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5,201 words · no email, no account
No. 002 · Music · Hip-Hop
The Hand-Sold Cassettes
a biography of Robert Earl Davis Jr.
What the book is
He was born Robert Earl Davis Jr. on July 20, 1971, in Bastrop, Texas, and learned to slow records down at the family turntable when he was twelve. By twenty he was the architect of the chopped-and-screwed sound — two copies of the same record, one a half-step slow, hands cross-faded — that would, for a decade, define Houston rap. He sold the mixtapes from his front yard on Greenstone Street for $10 a copy and recorded under the stage name DJ Screw. He died on November 16, 2000, of a codeine-promethazine overdose at his Houston home recording studio. He was twenty-nine.
Jamal Whitestone's biography traces the arc through the Bastrop childhood and the move to Houston's South Park neighborhood, the apprenticeship under DJ Darryl Scott, the founding of the Screwed Up Click and the long membership including Big Moe and Lil' Keke and Z-Ro and Pimp C, the 3 'N the Mornin' (Part Two) of 1996 that brought the Houston style to national attention, the codeine-cough-syrup addiction that the music had consecrated and the music had recorded, and the morning of November 16, 2000, when his cousin found him.
What emerges is a portrait of a Houston DJ whose chopped-and-screwed method built a regional aesthetic and whose habit the same aesthetic, in the end, killed.
At a glance
- Subject
- Robert Earl Davis Jr.
- Shelf
- Music · Hip-Hop
- Written by
- Jamal Whitestone
- Chapters
- 19 across 185 pages
- Narrated by
- Desmond Vale
- Editions
- Paperback · EPUB · Audiobook
- Authorisation
- Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
- Content notes
- substance use · fatal overdose
Contents · 19 chapters
- 01SmithvilleRead free
- 02The Records3,063 words
- 03The South Side2,267 words
- 04The Turntables3,257 words
- 05Slowed Down2,016 words
- 06The House on Greenstone3,721 words
- 07The Gray Tapes2,869 words
- 08The Screwed Up Click3,155 words
- 09Fat Pat2,101 words
- 10The Line Around the Block4,365 words
- 11Syrup2,855 words
- 12Freestyle2,944 words
- 133 'N the Mornin'3,088 words
- 14The Summer of 20002,679 words
- 15November 162,141 words
- 16The Silence After3,034 words
- 17The Sound Travels3,422 words
- 1860 BPM2,280 words
- 19The Casket Won't Go Down3,445 words
The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.
Editions
- Paperback · $19.99
- 6 × 9 in · 185 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
- EPUB · $3.99
- EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90623-045-4 - Audiobook · $5.99
- Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Desmond Vale
ISBN 979-8-90623-192-5
The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.
Questions
01Who is The Hand-Sold Cassettes about?
Robert Earl Davis Jr.. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Hand-Sold Cassettes — and the name goes on the line underneath.
02Is this an authorised biography?
No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.
03Can I read some of it before buying?
Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 5,201 words of the book.
04How long is it?
About 60,500 words, 19 chapters, 185 pages in the paperback.
05What is the printed book like?
6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.
06Does this book carry content warnings?
Yes: substance use; fatal overdose. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.
The writer
This book deals with
- substance use
- fatal overdose
Listed before you buy, not after.
