From DJ Screw to Moonlight: the unlikely comeback of chopped and screwed

Chopping and screwing, a DJing technique invented by Houston pioneer DJ Screw in the early 90s that pitches compositions down, is about feeling. Remixing a song in this way changes its texture; it makes the tones richer but also deeper and darker. In a 1995 interview with RapPages, Screw explained the technique: “The Screw sound is when I mix tapes with songs that people can relax to,” he said. “Slower tempos, to feel the music and so you can hear what the rapper is saying. I make my tapes so that everyone can feel them.” For Screw, slowing a record down allowed it to breathe, bringing new context to what was rapped and adding a new tint to the catalogs of the rappers he liked to spin — artists such as OutKast, Tupac, 8Ball & MJG, Warren G, and Spice 1.

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As he would tell it, the sound was designed to complement drowsy drug highs. Its sedated motion can communicate a number of things: calm, leisure, grogginess, chromaticism, and an almost numbing sense of ease. In a 1999 interview with the defunct rap magazine Murder Dog, Screw proclaimed: “I’m gonna screw the world up. It’s screwed up, but it ain’t finished.” The influential Houston DJ died a year later, but his vision came true. Now more than ever, Screw music is commonplace. To paraphrase another quote of his: the underground is now worldwide.

After the Texas rap explosion of the mid-00s (which saw rappers such as Mike Jones, Paul Wall, Chamillionaire, Lil Flip, and Slim Thug find popularity and bring attention to the scene), the technique underwent another renaissance in the late aughts and earlier this decade, first when a DJ Screw flip (November 18th) landed on Drake’s breakout mixtape So Far Gone, then on A$AP Rocky’s viral single Purple Swag. (Drake’s 2011 Take Care single HYFR also samples a screw classic – ESG’s Swangin’ and Bangin’.) Around the same time, the Odd Future member Mike G was making his own chopped mixes online. Perhaps coincidentally, only a few months after Purple Swag, the University of Houston Libraries acquired DJ Screw’s record collection for an exhibit.

The Houston DJ Michael “5000” Watts suggested that appropriation of the form by popular outsiders was a good look for the culture, even if he believed Rocky’s Purple Swag to be a “swagger jack”. “I see a lot of people that aren’t even from Texas that are part of the screwed movement and that are giving the movement a big boost and jump,” he said in 2011. “A lot of people thought the whole thing was dead, but out here in Texas – like me, the OG Ron C, and a few others – we always been doing it. People like A$AP Rocky, they really put it out there and it’s like bringing a whole genre to life, that makes people pay attention to it again, they know it’s not dead.”

Rocky was put on to Screw music by the A$AP Mob curator A$AP Yams, who himself promoted Screw culture and its aesthetic with his own Throwed Ass Jams mix. As the popular rappers of the moment were using the sound, its popularity grew among their fans. The Austin producer Eric Dingus was screwing songs from across the spectrum – Kanye West’s Blood on the Leaves, Fantasia’s Without Me, and even material by the J-pop group Perfume. Eventually, even the Grizzly Bear drummer, Chris Bear, was chopping and screwing the band’s song Plans. As it has approached critical mass, a small but dedicated group of local DJs have worked to preserve its Houston origins.

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In recent years, and with the internet as a distributor, OG Ron C and the Chopstars have continued to churn out tapes with their Chopped Not Slopped series, their ultimate goal being preservation of DJ Screw’s legacy. In 2015, Ron C got a signal boost on Drake’s Beats 1 show, OVO Sound Radio. Other Houston DJs such as DJ Purpberry and DJ AudiTory are doing their part to keep Screw’s name alive, too, tirelessly screwing everything from Lil Uzi Vert to Tory Lanez to Mac Miller.

Last year saw the chop go pop. More records got screwed than ever before, Rihanna’s Anti, the Weeknd’s Starboy, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and Frank Ocean’s Blonde among them. Big-time rap releases including Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Drake’s Views, and Chance the Rapper’s Coloring Book were all reworked. Solange’s A Seat at the Table, Childish Gambino’s Awaken, My Love!, and Bryson Tiller’s Trapsoul also got screwed. The technique was also applied to indie rock. A screwed version of Mitski’s Your Best American Girl surfaced on YouTube and Dirty Projectors’ comeback single Keep Your Name replicated the effects with pitch-down slo-mo vocals. Even Tame Impala’s Currents got the chopped and screwed treatment.

Perhaps the most surprising turn for DJ Screw’s now decades-old technique was that it became a part of the very fabric of an award-winning film. Barry Jenkins’ Moonlight, which is scored by Nicholas Britell, uses chopping and screwing to create texture and imply depth. A pivotal scene in the film is soundtracked by a chopped and screwed version of Jidenna’s Classic Man, but it’s more subtly used in the score itself: Chiron’s theme is a “bent version” of Little’s theme, and Black’s theme is a chopped and screwed version, warping the strings out of shape. There’s a specific word Britell uses to describe what’s taking place: evolution.

An evolution is an appropriate way to describe the activity surrounding Screw culture, too, though sonically it retains many of the same properties as the original Screw tapes. Screw culture has come to represent more than just chopping and screwing records in recent years; it’s an aesthetic now, one that’s come to represent a laid-back sense of cool, a transporting, almost disorienting atmosphere, and (for better or worse) codeine and opiate abuse (Screw, UGK’s Pimp C, and A$AP Yams all died of overdoses). But the technique lives on for more than its superficial value or any sort of commercial value (if it has any); it carries a sort of resonance in its sonics, a multi-dimensionality. The sound is inherently Houston, but the feel is transcendent and timeless. Across decades and eras and genres, it makes moments feel eternal.