For example,
Track 10 on Disc 1 is listed as “Let Me Ride (Parliment),” but when you play that song,
“Mothership Connection (Star Child)” by Parliament” plays instead. By writing “Let Me Ride”

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next to “Parliment” the list maker is leaving behind a node that links two different songs, “Let
Me Ride” by Dr. Dre and “Mothership Connection.” In a relatively simple and efficient way, DJ
Screw is connecting histories by showing you where a sample comes from. Where one might
find unreliable information about what is listed and what actually appears on the tape, the ability
to layer meaning by having multiple links for one node sustains each level of texts importance or
potential. In Hip Hop, DJs connect histories by blending sounds, essentially putting sources side
by side. Here, by titling it “Let Me Ride (Parliment)[sic],” we get to see what usually happens in
music happen in writing. This is important because it help demonstrates the ways that Hip Hop
builds itself hypertextually. Furthermore, we can see a hierarchy emerge that privileges the tape
over the written list. The practices of a DJ are dictating the ways we write.
Analysis: “Swing down sweet chariot, stop, and let me ride”
The song “Mothership Connection” is the main sample used by Dr. Dre for “Let Me
Ride.” On 3 In Da Mornin,’ the way the song is labeled indicates that DJ Screw wants his
audience to connect the Dr. Dre song to the original. Sonically DJ Screw drives this point by the
way he mixes the track. Over the course of two minutes and 56 seconds that the track lasts he
switches between “Mothership Connection,” Dr. Dre’s “Let Me Ride,” some shout outs by DJ
Screw, back to “Mothership Connection,” and then finally transitions to the next track “Dukey
Stick” by George Duke identified in the track-listing as track 11 “We want to play for you.”
By making this decision, DJ Screw is creating a migration for his audience that
recognizes the relationships that exist between himself, Dr. Dre, and Parliament. Through this
migration, the audience is also developing and understanding their own relationship to these
artist. Strategically using the key phrase “Let Me Ride,” DJ Screw is also providing an example
of how Hip Hop practitioners build their knowledges by making these connections. Inherent in

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this building of knowledge is the implication that purposeful meaning-making can occur under
conditions that privilege the user’s orientation and experience. This type of knowledge building
also allows practitioners to develop their own paths through histories of music without needing
to follow a chronological order because a chronological order is not accessible or possible.
Without DJ Screw’s and Dr. Dre’s intervention, Parliament is not inserted into the discourse.
In Figure 8 below, we see visual representations of the samples and influences in a
chronological order and a theorized path of orientation for a listener.

Figure 8: Tracing Lineages and Creating Paths from DJ Screw, Dr. Dre, and Parliament.
In this image two different timelines are depicted, one on top and the other on bottom. The top timeline titled
“Chronological Order of Production” shows the relationship between 4 songs, separated by black arrows signaling
the passing of time. The bottom timeline titled “Theorized Orientation of Listener” shows a re-arranged order,
separated by black arrows signaling the path of listening disrupting the chronological order.

Figure 8 depicts two migration, the first is organized based on a relationship to chronological
time and the second to an imagined embodied experience. Both migrations help communicate the
relationships between each iteration of a similar text. Comparing both migration we start to see
how Hip Hop practitioners develop non-linear relationships to texts by connecting nodes to
arrive at the conclusion that all of songs are linked. Additionally, we can also see how DJ Screw

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can impact the relationships his audiences make by shaping the migration through his Screw
Tape. In turn, we end of with a user-centered efficient migration that helps listeners understand
that all of these nodes are linked.
The main lyrics that tie all versions of the song together, “Swing down, sweet chariot,
stop, and let me ride” are an adaption from the Slave spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” that
is said to have been about the Underground Railroad. Some renditions of the spiritual have even
been thought to have been “Swing low, Sweet Harriet” referring to Harriet Tubman. The deep
ties to history are preserved all the way through into DJ Screw’s use of the lyrics. However,
unless you were aware of the original slave spiritual, there is really no way to follow the
chronological order to trace lineage represented in Figure 8. Yet because of the links and nodes
produced in Hip Hop, and the strategic insertion of voices by DJ Screw, we are given an entry
point into the lineage that defies chronology but creates access to history. The interplay of
diachronic and synchronic practice at play, allows practitioners of Hip Hop to create paths of
understanding in mixtapes on their own terms. To consider Dr. Dre’s “Let Me Ride” as its own
enunciation while tracing it back to Parliament and understanding it as equally important because
of its influence, allows for a dynamic form of meaning making.
The performance of 3 In Da Mornin’ helps connects DJ Screw to the traditions of Hip
Hop and its lineages. The same techniques of mixing, sampling, and cutting that help us see long
standing lineages and histories also help us develop and connect new ones. In a more synchronic
move, DJ Screw connects two Hip Hop artists through a similar theme by blending sounds to
create layering. According to Tricia Rose (1994), layering is an essential part of Hip Hop style
along with flow and rupture. Layering is used by DJs to create a “dialogue between sampled

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sounds and words,” (Rose, p. 39) which is foundational to the compositional work that DJ Screw
does as a DJ to create his unique sound and reflect his knowledge of Hip Hop.
On Track 7 “Dre & Snoop,” we get another example of Hip Hop writing where what is
written is meant to signal to the listeners something but what occurs on the tape is more complex.
Track 7 starts with an instrumental for an unnamed song with some shoutouts by DJ Screw.
Screw then goes on to slowly mix in the next song which is “Dre Day” by Dr. Dre featuring
Snoop Dogg, which is what “Dre & Snoop” is referring to. As “Dre Day” starts to play, after 20
seconds of the first verse by Dr. Dre, a sample is blended over the verse. A brief shout of
“Friends!” is heard as Dr. Dre raps. The sample is from a rap group named Whodini from their
song “Friends.” By this point the CD version switches to track 8 titled “Street Military” however
“Dre Day” starts over and the Whodini instrumental for “Friends” plays more prominently on top
of “Dre Day.” DJ Screw continues to play the rest of the song with the verse from Snoop Dogg
but also continues to drop samples from the Whodini track.
“Dre Day” is a diss to former NWA member and friend Eazy E. “Friends” by Whodini is
about the many interpretation of the meaning of the word “friend” and the general ambiguity of
the word as it related to actual relationships. By blending these two tracks together, DJ Screw is
bridging a couple of different factors within Hip Hop. Dr. Dre and Whodini represent opposite
coasts as well as different movements within Hip Hop. DJ Screw is performing a particular kind
of migration here, moving between the East and the West coast, early 80s to the early 90s, and
Gangsta Rap/G-Funk and first wave Hip Hop. By connecting these distinct voices and putting
them together, DJ Screw is demonstrating that he both knows Hip Hop history by playing
Whodini but shows a common theme around friendship and relationships. While it is up to the
listener to take away the meaning of what these two tracks convey together, DJ Screw seems to

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purposely be pointing at the idea of friendship or at least recognizing it as an important theme or
discussion within Hip Hop or black communities.
DJ Screw’s combination of Dr. Dre and Whodini is just one example of the many
possible connections made throughout the mixtape. Screw Tapes are rich, data heavy texts that
allow for an incredible potential for meaning making. The sum of their parts does not aim to be
static or singular signifiers. Instead, we see how it relies on a hypertextual structure of
signification. Not only are there many nodes to use as links but there are multiple types of nodes
that lead to links and the combination of nodes leads to even more links. Finally, the collection
of nodes and links helps to both build relationship and connect ideas but also creates new
knowledge.
By closely studying the Hip Hop practices of a local community, I was able to follow a
migration across modalities through a hyper-textual relationship. Furthermore, migrating across
these texts and relationships we see how communication is shaped and designed to be supportive
of the community it is situated within. In this communication, we see both an example of
intentional accessibility with a potential for sustaining culture and building new meanings. The
implications of this research are relevant to wider conversations in technical communication
about broadening the scope of the field to more diverse populations. Inherent in this work is not
only the valuing of diverse populations, but communication designs that offer efficient uses of
language that have a long history connected to digital innovation that is connected to local and
global discourses.
My analysis of Screw tapes, and the relationships formed around and through them,
suggests that Hip Hop practitioners are constantly developing localized adaptation with a
conscious understanding of global discourses. The Screwed and Chopped style is an example of

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how user-localization can balance accessibility, design, and content. However, by developing
this style through DJ techniques, DJ Screw demonstrates how his user-localization works within
the globalized discourse of Hip Hop. Using the same tools that other DJs use, he is performing a
relational act that helps maintain a connection to Hip Hop. This relational act is both what
preserves the hyper-textual structure in Hip Hop and the accessibility of it. These outcomes are
important practices and strategies to employ in our work as technical communicators and
educators. By building hyper-textual relationships through culturally relevant and community
specific ideals, we have the potential to build better documents, systems, and general lines of
communication.
Furthermore, this hyper-textual practice manifests itself in the ways that Hip Hop
practitioners use texts, whether written or digital. The ability to layer meaning and communicate
successfully within the community maximizes the use of texts. From this we can learn about the
value of relationships among communicators for technical communication by utilizing the power
that Hip Hop has in creating networks of communication and people because it of the “universal
language” that is built from the negotiation of mobile matrices of style (Alim 2007).
Conclusion
In this chapter, I argue for the incorporation of Hip Hop in technical communication. Its
absence from the field leaves out not only the Hip Hop Generation but one of the most important
globalizing movements. Hip Hop offers complex layers of possibilities for technical
communication through its various sites of inquiry as well as cultural practices that can help our
efforts as practitioners. Something as simple as a playlist becomes an opening for inquiry into a
more complex system of communication.

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Imagining Hip Hop’s inclusion in technical communication means that we might pay
attention to the important work that local Hip Hop communities are doing in social justice,
community-building, commerce, and knowledge making. As evidenced in the work of DJ Screw,
we can continue to answer questions such as: How are Hip Hop practitioners already reimagining technologies? What technologies are they re-vitalizing? How are Hip Hop
communities re-imagining geo-political borders? Work by H. Samy Alim and Alistair
Pennycook (2007) are already showing us how international communities interpret and deploy
multiple languages. Building from this work, technical communication can continue benefit from
the advances that Hip Hop has already made, using ethical analyses of Hip Hop to understand
social-justice, community-driven frameworks for globalizing information.
In the next chapter, I continue to migrate slowly through Screw Tapes, turning my
attention to June 27th. Framing Houston as a translocal community, I examine the ways that DJ
Screw and the community around him participate in the Global Hip Hop Nation by localizing the
purpose and structure of mixtapes. Throughout Hip Hop’s history mixtapes have played an
important role in creating spaces for new voices. The Screw Tapes mixtape series helped create
and sustain a new cipher in Houston that continues to build on traditional Hip Hop practices.

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CHAPTER 5: SCREW TAPES SIDE B—JUNE 27TH, THE LOCALIZATION OF CIPHERS
AND LANGUAGE
Introduction
As Hip Hop has continued to migrate over time and space, the mixtape has remained an
important artifact of the culture. The mixtape has been used by different Hip Hop practitioners
and re-imagined its format to create new spaces for artists to reach their audiences. The mixtape
in Hip Hop has been an avenue for artists to independently produce content and directly engage
with their audiences. Throughout the history of Hip Hop, the mixtape has helped shift power
structures as Hip Hop culture engaged with the music industry (Ball 2009, 2011). Most recently,
Chicago rapper Chance the Rapper has subverted joining the music industry by continuing to
provide his music for free through mixtapes and convinced the Grammy Academy to change
their submission guidelines to include free mixtapes. Chance the Rapper went on to win multiple
awards at the 2017 Grammy’s setting a new precedent for artists who choose to reach their
audiences on their own terms.
The Screw Tapes series from Houston are part of the translocal mixtape legacy in Hip
Hop, that allows for local communities to assert themselves in the production and consumption
of Hip Hop culture. As a recorded Hip Hop performance, Screw Tapes represent an archive of
Houston Hip Hop culture because they preserve the ways that Hip Hop was being practiced.
Preserved in these mixtapes are Houston’s interpretations of Hip Hop ciphers, localized language
practices, styles of rapping and the establishment of Screw tape as its own genre of mixtapes.
Together these different factors helped represent and solidify the community or cipher around DJ
Screw and Screw Tapes. In this chapter, I analyze Screw Tapes as their own genre by identifying
specific features of the mixtapes. Focusing on the June 27th Screw Tape, I analyze the ways that

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traditional Hip Hop practices are localized and represented on Screw Tapes and articulate the
ways that these mixtapes asserted and sustained a Houston Hip Hop community.
Method: Migrating through Houston on Screw Tapes
The slowness of Screw Tapes requires careful and thorough engagement with them. Even
though the pitch of what is playing on the tape is at a slower pace, you can easily miss important
nodes of information because of how well the layered sounds blend together at this pace. The
slow sprawling listening experience of Screw Tapes emulates the experience of Houston’s long
highways. In a similar fashion, traveling on Houston highways can make it difficult to be
conscious of the spaces that you are moving in. Migration as a method for slow thoughtful
practice and relationship building (Miner, 2014) becomes incredibly important as we work to
understand Screw Tapes as distinctly Houston.
In this chapter, I migrate through the June 27th Screw Tape to understand Houston Hip
Hop culture as a translocal community because the mixtape reflects local knowledges through
global Hip Hop practices. To understand Houston as a translocal community, the borderlands
between Houston as a local community and the Global Hip Hop Community has to be migrated
through to see the movement of ideas and practices. Stated differently, to see how Houston is
practicing Hip Hop we have to understand the relationship between Houston and the Global Hip
Hop community. At the center of this relationship is a borderlands where a migration of
knowledges and practices is simultaneously being exchanged. It is within this borderlands space
that we can see where the distinctions occur between Houston, other regions, and Global Hip
Hop. By migrating through this space, understanding the distinctions that occur as a relationship
between local and global communities establishes Hip Hop places, like Houston, as translocal
because their enunciations signifying using multiple influences. The localization of Hip Hop

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becomes the process for which global practices and knowledges get remixed, re-imagined, and
re-interpreted through local practices and knowledges. Thus, migrating through Houston’s
localization of Hip Hop points us to the ways that Houston is practicing Hip Hop and
establishing itself as a translocal community. Below in Figure 9, the movement of practices and
the relationships between Houston and the Global Hip Hop community is depicted as two
ciphers.

Figure 9: Houston’s Localization of Hip Hop.
In this image two ciphers are depicted, the Houston’s Cipher on the left and a Global Hip Hop Cipher on the right.
These ciphers are meant to represent the cultural practices and knowledges that make up each community. Their
proximity is meant to display the formation of a relationship and its development is represented by the image of feet
showing the migration between both ciphers. The dotted line between the ciphers calls attention to a borderlands
space that allows for simultaneous migration. At the center of the Global Hip Hop Cipher are universally understood
practices occurring in Hip Hop, the four original elements of DJing, Rapping, Grafitti Writing, and B-Boying/BGirling. These practices are understood as universal because they can be universal identified regardless of local
influences. At the center of the Houston Cipher, the icons depict local Houston influences like cassette tapes, DJ
Screw, and the local car culture. The icons of the headphones, hands clapping, and eye are identified as “Practices
for Migration and Relations” because they are the methods for supportive participation that allow for practices and
knowledges to migrate. This set of practices are founded in listening and observation that center embodied practice
at the center of migration and relationship building across communities.

Through traditional Hip Hop practices like freestyle rap ciphers, DJ shout outs, and the
localized uses of African American Language practices, the Houston Hip Hop community
localized these practices to develop their own Hip Hop space. H. Samy Alim identifies the

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practice of local Hip Hop communities read through more global analyses as translocal style
communities (2009). Alim understands global stylizations within Hip Hop as the various
practices that practitioners engage in like rapping, DJing, b-boying/b-girling, and graffiti writing
as well as other specialized practices like ciphers, freestyling, and mixtape making. Translocal
style communities form when we analyze similar styles across localities. These comparisons
occur when move through the borderlands of localities. By making comparisons, we start to
notice how different spaces or communities create relationships to the styles or practices. These
differences often reflect the local aesthetics, knowledges, and ideologies. While the voices and
cultural reference were from Houston, the methods for signification in the mixtapes are still
recognizable to audiences outside of Houston. Furthermore, as these local voices migrate outside
of Houston, new communities begin to form their own relationships to these mixtapes. Looking
for translocal moments on the mixtapes through these practices or variables, helps us understand
how Hip Hop continues to migrate as well as what ways Houston Hip Hop practitioners were
engaging in this migration.
Background – It’s a real ass day bay-beh
The June 27th mixtape was recorded in 1996 to commemorate the birthday of Screwed
Up Click member Big DeMo. This tape is significant in the Screw Tape series because it
featured a freestyle session that immediately resonated with the Houston Hip Hop community.
Featuring verses from future Houston legends Big Moe and Big Pokey, the “June 27 th freestyle”
became an instant classic and solidified the presence of Screw Tapes in Houston Hip Hop
culture. According to Matt Young and his Houston Chronicle article from June 27th, 2016 titled
“Why June 27th should be a Houston Holiday for Hip Hop Fans,” after 20 years the mixtape and
the date continues to be celebrated for its impact on the history of Houston Hip Hop.

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The 36-minute freestyle featuring seven rappers helped make June 27th the best-selling
and most popular tape in the Screw Tape catalogue (Young). Through my research, I believe that
the popularity of this tape is due to the conditions of its production as a culmination of the
community around DJ Screw. This tape was created to celebrate Big DeMo’s birthday. The
relationship between DeMo and DJ Screw is representative of the tight-knit community centered
approach to Hip Hop in Houston. Big DeMo had met DJ Screw a few years before by way of
DeMo’s sister insisting that they meet (Walker, 2014). DeMo’s sister played a Screw Tape for
him and he immediately recognized that “whoever he is, he is a DJ for real…He mixin’ his ass
off” (Walker, p. 152). Before meeting DJ Screw, Big DeMo actively engaged in Hip Hop
through DJing, rapping, and b-boying/b-girling. DeMo notes that the day he met DJ Screw, after
a long conversation on the driveway, he realized the potential of his talent passing on all the
records in his collection. From that day, DJ Screw and DeMo’s friendship would continue to
grow and DeMo would go on to make at least one Screw Tape a week.
The role of Big DeMo on June 27th goes beyond it just being his birthday. As Matt
Young notes in his plea for June 27th to be a Houston holiday, most casual listeners of the tape
are mistaken to the significance of the date and are unaware of Big DeMo. On the “Shout Out”
track DeMo’s birthday is clearly referenced and thus alerted me to his interview with Lance
Scott Walker in Houston Rap Tapes. According to DJ Screw, DeMo made the “baddest lists” and
always enjoyed making DeMo’s tapes because “you gonna get a song ain’t nobody heard…that
you know is jammin’ and everybody don’t know is jammin’, but you know is jammin’” (Walker,
p. 159). Throughout his interview with Walker, DeMo provides important context for
understanding Houston’s translocal relationship to Hip Hop. Whether talking about Houston
audiences’ preference for storytelling rap music from the West Coast and the South or his

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description of the Screw House as a space for inspiring community members to become rappers,
DeMo provides the insight through stories that allow us to see the community relationship that
lives on in Screw Tapes.
Data Collection: June 27th

Figure 10: Back cover of the CD version of June 27th Screw Tape.
In this image “Diary of the Originator” is written diagonally from top to bottom and left to right on the right side of
the image, the background for the back cover is a yellow sheet of lined paper with the track-listing displayed
prominently across the middle, and near the bottom an image of the Screwed Up Records and Tapes building sits on
a record.

The data collection for this chapter was based in supportive participation practices of the
cipher. Screw Tapes offer ethnographic opportunities to study Houston Hip Hop because they are
live performances sonically distilled. As live performances, Screw Tapes evoke the same
experience as observing and listening to a cipher. Furthermore, because June 27th mixtape not
only featured DJ Screw’s DJ performance but also included a shout out track and an extended
freestyle, the mixtape continued to support the ethnographic experience of being a supportive

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participant of a freestyle cipher. The shout out track and freestyle provided additional examples
of community members voices, offering insight into local cultural practices as well as helping to
identify active participants of the Houston community cipher. Supported with other types of data
including other Screw Tapes, journalistic articles, and Lance Scott Walkers Houston Rap Tapes,
these tracks helped make sense of the relationship between Houston and Global Hip Hop.
Due to the different types of tracks that appear on this mixtape, I compared it to other
mixtapes like 3 In Da Mornin’. Through these comparisons, I could identify the structure of
Screw Tapes as a localization of the mixtape. There are three types of tracks that appeared on
Screw Tapes: remixes, narration moments, and freestyles. While every track contains music that
DJ Screw remixes from other artists, the purpose of each kind of track varies. The first type of
track, remixes, is the most traditional type of track to appear on mixtapes. These are single tracks
from other artists that had been remixed by DJ Screw through his Screwed and Chopped style.
Because DJ Screw was remixing them through his own style, they have been localized for
Houston audiences. In addition, on the remixes, DJ Screw often added samples from other songs
to layer meaning. For example, as discussed in Chapter 4 on the 3 In Da Mornin’ mixtape, DJ
Screw layered in Whodini’s “Friends” over Dr. Dre’s “Dre Day,” as both tracks make
commentary about friendships. These rhetorical decisions are done by DJ Screw and further help
make his remixes distinct. To identify the various songs remixed, I used digital music archives
like YouTube, Tidal, and RapGenius to identify the original songs being remixed. The second
type of track, narration moments, were tracks that varied in length but were identified on track
listing as intros, outros, or shout outs. Similar to the function of interludes, narration moments
are distinct because they often gave context for the creation of the tape or provided information
pertinent to the culture around the mixtape. Their placement on the mixtape rhetorically served

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as moments for audiences to be guided through the slow moving mixtape by breaking up the
monotony of just remixes.
Finally, the last type of track was the freestyle, which I identify as the migration of the
cipher to Houston. Traditionally in Hip Hop, we see the cipher as a group of emcees in the park,
but on Screw Tapes we find friends sharing a microphone during the recording of a Screw Tape.
On June 27th, Big DeMo requested a gathering of specific people to rap together for his birthday
tape. While these factors are common in ciphers outside of Houston, for Screw Tapes the
freestyle tracks helped develop and encourage community members around DJ Screw to pursue
rapping. More importantly, they were encouraged through rap to embrace their voice because of
the opportunity presented from the exposure of Screw Tapes.
Data Analysis
June 27th is a collaboration between DJ Screw and Big DeMo. While almost every Screw
Tape was made from a list that was submitted to DJ Screw, June 27th represents a unique
migratory experience because of the popularity of this mixtape, the relationship between DeMo
and DJ Screw, and the additional data available through DeMo’s interview with Lance Scott
Walker. Because we know that this tape was made with DeMo, we can analyze the remix
choices, narration moments, and the freestyles through the information provided by DeMo.
Furthermore, by comparing June 27th to other tapes, the differences and similarities help make
visible the ways that Screw Tapes are representation of Houston.
Listed below in Table 2, is the track-listing for June 27th. In comparison to 3 In Da
Mornin’, which lists 19 tracks, June 27th contains significantly less tracks even though both
mixtapes are approximately 100 minutes long. Furthermore, of the twelve tracks on June 27th,
only seven of them are remixes of other artist’s music. Due to the 36-minute freestyle, not as

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many remixed tracks could be included on this mixtape however there are also three significant
narration moments, most notably the eight minute “Shout Out.” The “Intro” on this tape is
different from other tapes because it does not feature any talking from DJ Screw or anyone else
like the other tapes. Instead, the “Intro” is a skit from Los Angeles rapper Ice T from his 1996
album Return of the Real. The “Outro” is an unnamed instrumental that features a brief farewell
from DJ Screw.
A majority of Big DeMo’s playlist were songs released between 1995 and 1996. Tracks
like the “Intro” which comes from Ice T’s album Ice T VI: Return of the Real (1996), Too
Short’s “Getting’ It” from his album Gettin’ It (1996), and Tupac’s “All About U” from his
album All Eyez on Me (1996), were released days or weeks prior to DeMo’s birthday. Aside from
the lone reggae track from Steel Pulse (“Roller Skates”), Big DeMo’s choices signify the role
that Screw Tapes played in supporting Houston as a translocal Hip Hop space. Big DeMo’s track
selections from various regions (Los Angeles, Cleveland, Houston, Oakland, New Orleans),
whose release date have a close proximity to the release of June 27th, represents his migration
through Hip Hop as ongoing. By continuing to listen to new releases in Hip Hop, Big DeMo’s
migration helps keep Houston connected to current discourses in Hip Hop. Even though the
tracks undergo the process of localization by DJ Screw’s remixing, the results of DeMo’s
migration and the remixing done through DJ practices help preserve the relationship to wider Hip
Hop culture.

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Disc 1

Disc 2

1. Intro
2. Crossroads (Bone Thugs & Harmony)

1. Freestyle (Big Moe, Key-C, Big Pokey,
Youngsta)
2. Roller Skates (Steel Pulse)

3. Instrumental

3. High Till I Die (Tupac)

4. All About U (Tupac)

4. Outro

5. Shout Out (D-Moe, Big Moe, Youngstar)
6. Getting It (Too Short)
7. Last Dance (Tru)
8. Surviv’n the Game (Botany Boys)
Table 2: Annotated playlist from the back cover of the June 27th mixtape.

For Hip Hop Culture at large, 1996 represents one of the most fruitful years for rappers
and rap fans. It was fruitful because not only was there a growing diversity of artists making
records but the diversity was represented regional by established and newer artists. In 1996,
established artists like Too Short, A Tribe Called Quest, Ice T, The Beastie Boys, Master P, The
Geto Boys, De La Soul, and MC Lyte demonstrating that regionally diverse artists were
experiencing longevity in their careers. Sophomore efforts from Snoop Dogg, The Fugees, Nas,
Three 6 Mafia and Outkast, and debuts from Foxy Brown, The Roots, Ghostface Killah, Silkk
the Shocker, Busta Rhymes, and an independent debut from Jay Z represented that a new crop of
regionally diverse artists were the given the space to make. This list doesn’t even include two
albums from Tupac Shakur, the debut release of underground unknown rapper Eminem and the
release of NBA star Shaquille O’Neal’s debut.
The significance of the breadth of these releases is the growing diversity of Hip Hop
music being sold nationally. The greater diversity of music available for consumption
represented more opportunities for migration. By 1996, a Hip Hop fan had the option to be as
regionally inclusive or exclusive as they desired. Yet, in spite of this access to diverse Hip Hop

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artists, audiences in Houston were turning away from their broadcast radio and turning to Screw
Tapes as their arbiter of Hip Hop. Their relationship to Hip Hop was mediated through Screw
Tapes instead of directly interfacing with artists. Big DeMo supports this claim stating, “If you
was a rap artist in this country, you wasn’t sellin’ in Houston unless you touched one of those
Screw tapes. ‘Cause we didn’t know about you, man,” reiterating not only the importance of
Screw Tapes but the commitment from the Houston community (Walker, p.153). By 1996, DJ
Screw was five years into his mixtape series meaning that his relationship with Houston
audiences was well established. Regardless of what was happening outside of Houston, DJ
Screw and Screw Tapes represented the relationship between Houston and the Global Hip Hop
community because that is how Hip Hop was being practiced. If Hip Hop is sustained by the
embodied practice of its participants, in Houston, the community was practicing Hip Hop
through Screw Tapes.
Results: Anatomy of a Screw Tape
Migrating through June 27th, the beloved 36-minute freestyle can overwhelm the
significance of the rest of the mixtape. Along with the freestyle, the history of the mixtape and
the various types of tracks represent the relationship between DJ Screw, the Houston Hip Hop
community, and a wider Hip Hop community. Each track offers opportunities to analyze how
Houston was localizing Hip Hop. Through these localization, by making connections to more
global Hip Hop practices, Houston develops its own translocal style community. More so than
the 3 In Da Mornin’ tape, June 27th offers explicit opportunities to engage with these localization
moments because local voices are featured significantly. From the “Shout out” to the
“Freestyle,” members of the Houston community use self-representation and local language
practices in traditional Hip Hop practices like the cipher to help make and preserve Houston Hip

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Hop. Within the content itself, we see that Houston is interested in stories and storytelling with a
more melodic style of rapping. In this section, I identify three important aspects of Screw
Tapes—Narration Moments, Storytelling, and Ciphers—that help identify how these mixtapes
reflect Houston Hip Hop as a practiced translocal style community.
Narration Moments
Narration moments are tracks that vary in length, typically appeared as intros and outros,
and eventually became the best way to identify the authenticity of a Screw Tape. I name these
tracks “narration moments” because their early incarnations were moments on the mixtape where
DJ Screw would talk over an instrumental. Like many DJs performing live, DJ Screw talk to his
audience giving brief statements of affirmation. Phrases like “real throwed” or “know-what-I’msayin’” were frequently used by Screw to describe the tape, the atmosphere of the recording
session, or how he was feeling. These moments built a foundation for Houston audiences to
identify themselves within these tapes because of the local language practices used. As the
popularity of Screw Tapes began to rise and more artists around the Screw House started to have
more active participation on the mixtapes, shout tracks became a part of the Screw Tape structure
offering an additional layer of localization through language and the naming of community
members. As narration moments, the shout outs provided meta-data for the mixtapes.
For example, the “shout out” track on June 27th, DeMo announces it is his birthday tape
stating “1996, DeMo back up in this bitch once again, it’s my birthday,“ and shows love to
everybody that was present, “first I’mma send love out to all these niggaz that’s in here, just
taking time out” (“Shout Out”). The track listing names “D-Moe, Big Moe, Youngstar” as
contributors but at least three other contributors appear on the track including Houston artists Big
Moe and Clay Doe. On these shout outs community members continue to narrate the tape, name

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other people, send direct messages to community members, and say something about where they
are from. Screwed Up Click member, Key-C, demonstrates a variation of this by giving “Kurt” a
shout out and telling him to “stay on your hustle baby, stay up.” No other identifying information
is given, regardless the Kurt that Key-C is addressing has been included on the Screw Tape and
is being encouraged to keep his spirits up and keep working by telling him stay on his “hustle”
and “stay up.” Another example is Big Moe’s shout out, where he names his neighborhood the
Third Ward of Houston stating, “representin’ that Three in here, forreal.” Big Moe’s shout out
not only calls attention to Houston, but a specific part of Houston—the Third Ward—by stating
“that Three,” representing an example of local language use and how language is used to
demonstrate relationships to place. The “forreal” at the end of Big Moe’s shout out could also be
a way of saying how much he represents for the Third Ward or that he authentically represents
the neighborhood, regardless it punctuates his relationship to the Third Ward.
Each one of these narration moments are important because they provide a space for
Houston and specifically the community around DJ Screw to hear themselves on mixtapes. As
Houston Hip Hop fans listened to these shout outs, “Kurt” or someone from the Third Ward of
Houston, uses these shout outs to create their own relationships to the mixtapes and the Hip Hop
community developing around Screw Tapes. Furthermore, to hear local voices inserted inbetween established artists like Ice T and Tupac, was a purposeful way to create belonging
through practice. As a way to break up the monotony of the mixtape, these narrations moments
helped remind listeners that these mixtapes were for and by local Houston practitioners.
Screw the World: Looking for Stories
Prior to the Screw era, the Geto Boys and Rap-A-Lot Records were Houston’s most
notable Hip Hop act. The Geto Boys were known for telling vivid stories of living in Houston

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known as “reality raps” (Faniel). Initially critiqued for being overly violent or graphic, this style
of storytelling through rapping, was not meant to be shocking but rather present the reality of
everyday life. Their frank portrayals of Houston mirrored similar movements from the West
Coast’s Gangsta Rap style. Because Gangsta and Reality Raps relied on the telling of everyday
life stories, theses styles of rapping required a focus on the stories themselves. Thus, rappers
made use of local knowledges and vivid storytelling to portray these stories to their audience.
Big DeMo provides the necessary context for Houston’s preferences in styles for stories
and storytelling as well as the possible relationships across communities. As Hip Hop music
migrated away from New York City, newer styles could develop and by 1996 Hip Hop fans
could be decisive about what they wanted to support because of the increasing diversity in music
available. Assessing the differences and his preferences DeMo explains that, “East Coast rappers
were still rappin’ about rappin’…and people down South didn’t care about Farmers Boulevard.
They ain’t seen Farmers Boulevard” (Walker, p. 155). DeMo’s statement suggests a divide
between New York rappers and Southern audiences based on content. Furthermore, details like
“Farmers Boulevard” did not resonate with Southern audiences because they could not relate.
This disconnect between New York artists and Southern audiences allows us to see the moments
in Hip Hop where local knowledges emerge and influence the migration of the culture. While I
initially framed this as a divide, it also represents difference and growth within Hip Hop.
Through these difference, we can distinguish how different communities establish and sustain
their own understandings of Hop Hop through practice. These are also the moments where we
see local communities establish relationships to different communities, practices, and content.
DeMo continues to describe Southern audience’s relationship to Hip Hop by discussing
stylistic differences stating, “we wasn’t likin’ that East Coast because of the beats,” establishing

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the complex relationship between style, sound, and content. DJ Screw used, “[s]lower tempos, to
feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying,” the relationship between what the
rapper was saying and the sound directly impacted Houston audience’s ability to connect with
the music. DeMo’s comments reveal the purposeful decisions that audiences make when
deciding how to build a relationship to Hip Hop. In the context of DJ Screw’s Houston, these
purposeful decisions impacted the development of Houston Hip Hop culture because it meant
that Screw Tapes accommodated the interests of local fans. Screw Tapes were slowed down to
create greater access to the content and the aesthetic listening preferences of Houston audiences.
Screw Tapes were also made from the lists that community members would provide to DJ
Screw. Thus, based on what appears on Screw Tapes we can access what audiences were
interested in and see what relationships were established, like the disconnect from the East coast
and the development of a relationship with the West Coast and Gangsta Rap.
Screw Tapes significantly featured West Coast Gangsta Rap artists confirming a
relationship between both regions. Artists like Ice T, Tupac, Too $hort, Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, and
Snoop Dogg make multiple appearances on June 27th and 3 In Da Mornin’, bringing their music
into the cipher of Houston Hip Hop. Their inclusion on Screw Tapes fulfills the complex formula
of Screwed and Chopped culture because it offered Gangsta Rap stories and storytelling as well
as musical production that was compatible with being remixed by DJ Screw. Despite being
representative of a different region, there were connections between Southern and West Coast
Hip Hop communities that sustained their relationship. Furthermore, West Coast affiliated group,
Bone Thugs and Harmony, also appear on Screw Tapes despite being from Cleveland. Bone
Thugs and Harmony represents an example of a translocal Hip Hop artists because their aesthetic
is influenced by their West Coast affiliation, Ruthless Records, but the stories they tell are from

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their experiences growing up in Cleveland. This translocal representation on Screw Tapes helps
clarify how migration occurs through the relationships between communities. Bone Thugs
combines local stories with another regions style of storytelling to create their own space. By
building from common ground, other connections can be forged across different communities
because the styles are recognizable. The potential for a Houston and Cleveland relationship
exists because of these commonalities. There is a stylistic lineage that can be traced from these
comparisons. Finally, we see more tangible representations of a relationship between the South
and the West through track 7 “Last Dance,” by super-group Tru, which was made up of New
Orleans and West Coasts artists.
Freestyle Sessions: The Making of a Houston Cipher
Screw Tapes as live performances helped establish a public space for rappers in Houston
to engage with rapping. Freestyle tracks like the one on June 27th, helped the community around
DJ Screw see rapping as a tangible practice. It was a threshold moment that demonstrated the
fluidity of moving between a supportive participant into an active participant. Hearing local
voices combined with the popularity that came with appearing on Screw Tape, helped reveal that
fluidity within the cipher of Houston Hip Hop. Echoing what Jay Z once said when he saw his
first cipher, “That’s some cool shit…I could do that.”
Listening to the freestyle on June 27th, as a live performance by the DJ and the rappers,
the freestyles were Houston’s localization of the Hip Hop Cipher. Historically, the Hip Hop
Cipher has been revered as the space for rappers in Hip Hop to develop their style while building
community. The cipher typically allows every rapper present the opportunity to participate, relies
on the execution of transitions between rappers as moments of recognition and solidarity, and is
sustained by building from the knowledge shared by each participant (Emdin, 2013). The

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freestyle tracks on Screw Tapes, are another example of Houston practitioners engaging in
traditional practices while continuing to reinterpret these practice through local styles. In the
borderlands between traditional Hip Hop and Houston, the nuances of the cipher revealed and
valued.
For example, the transitions between rappers in a traditional cipher is a representation of
the relationship between rappers. Transitions rely on each rapper listening, making space, and
responding to their peers, thus the transition can indicate the status of the cipher and the
relationship between the rappers as well as their audience. On Screw Tapes, a major difference
was the recording of the performance therefore the transition was always marked by the physical
passing of the microphone. Assuming the microphone was wired, this creates a distinct problem
of not only passing the microphone but moving into position to keep the microphone connected.
In addition, because audiences listened to these freestyles on a tape, they could not see who was
rapping like a traditional cipher where you could see the transition occur. On June 27th, the
invisible work of transitions in ciphers was facilitated by Big Moe. At the start of the freestyle
and in between rappers, Big Moe would introduce each rapper as well as make time to ease the
passing of the microphone.
The long-term impact of the cipher on Hip Hop is the space to create, develop, and
sustain. For rappers, the more they participated in ciphers the more space they had to develop
their skills. For communities, the cipher helps make public who is participating and a space to
participate. In his recounting of the atmosphere around DJ Screw, especially after June 27th was
released, Big DeMo describes the motivation that was instilled in his peers to write raps or make
playlists. According to DeMo,

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You know, you see—there’s a lot of guys that didn’t rap before they knew Screw man.
You gotta—like you say, people be in Screw House, and they see people makin’ lists, and
then you see Fat Pat over there, writin’ him a rhyme. “Man, I’ma do me a song, man! I’m
fittin’ to put these on my tape. Real throwed, man…And people just kept on ‘til they got
better. And like…June 27th turned a lot of people into artists, too. (Walker, p. 156)
DeMo’s description of the Screw House demonstrates the movement between supportive
participants to active participants. Within the Screw House, active participation in this Hip Hop
community could range from writing rhymes to writing playlists. Like a cipher, the production of
Screw Tapes and freestyles, not only encouraged participation through observation but also
established a space for practice and development.
H. Samy Alim, recognizes the cipher as a space for competition, community building,
and learning. Alim states, “The cipha is seen as a linguistic training field for MC’s. Several skillz
are developed in the cipha—Rap delivery, reacting under pressure, verbal battling, or ‘jousting
from the mouth.’ The cipha is like Hip Hop’s classroom” (p. 553, 2004). The Screw House and
the production of Screw Tapes represented various types of ciphers that led to the development
of the Houston Hip Hop community. The freestyle tracks as ciphers helped rappers develop their
skills and encourage others to start rapping. The translocal style community around Screw Tapes
formed a cipher that encouraged Houston to engage with Hip Hop. In both ciphers, community
members were given the opportunity to become and understand themselves as Hip Hop
practitioners. The Screw House, like freestyle rap ciphers, allowed community members to have
access to practice Hip Hop to the point that, as DeMo states, “people just kept on ‘til they got
better.” To paraphrase Alim, the Screw House was a Hip Hop training field for practitioners
within the context of Houston Hip Hop.

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Aside from DeMo’s interview, various moments on the mixtape support this inclusive
classroom experience, starting on the “Shout out” track when DeMo says, “We loopin’ in hear,
ain’t nobody gonna miss,” making sure that everyone has a chance to speak. Or for example, on
the “June 27th Freestyle,” there is an audible difference between the rappers that have more
developed flow and cadence control as well as their experience using a microphone. Big Moe,
the narrator of the freestyle, always sounds clear and in control of his voice. In comparison, Big
DeMo’s freestyle verse is initially hard to hear until about midway through where he starts to
speak more directly into the microphone. Details like this, emerge because the performances
were recorded live and help make transparent Hip Hop as a culture that needs and makes space
for practice and growth through sustained accessible engagement.
Analysis
Migrating through the June 27th mixtape, mixed into the DJ Screw remixed tracks is the
consistent presence of local voices that allows listeners to engage with Houston’s distinct ways
of speaking and practicing Hip Hop. Featuring more local voices than 3 In Da Mornin’, June 27th
allows for the analysis of language practices and the function of storytelling with the Houston
cipher, highlighted through the narration moments and freestyles. Hearing every one of the shout
outs punctuated with a “goin’ dine” (going down), points us towards the localization of the shout
out through local language practices.
Hip Hop Nation Language in Practice
The function of narration moments follows in the tradition of African American radio
DJs as “crucial keeper[s] of African American folk and oral traditions” (Banks, p. 24). Narration
moments are representations of the linguistic practices associated within the Hip Hop Nation
Language (HHNL). Whether in the freestyles or in the shout outs, specific words, phrases,

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intonations, and places make constant appearances across the speakers. Some examples of this
are represented below in Table 3.
Houston Language

Meaning

Bay-beh

“Baby”

Screw-Zoo

DJ Screw

that 3

3rd Ward of Houston

Know-what-I’m-sayin’ (pronounced as one word)

A phrased used within a call and response discourse

Long Drive

Specific neighborhood on the South Side of Houston

Sippin on a Fo’

Cough Syrup based drink

Throwed

Something that is good or being inebriated

Mane

“Man”

Table 3: Houston Language. In this table are examples of local language practices in Houston and their meaning.
Some words or phrases have direct translations and other require more context or function through discursive
practice.

H. Samy Alim’s work on HHNL understands the function of language in Hip Hop as not
only “the syntactic construction of the language but also the many discursive and communicative
practices, the attitudes towards language, understanding the role of language as both
binding/bonding community” including the importance of localized slang stating, “Rappers, as
members of distinct communities, also take pride in regional lexicon” (p. 533, 536, 2004).
Defined as such, language functions as a practice but also there is a distinct difference and
consciousness of the role of language. Alim lists ten tenets of HHNL including its centrality to
both the “identity and the act of envisioning an entity known as the HHN” and “to the life worlds
of the members of the HHN and suitable and functional for all of their communicative needs” (p.
533). Highlighted in these tenets is the ways that HHNL helps form and shape identities, create
spaces, and that within communities becomes the standard language spoken.
To further emphasize that HHNL functions as the standard within the HHN Alim
discusses the relationship between Black Language (BL) and HHNL stating:
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Since Hip Hop’s culture creators are members of the broader Black American
community, the language that they use most often when communicating with each other
is BL. HHNL can be seen as the submerged area (Brathwaite 1984: 13) of BL that is used
within the HHN, particularly during Hip Hop-centered cultural activities, but also during
other playful, creative, artistic, and intimate settings. This conception of HHNL is broad
enough to include the language of Rap lyrics, album interludes, Hip Hop stage
performances, and Hip Hop conversational discourse. (p. 535)
Paying attention to the shout out tracks on Screw Tapes, we understand these narration moments
as slices of intimate moments that are playful, artistic, and creative uses of language that bring
the conventions of rap performances to day to day language practices. Or rather the way that
regional variation of BL makes their ways into HHNL because language is practiced beyond
what we hear in rap music. You do not have to be a rapper to practice or participate in Hip Hop
because of the function and understanding of language as foundational for the community. For
the HHN, the relationship to language is never neutral, it is the access to language that makes
rappers resonate or relevant to their audiences.
Alim further analyzes the ways that rappers use language to assert their themselves. In his
discussion of St. Louis rappers Nelly and the St. Lunatics, Alim points to ways that they over
emphasized “every word that rhymes with “urrr” to highlight a well-known (and sometimes
stigmatized) aspect of Southern/Midwest pronunciation” (p. 538). Alim goes on to say, “By
intentionally highlighting linguistic features associated with their city (and other southern cities)
they established their tenacity through language, as if to say, ‘We have arrived.’ Since then,
many other rappers, even some not from that region, have played and experimented with this
phonological aspect of BL” (p.538). While Screw Tapes pre-date Nelly’s rise to fame, a major

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component of these mixtapes is the presence of local language practices. The use of narration
moments was an opportunity for DJ Screw and other Houston rappers to assert their own
language practices. By using intros, outros, and shout out tracks to break up the music of rappers
from other places, DJ Screw could make the mixtapes distinctive to Houston as a separate layer
of signification. In addition to the slowed down sound these moments allowed anyone on the
tape to speak in a distinct Houston way without it having to be rap performance but still apart of
the overall performance because it was recorded. It was one thing to speak day to day but to be
able to hear it on tape was especially significant for the community.
Storytelling
Big DeMo’s involvement in June 27th and his interview with Lance Scott Walker allows
us to better understand the song selections for Screw Tapes. DeMo’s perspective on the regional
differences of Hip Hop and their adoption in Houston emphasized content and style equally.
Audiences in Houston did not relate to rapping about rapping or references to streets in New
York City as way to engage any possible stories because the experiences did not align. At the
same time, if the beats weren’t jammin’ while driving, the content was further neglected because
it was not accessible to listening practices and preferences of Houston.
As Screw Tapes became the main broadcast for Hip Hop in Houston, the Screw and
Chopped style helped shape the rapping practices of Houston’s rappers. Along with the
celebration of localized language practices and their importance to the Hip Hop culture in
Houston, more melodic rapping styles were adopted because they sounded better after being
Screwed and Chopped. Just like song selection was influenced by its ability to sound well when
slowed down, rappers like Big Moe incorporated melodic rapping cadences that sounded like he
was singing at times. The first examples of this style on June 27th appear on the “Shout out”

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track when Big Moe sings “DeMoooo, my patnah named Demoooo.” Big Moe continues to use
this style as the host of the “Freestyle” track, improvising quick introductions that usually started
with some form of harmonizing, included prominent Houston slang, and specific Southside of
Houston cultural references.
One example of this is when he introduces Screwed Up Click member Key-C’s verse:
It's that nigga, nigga named M-o-e
I represent that Southside, yeah the 3
Hooked up with them boys off that Long Drive
You know we stayin playa made
You know we gotta strive
To the T-o-p, that's the top mane
I'ma come through nigga down to bring the pain
If these hoes down to jack, I want you to know
We comin’ down bald fades, not afros
Big Moe first introduces himself to help demarcate that the previous rapper has finished and he is
helping transition to the next rapper. He identifies himself as “M-o-e” as not only a stylized way
of rapping but to allow himself to sing the “e” at the end to make his brief verse more melodic.
He replicates this a few lines later spelling out “T-o-p.” Additionally, Big Moe makes
specific references to the Southside of Houston by talking about “the 3” or the Third Ward of
Houston and the Long Drive neighborhood that is also on the Southside. Finally, in the last line
Big Moe makes references to hairstyles. In Houston, the Southside is known for bald fades and
the Northside was known for wearing afros. During this time in Houston, the city was divided

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between the North and Southside. By making a distinction through haircuts, Big Moe is using
specific cultural references that Houston audiences would recognize and react to.
In nine lines, Big Moe engages in a type of storytelling that was common on the
freestyles and shout outs. He starts by saying his own name to assert his presence and then goes
on to name where he is from and who he is with. Demonstrating Southside loyalty, he explicitly
states he represents the Southside while naming his specific neighborhood, the Third Ward, and
then going on to name that he’s “hooked up” with people from the Long Drive neighborhood
cementing unity across the Southside. This initial representation sets up the rest of the verse as
he offers words of motivation and encouragement for the ascension of the Southside to the “T-op.” Ending with a warning to the Northside of Houston, Big Moe is willing to “bring the pain” to
anyone with an afro who is “down to jack.”
The phrase “down to jack” translates to someone who is willing to steal. This reference
by Big Moe could be about the stealing of cars between both sides of town. A common act of
defiance between the Northside and the Southside was to have someone damage or steal a car
from the other side of town. There are rumors that the Northside first heard a Screw Tape
because it was in the tape deck of someone’s stolen car from the Southside (Walker, 2015). To
that end, Big Moe could also be referencing the Northside trying to steal the sound or success
from the Southside enjoyed from Screw Tapes. Overall, Big Moe’s verse is a vignette about
being from the Southside and striving for success in the name of his community.
Big Moe manages to tell a story in a short amount of time through his ability to use a
melodic style of rapping, local knowledge, and local language. His storytelling relies on his
relationship to his community through their shared experiences and language practices. Jelani
Cobb situates Hip Hop within the black traditions of music and storytelling stating, “Blues is the

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cornerstone of American popular music, but hip hop is the only one of its progeny to place equal
emphasis upon the telling of stories” (p. 112, 2007). Cobb argues that “[a]t the core of hip hop’s
being, its rationale for existence, is this refusal to exist as unseen and unseeable” (p. 109). Big
Moe’s follows in this tradition of refusing to be unseen by naming where he is from and what he
represents. His use of Houston language practices and references is way for Moe to assert this
visibility while making it accessible for others who also represent the same communities.
The significance of representation in Hip Hop storytelling is fundamental to a rappers
relationship to their raps, Cobb explains this relationship stating:
This is a culture that, on the level of its stylistic temperature, its core principles, right
down to the stories it tells about itself, regards one question above other concerns: who
and what does one represent? In the case of “Niggas Bleed,” the tale was told in the first
person—deliberately blurring the line between the imaginative creations of Notorious
B.I.G., platinum-selling rap artist, and the deadpan confessions of Christopher Wallace,
the Catholic-schooled Brooklynite ex-hustler. It would be impossible to understand
B.I.G.’s artistic statement without understanding the centrality of his indigenous lands in
the Borough of Kings because, dig it or not, the Borough of Kings is the reason for the
artistic statement. Same goes for Scarface’s battered muse: Houston’s notorious Fifth
Ward, the Bay Area environs of Freestyle Fellowship, the ATL sprawl that gave rise to
the Dungeon Family Collective. And thus, there is no room for fake representation. (p.
112)
Cobb identifies a rappers site of enunciation as a negotiation between their personal histories and
their position as artists. This ongoing negotiation, for Cobb, is always situated within the place
that a rapper is from or representing. Screw Tapes as community ciphers are consistently making

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space for Southside Houston Hip Hop practitioners. As a site of enunciation for practitioners like
Big Moe, DJ Screw and Big DeMo, they are constantly re-inscribing the local community by
responding and representing it through stories and storytelling that speak to this negotiation of
personal history and artistry. This is the borderlands space that puts them between Houston as a
distinct local community and Hip Hop the global culture. Thus, their decisions as rappers, DJs,
and list-makers are always influenced by the need to represent stories that appeal to or represent
Houston while telling them in a Houston way.
This borderlands space led to a method of storytelling that was made from the Screwed
and Chopped style, Houston knowledge, and Houston language practices. The stories that
appeared on Screw Tapes either through shout outs, freestyles, or remixes had to relate to the
everyday experiences of the Houston community. These stories were about resisting being
unseen like Big Moe’s verse asserts or Big DeMo ensuring that every had a chance to speak on
the shout out. These stories were also about uplifting a community like Key-C’s message to Kurt
to stay on his hustle or Moe’s motivation to strive to the top.
Conclusion
In this chapter, I migrate through the relationship between Houston as a local community,
its community members, and their engagement of Hip Hop practices represented through
mixtapes. The mixtape allows communities to have agency in the production of their Hip Hop
practices. Screw Tapes like 3 In Da Mornin’ and June 27th have different purposes and
structures but ultimately use DJ Screw’s slowed down style and Houston’s culture as a method
for storytelling. June 27th was made as a celebration of SUC member Big DeMo’s birthday and
demonstrated how involved the community was in the production of Screw Tapes.

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Many of the selections that DeMo made for his playlists were songs that came from
albums that were new in 1996 demonstrating his continued engagement with Hip Hop and how
he continued to migrate between Hip Hop communities. Yet, in the selection of tracks for Screw
Tapes, we see music that was often considered “hardcore” in relation to the mainstream but
resonated with Houston audiences. The contrast in tastes between a mainstream audience and a
local one, points to the example of a Hip Hop community demonstrating that what might appear
to be extreme in one context is everyday life in another. The embracing of these stories falls in
line with the idea of the refusal to be “unseen or unseeable,” challenging the notion of
normativity. Screw Tapes became an avenue for highlighting stories that were familiar,
challenging even what was normal in the context of Hip Hop culture, refusing the rappers who
rapped about rap. Through remixing other artist’s music, Screw Tapes could center a narrative
that would lead to creating a distinct style in Houston that worked in unison with the slowed
down sound. Houston could continue to shape that narrative by adding these other kinds of tracks
that helped further localize the mixtapes. These freestyle and narration moments helped bridge
everyday life to the stories that they heard in rap songs.

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CHAPTER 6: Outro—Implications
Introduction
My relationship with Hip Hop has always grown from a tension of identity and place that
is necessary for meaning making and growth. As a Xicano from the Juarez-El Paso Borderland,
listening primarily to stories from black urban experiences, I always knew that these stories were
not mine. Being cognizant of this tension meant respecting where those stories come from and
what they represent. Recalling the structure of the cipher, I did not need to be the center to
participate. I also do not need to be at the center to make meaning. Sitting at the edge of the
cipher was a familiar place, living in the borderlands is familiar for a Xicano.
I see this borderlands experience, mediated through Hip Hop, as a powerful implication
for my work across technical communication, community work, and cultural rhetorics. Through
this project, I have articulated how Hip Hop is a purposeful complex process of making and remaking. Additionally, I want to emphasize that understanding this process requires that we
understand the relevance and influence of space and place to these makings. Thus, I want to
argue that Hip Hop is a powerful paradigm for research and practice in Writing Studies because
migrating through Hip Hop asks us to move through spaces that exists sonically, digitally, and
physically.
These migrations lead us through borderlands, where we recognize common practices
that links diverse communities. The value of these borderlands spaces for rhetoric and
composition is the simultaneous engagement with diverse communities, practices, and
communication. At the start of this project, I initially theorized this work as Borderlands Hip
Hop Rhetoric (BHHR). I found BHHR to be generative because it allowed me to think about my
movements between Hip Hop communities as purposeful and respectful. In future work, I will

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continue to think about BHHR as a framework for engagement and research however in this
dissertation the focus has shifted to focus on Ciphers along with Migration and Borderlands.
This final chapter is an Outro. To close out my dissertation, I want to start by discussing
the implications of my work as we continue to think about the possibilities for Hip Hop and
Migration. Followed by a discussion of my future plans for this research.
Implications-Towards a Hip Hop Migration
Participating in Hip Hop requires a constant level of engagement through a negotiation of
complex listening practices. The combination of Hip Hop, borderlands, and migration is the
opportunity to produce sites for understanding the complex process of engagement in diverse
spaces with an attention to decolonization. For Hip Hop, diverse spaces are defined by their
participants as well as the modalities for participation. This type of diversity allows for more
dynamic understandings of borders and borderlands.
The acknowledgement of borders helps us become cognizant of the spaces that we cross
into while paying attention to the ways that we create relationships. What studying borderlands
in Hip Hop affords us is the ability to recognize what discourses are present in a Hip Hop
community. The practice of recognizing these discourses helps us learn how we orient ourselves
within Hip Hop. One of the most important revelations that comes from this work is that border
crossing can occur physically as well as sonically and/or visually through digital medias. For
example, DJ Screw was a border crosser for the Houston Hip Hop community by listening and
using records by artists from other cities on his mixtapes. These records, presented on Screw
Tapes, helped shape the preferences of Houston audiences. The importance of borderlands to Hip
Hop is being able to see what is being preserved and how that process is occurring.

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If Hip Hop already has tools for understanding an ongoing border crossing, by framing it
through a decolonized migration, we can continue to practice Hip Hop while resisting settler
colonialism. This is one of the more powerful implication for Hip Hop and Borderlands because
within Hip Hop we can actively resist settler colonial logics because we no longer treat Hip Hop
as a monolithic culture and honor the potential for and existing local Hip Hop communities. We
learn to recognize that new movements or communities in Hip Hop are not discovered but rather
we engage in their borderland spaces where we develop relationships to their practicing of Hip
Hop. Bringing a consciousness for settler colonialism to Hip Hop, is equally powerful because it
pushes Hip Hop to acknowledge its decolonial potential. Settler colonialism framed within Hip
Hop gives Hip Hop practitioners tools for understanding colonialism outside of Hip Hop.
The potential for Hip Hop, migration, and decolonization posits multiple sites or
borderlands for knowledge making. The decolonization of migration was in part the result of my
multiple ongoing migrations in Hip Hop. Through my various engagements within the Hip Hop
community I could actively practice what it means to constantly cross and live in borderlands
while thinking beyond settler nation-states. Moving across the Global Hip Hop Nation allowed
me to disrupt the migration narrative of a singular finite movement north. Instead, the recursive
nature of Hip Hop encouraged this orientation to migration as being ongoing.
Conclusion: Future Plans
In this dissertation, I sought to design a study that brought to light the ways that Hip Hop
could provide us models and sights of inquiry for engagement, pedagogy, and rhetorical practice.
To make this argument I believe that we needed to situate our approach to Hip Hop through its
ongoing migration as a translocal culture and through the understanding that practitioners engage
in Hip Hop through an embodied hypertextual relationship. I felt that, so often, Hip Hop was

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misrepresented because it was treated as a flat text. Building from Hip Hop scholars across a
range of disciplines, the potential for Hip Hop’s impact in writing and rhetoric can be tied to so
many of the pressing disciplinary conversations.
Moving forward there are some specific directions I hope to continue to move in. My
insistence on working within writing and rhetoric, despite the current relationship it has with Hip
Hop, is the emphasis on rhetoric and rhetorical practices as well as the chance to focus on writing
in community and classroom spaces. Rhetoric and Writing provides the unique opportunity in the
humanities of making things. Not only do we theorize and analyze but we also get the space to
turn our inquiry into action. Building from my dissertation, I am excited to continue to work on
the Houston Hip Hop Archive, Hip Hop and technical communications, Hip Hop pedagogy in
Writing Studies, and community engagement.
Having been reminded of the DJs role in Hip Hop, I think that theorizing and enacting DJ
practices is best way to revise the relationship between Writing Studies and Hip Hop. The DJ
helps make space for communities to grow while inserting new voices. At the same time, they
are archivist and help preserve histories. These skills are relevant and central to work in Writing
Studies. Furthermore, continuing to build on the role of hypertext in Hip Hop, there are
important arguments to make in Hip Hop to contribute to the already growing scholarship around
how communities of color are already archiving their culture through embodied practices.
Currently, I am in the planning stages of an exhibit for a symposium to be hosted by the
University of Houston Library in the fall of 2018. The archive’s director, Julie Grob, has
continued to be interested in the progress of my work and we have had multiple conversations
about designing the exhibit around visualizing the effort of DJ Screw’s work on his mixtapes.

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Currently we are planning to have a physical exhibit that will be accompanied by a digital piece
to remain in the online catalogue.
Second, the most surprising outcome of my dissertation has been the potential for Hip
Hop rhetoric work in technical communication. Given Hip Hop’s ongoing history with
technology and the careful design of communication, the potential for work around technical
communication is not only fruitful but necessary given the increasing globalizing space that
technical communicators are working in. From Hip Hop’s ability to teach diverse listening
practices to the increasing automation of writing, Hip Hop practitioners like DJs provide models
for engaging in communities and writing with pre-written blocks of text. I hope to immediately
develop Chapter 4 “Screw Tapes Side A: Imagining Communication Design through Hip Hop”
into an article for Communication Design Quarterly.
Currently, Hip Hop Education scholars are producing the most exciting academic
scholarship in Hip Hop. Building from that work, I want to develop Writing Studies pedagogies
through Hip Hop in the ways we reimagine the classroom space and through Hip Hop’s
insistence on style as a point of invention. Hip Hop provides models and tools that add to the
already important scholarship on designing classroom spaces that are more inclusive.
Furthermore, given the importance of embodiment to teaching writing, Hip Hop provides us with
examples to help students engage with and understand their subjectivity through their own
experiences. Asking students to acknowledge where they are from and challenging their listening
practices offers important spaces of learning from first year writing and into any number of
courses within a writing major. Through the negotiating of subjectivity, I am also interested in
developing writing and rhetoric pedagogies that start with style. Especially for digital and
multimodal rhetorics, style as defined in Hip Hop helps us think rhetorical about what modes or

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digital tools can be most rhetorical. As we learned from DJ Screw and his use of style, not every
narrative fit the Screwed and Chopped style but the style always fit the community it worked
within. This attention to style can teach students to always keep their audience’s needs at the
forefront of invention.
The thread that ties all this work together is the imagining of Ciphers and our movement
between past, present, and future ones. Every space in Hip Hop is dependent on the people who
practice within that space. As we enter these various spaces in Hip Hop, we must respect and
acknowledge what is present in the space. What defines these spaces are the adaptations of
language, embodied practices, and place. Learning to recognize these variables by moving
through the borderlands between ciphers in Hip Hop, teaches us to recognize this in non-Hip
Hop spaces. For our own projects and for teaching students how to do community work, Ciphers
and Borderlands can teach or remind us to recognize and value language practices, how spaces
are constructed, and the influence of place. Often in Writing Studies we see an encouragement
for engaging community but lack the tools to do this work ethically and respectfully. My work
with Ciphers and Borderlands (potentially Borderlands Hip Hop Rhetoric(s)), can be a method
that can provide more tangible tools for border crossing and relationship building.

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