up a semi-official shop, establishing Screwed Up Records behind bulletproof glass in a store near South Park. Nothing was for sale except those cassettes.
By this point, a decade into Screw’s career, he was famous outside Houston. Chopped and screwed, the style he invented, had permeated the scene. Michael “5000” Watts, a north-side producer and cofounder of Swishahouse Records, adopted the sound; his Swishahouse partner OG Ron C picked it up, too. Watts DJed on Sundays for 97.9, the Box, the hip-hop station that had taken over in the nineties, leaking chopped and screwed to a wider Houston audience. By then, Screw’s prodigious output was flagging. He was getting heavier and slower, as if his body had started working at his signature tempo. He had become addicted to codeine cough syrup, also known as lean.
Lean is now permanently associated with rappers, partly because of the Houston scene at its most flamboyant—the grills, rims, and sizzurp aesthetic—and partly because of notable acolytes of the substance, like Lil Wayne. But drugs are always demographically flexible. Townes Van Zandt, the melancholy country blues artist who got his break in Houston, loved cough syrup so much that he called it Delta Momma (DM, as in Robitussin) and sang one song (1971’s “Delta Momma Blues”) from the genial point of view of the drug itself. Chopped and screwed mimics the lean feeling—a heady and dissociative security, as if you’re moving very slowly toward a conclusion you don’t need to understand. It induces a sense of permissive disorientation that melds perfectly to Houston, a place where a full day can pass without you ever seeming to get off the highway, where the caustic gleam of daytime melts into a fluorescent polluted sunset and then into a long and swampy night. Chopped and screwed picked up something about Houston that connects impurity to absolution. It was its own imaginary freeway, oozing with syrup, defining the city’s limits, bounding it like the Loop.
In the blistering hot parking lot of the megachurch, on the old seats of my parents’ powder-blue Suburban, chopped and screwed sounded right to me as soon as I heard it, even though it would be years before I began to understand the context in which it was produced. Like religion, it provided both ends of a total system. Its sound entangled sin and salvation; it held a tug of unease, a blanket of reassurance. It was as ominous and comforting as a nursery rhyme, this first taste of the way that an open acknowledgment of vice can feel as divinely willed, as spiritual—even more so—than the concealment often required to be good.
Or maybe Houston just crossed too many of my signals. It wasn’t long until the city’s music permeated even my sheltered environment. There was a lack of zoning in our cultural lives, too. I first learned about twerking when I was thirteen, at cheerleading camp, where we got measured for navy bell skirts with high slits that barely cleared our underwear, which we were required to wear on football game days to our modesty-preaching Christian school. At camp we prayed that Jesus would keep us safe during practice, and then we threw one another, with sloppy abandon, ten feet into the air. Southern rap was rising: after school we danced around each other’s bedrooms, listening to Outkast, listening to Nelly, listening to Ludacris and T.I. We dropped to the floor, clumsily mimicking the motions that were spreading like a virus, clapping for the girls who could do it best. We still went to church twice a week, and it all started to seem interchangeable. Some nights I went with my girlfriends to youth group and sang about Jesus, and sometimes I would go with them to the club on teen night, driving past the Repentagon into the thicket of liquor stores and strip clubs a mile up on Westheimer, entering another dark room where all the girls wore miniskirts and everyone sought amnesty in a different form. Sometimes a foam machine would open up in the ceiling and soak our cheap push-up bras, and we’d glue ourselves to strangers as everyone chewed on the big mouthfuls of Swishahouse in the room.
We had been taught that even French kissing was dangerous—that anything not marked by rich white Christianity was murky and perverse. But eventually, it was the church that seemed corrupted to me. What had been forbidden began to feel earnest and clean. It was hot out the first time I tasted cough syrup,