What do u think?’ The response was overwhelmingly for West. In fact, DJ Michael Watts last week tweeted, ‘I said I was gonna chopp Nicki Minaj’s album, but everydody’s seems to want me 2 do Kanye’s.

It was inevitable, then, that Kanye West‘s acclaimed new album, ‘My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy,’ would get chopped and/or screwed. Last year, some joker chopped and screwed Justin Bieber, and nothing sounds more dangerous than this screwed version of ‘Party in the U.S.A.’ by Miley Cyrus. The remix technique has continued to germinate underground since its peak in the late ‘90s/early ‘00s, and its influence has spread to a new generation of music makers - including the loose affiliation of producers such as Salem and oOoOO creating spooky, syrupy dance tracks that fall under the so-called witch house subgenre. David Banner’s 2003 album ‘Mississippi: The Screwed and Chopped Album,’ given a reworking by chop and screw master DJ Michael Watts of the Swisha House crew, is one of the darkest, bleakest documents of the ‘00s. But the more you listen, the stranger and more magnetic the music becomes.Īfter Screw died in 2000 - he was addicted to cough syrup, a fact that no doubt played a part in the allure of such slow sounds - his mixtapes became Texas talismans, underground tokens of a weird moment in rap history. At first, chopped and screwed tracks sound funny. The result, released on mixtapes (the real kind: cassettes) and sold on the streets of Houston, was a tripped-out, bugged-out sound that turned real-time 88 bpm boasts into menacing, deep, digital 44 bpm blues. A storied personality in the history of Southern rap, Screw would ‘chop and screw’ his tracks with the aid of cassette players by slowing down the music to half-speed. See About archive blog posts.Ī few weeks ago, writer Jon Caramanica wrote a perceptive piece in the New York Times on a remix technique developed in the mid-1990s by the late Houston producer DJ Screw. This article was originally on a blog post platform and may be missing photos, graphics or links.

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