Moments In Love: Swang

by Micha Valentine

The year is either 2006 or 2007. I couldn’t tell you exactly because having crystalline memories of everything you did in high-school is a certifiable death-trap; either endlessly reliving juvenile ‘glory days’ or circling around some fixed agony from isolation that prevents you from evolving. I say all this and yet I still have pronounced memories of coming into Study Hall (Read: I did something to merit an in-school suspension), pulling out a CD player and revisiting one of my favorite obsessions. I’d read about it in the “Hot Songs” list of a magazine, downloaded it off Limewire, and soon became obsessed. “Swang”, a morass of chocolate liqueur sludge set over a turgid sample of the orchestration to Michael Jackson’s The Lady in my Life accompanied by the molasses-like vocals of long-dead Houston rapper Fat Pat peppered in via DJ scratches.

As a teenager in the 00s, I’d learned about ‘Screw Music’ in a cursory fashion. The period from 03-08 was fantastic if you had any susceptibility to novelty in rap as pop. It felt like one merely needed to pick up a magazine or put on MTV2/BET and some ‘movement’ was trying to vie for your attention: Crunk, Snap, Hyphy, Screw, Juke, Trap (long before it was the Trap we knew it to be) and so on and so forth. Almost every other month, a new regional strain/flavor/style of rap was emerging and becoming a national buzzword. Some of these scenes were recent trends blessed by a hungry consumer public, others had decades of history. As much as I’d learned about rap outside of my beloved home of NYC thanks to the net (an interest that baffled my tru-school father who’d raised me on cassettes of Rakim, Wu-Tang, and Public Enemy, while barely deeming Dr. Dre or Master P worth a hint of appreciation), I didn’t know the legacy buried within a record like SWANG. However, even as a teen it glanced at an emotional potency and history that with each year makes its gravity all the more impactful.

The main artist responsible for SWANG is a rapper named Trae the Truth, a Texas Rap mainstay who despite never crossing over has garnered himself an iconic status in the city thanks to both his charitable nature towards the people of Houston and being a veteran of rap since the 90s. There’s probably 3 Trae songs I love in particular, “SWANG” included, and sadly the guy is overshadowed on all of them. On his 2011 single Inkredible, Trae gets easily brushed aside by a semi-lucid Lil’ Wayne and a maniacal Rick Ross. Meanwhile on the 2006 single No Help, his brother Z-Ro’s lightning fast rapping and mournful singing takes center stage away from his little brother. Trae’s voice is exceptionally odd, baritone and gravely in a way where you’d think it was being distorted by one of those kids' microphones with a ‘space invaders’ effect. That’s a voice that already sounds legitimately phantasmal at normal speeds, so whenever his records end up getting chopped and screwed it becomes one of the most captivating, unsettling things one can hear. I say this in love, but Trae’s voice when pitched low is more abnormal than any creation Lovecraft nerds could ever try to sketch you out via Beksinskian horror show.

This brings us to SWANG. Dozens of versions of this song exist now due to a failure to clear the Michael Jackson sample on the original version of the single. Instead, the official version now features that sample played over, its lush sound turned into something plasticine and artificial, more suitable for ornamental backing in a slightly unnerving Hallmark movie than a Houston-style cruising record. Moreover, thanks to a remix featuring a then recently freed Pimp C of UGK, the original was further superseded. Among these variations are dozens of different attempts at chopping and screwing the song by professionals or home amateurs, each applying their trade to the numerous versions at a regular tempo. The official ‘screwed’ version however, (or at least the one I remember from my teens) was done by Trae’s DJ Pollie Pop. Everything here on his S.L.A.B-ED mix moves at a glacial pace, the tumid instrumental and Trae’s own vocals oozing over the listener in comforting glaze. Ironically, this is only the tip of the iceberg in what makes the record so unnatural.

As mentioned earlier, one of the key elements of SWANG is the invocation of vocals from the deceased Fat Pat. Born Patrick Hawkins, Fat Pat is one of the original members of DJ Screw’s “Screwed Up Click” along with his younger brother John Hawkins or ‘Big H.A.W.K.’. Pat was murdered under suspicious circumstances in 1998, before his biggest commercial breakthrough; being featured on the now classic single by UGK Affiliate DJ DMD’s 25 Lighters along with fellow S.U.C. member Lil’ Keke. While in Texas and the greater south, S.U.C members such as Keke or even second generation members like Z-Ro and Trae are cult icons who’ve sold millions over careers spanning multiple decades, I admittedly never learned about the Screw Movement’s pioneers properly. For my generation, most of us only witnessed hits that came via the rival Swishahouse camp of Mike Jones, Slim Thug, Paul Wall and Chamillionaire. Arguably the closest mainstream act was Lil’ Flip who never quite made the impact anticipated, despite being one of the most highly regarded rappers in the S.U.C. So when I heard H.A.W.K. on SWANG as a teenager, it was an informal introduction to Pat; and a formal information to his younger brother’s grief.

Verse 3 of SWANG belongs to H.A.W.K. and begins with the sounds of him and his brother reciting words from Pat’s verse on 25 Lighters. For whatever reason, I’d never really taken to 25 Lighters until this year when I fell into a habit of listening to the tune a bunch via Youtube. All the rappers ride the breezy Al B. Sure! sample with ease, but by the time you get to Pat’s verse it’s clear that the video was shot long after his demise. Most of it relies on DMD and Keke to recite the verse into the camera, spliced alongside shots of a TV playing VHS footage of Fat Pat freestyling alongside his S.U.C. comrades. At one point, DMD points upward to the heavens as he recites Pat’s boasts, turning the simple rap bragging into a protective gesture, as if knowing that even in death Hawkins’ would be undefeatable; his legacy would live on through his music, and even further through his friends paying such reverent tribute. It’s a plaintive distance from the other aspect that 25 Lighters is a single essentially haunted by footage and audio of a man taken from this world before he could celebrate the record’s success along with his friends. While the rest of the video is DMD and friends having a casual barbeque or partying in a mansion-like building, here the video suddenly becomes a memorial.

That thread doesn’t leave SWANG either, as H.A.W.K. flips his brother’s flexes into solemn and somber reflection. He raps about both his brother and their friend DJ Screw passing away (Screw died in November of 2000 from drug related complications). As a teen, barely understanding, I was struck by the tragic sentimentality of the younger Hawkins brother talking about driving through their neighborhood and being mistaken for his dead brother, saying how Pat would live on through not just him. Because that same year SWANG was released, possibly the biggest record of H.A.W.K’s career, he would be murdered just like his older brother. And just like his brother, John Hawkins would be leaving behind his greatest commercial performance on someone else’s single, with his friends forced to pay tribute to his memory. Now whenever I’m able to listen to SWANG, I’m in mournful awe of an amazing record. The morbid air hanging over it becomes immeasurable and brings tears to my eyes. I hate the use of ‘poetry’ as an ennobling descriptor for rap, and yet there’s nothing more perfect to describe hearing SWANG now. It’s a record where the ephemerality of life, death and what we leave behind manages to glide with luxury.