I’ve wrote about albums, EPs, mixtapes, compilations, and DJ mixes, but it’s been rare for me to devote a piece of writing primarily to just one song. Last year, we were assigned to analyse a song for a course I took, and it was actually pretty fun as far as assignments go. I delivered it as an in-person slideshow presentation for the course, but I decided to convert it into written form so that I can share it on the blog. It is the first instalment in what I hope will be a reoccurring series called Long on the Song. As the name suggests, these are long(ish) pieces where I’ll dive into the nitty gritty of one song and talk about its larger cultural relevance. I don’t think there’s any better starting point for this series than a track that served as the gateway point to getting acquainted with one of my now favourite musicians. I’d also like to mention that at the time that I wrote this, I had just finished reading DJ Screw: A Life in Slow Revolution by Lance Scott Walker. This biography and oral history was instrumental in helping me gain a more nuanced appreciation of DJ Screw’s life, artistry, and role in shaping the development of hip hop. I can’t recommend this book enough to anyone interested in chopped and screwed music and/or Southern hip hop. Additionally, if you’re a fan of storytelling that occurs through the medium of conducting interviews and slicing quotes chronologically, (it’s a format similar to Meet Me in the Bathroom, for example), you’ll probably dig the book. But enough with the intros, let’s talk about the song.
I’ve chosen to analyse DJ Screw’s remix of “One Day” by UGK for several reasons. It demonstrates the chopped and screwed technique that Screw pioneered, which is a style of music with an influence well beyond its origins in the Houston hip hop scene of the 90s. The song is also significant in how the music and the sound of this chopped and screwed technique helped formulate a soundtrack for communal experience for Black communities in Houston. Third, the slow character of chopped and screwed music is a form of slow media, and thus offers a listening experience that resists the instant gratification, “speed”, and standards of what the music industry deems as ideal for pop music, especially in the current day. And last, DJ Screw’s selection and treatment of the serious and sombre song by UGK pushes back against stereotypical conceptions of what chopped and slowed music is and why it is appealing and/or is important to people.
I want to start this by discussing what it means for music to be chopped and screwed, starting with a description of the techniques that Screw utilized to achieve his signature sound. The physical media and hardware that Screw used are where we must begin. He was a DJ first and foremost, so he used a set-up of two turntables, mixer, and a huge selection of records. Using this collection of records (most often hip hop, but also some funk and soul) as the core of the music, he would employ a variety of techniques to transform the music as he recorded straight to cassette tape. Screw employed the practice of record-scratching, which was already well-established in the hip hop tradition by the time of the 90s, as one way in which he manipulated the rhythm of the music he was playing. Another technique was tapping, where he would have two copies of the same record playing on each turntable and would take the crossfader on his mixer and quickly slide it over to the record on the other side. This would create the effect of doubling the beat to create a stutter, or a double time infliction, on the drums or lead to the repetition of a syllable from the rapper. Looping or rewinding the record to repeat an instrumental bar or a line from the MC was another common technique of his.
Beyond the previously mentioned techniques, there were other ways in which Screw would alter the flow and temporal experience of the music, and it is the slowness of the chopped and screwed sound that is one of its most distinct elements. To start with, Screw would often play the records on the turntables at 33 rpm rather than 45, which is the speed at which most records are “supposed” to be played. That already slows the speed down and lowers the pitch, but that wasn’t enough for Screw. Pitch shifters on turntables and four track tape recorders would also be used to slow things down, as well as adjusting the screw on the motor of a stereo to further drag things to crawl.
Screw spoke about how these slower tempos were designed to give listeners something to relax to, to feel the music, and better hear what was being rapped about on the tracks. This emphasis on the translation of lyrical content to listeners goes hand in hand with his aforementioned tendency to rewind and replay parts of songs to emphasize particular lines that would resonate with him and those would listen to the tapes.
However Screw’s emphasis on deep listening and lyrical messaging sometimes gets lost in contemporary conversations about chopped and screwed music, usually amongst outsiders and in particular white listeners and music critics without any connection to the majority Black neighbourhoods and hip hop music scene that Screw was a part of on the southside of Houston. These outsiders often emphasize the aesthetic qualities of this genre, its classification as a psychedelic music which is associated with drug culture in 90s Houston hip hop, and hip hop at large. Sinnreich and Dois note that many fans, music critics, and scholars argue the sound of screwed music looks to invoke a sonic feeling to that being under the influence of lean which is a beverage of soda pop mixed with cold medication containing promethazine and codeine. It creates a depressant effect, so this association has some validity in relation to the slowness of the music, and Screw and other members of the Screwed Up Click would incorporate lines about drinking lean into rap verses. It should also be noted that Screw would pass away at age 29 in part due to health complications related to heavy codeine consumption, as would Pimp C, one of UGK members rapping on “One Day”, at the age of 33. The association between lean and screw music would also be reinforced in later popular works within hip hop. For example, in Three 6 Mafia’s 2005 hit “Stay Fly,” when Juicy J raps “Vision messed up cause I’m drinking the lean” the pitch of his vocals is dropped down to a low frequency like one might hear on a screwtape. This happens for this one line only, while the rest of his verse is at is regular pitch. Consider also the case of Travis Scott, who is also from Houston, and paid tribute with the track “R.I.P. SCREW” on his 2018 album Astroworld. On the cut, both him and Swae Lee have lines about being under the influence of drank.
However, including songs like “One Day” to his tapes appear to show an intention by Screw to emphasize serious matters affecting the Southside of Houston. The song is a somber meditation on death, particularly the loss of young ones gone too soon, as well as the prevalent threat of incarceration for young Black men. Screw’s treatment of the song highlights these poignant observations by the three rappers, 3-2, Bun B, and Pimp C. I believe it’s actually Screw whose voice is the first on the track, during the intro where he loops the guitar riff sampled from “Ain’t I Been Good To You” by The isley Brothers, which makes the backbone of the “One Day” instrumental that was produced by Pimp C. He gives a shout-out to the true Gs that didn’t make it to see this day, and there are a lot of names listed. There is also mention of baby Gs, children in Screw’s family that passed, with Screw promising to them that “uncle gon see y’all,” alluding to a hopeful reunification in the afterlife. He also mentions how he is sitting here with his partners, and the recording of Screwtapes were often a social affair. With his plea to the listeners to take care of themselves, Screw emphasizes the power of togetherness and communal support during times of grieving, as well as a need to look out for one another and maintain a sense of groundedness in the present when life is so fleeting.
This monologue sets the tone for when the drums finally kick in and the song swings into full gear. The first two lines of 3-2’s verse, which are ran back a second time by Screw, describe him getting into drug dealing as a teenager. It’s a stark account of how difficult circumstances coerce young people into such lines of work out of a necessity to survive. And even if this allows him to get by, the potential consequences of this business are something that weighs on his mind heavily. This is evident in the lines ”Cause tomorrow ain’t promised to me, the only thing promised to a player is the penitentiary,” which also gets the rewind-and-repeat treatment by Screw. Here we can think of how the United States ratcheted up the War on Drugs throughout the 1980s, which by 1994 would result in the incarceration of 1 million Americans annually. The Human Rights Watch would find that Black men were imprisoned on drug charges at 13 times the rate of white men.
Bun B’s verse is heavily chopped by Screw, which some may argue reduces the potency of the lyrical messaging in the verse. One part that Screw doesn’t manipulate are the lines where Bun remarks “My brother been in the pen for damn near ten, but now it look like when he come out, man, I’m goin’ in.” Likewise, Pimp C talks about over-policing in the neighbourhood where he stays, remarking how “them laws is tryna lock us up for the whole century.” This line is ran back again by Screw. Pimp C, would spend several years behind bars in the early 2000s, also offers examples of friends of his given 40 and 19 year sentences. Pimp C also raps how UGK’s hype man BoBo Luchiano lost his son in a house fire. Although he maintains a religious practice, Pimp questions how a God could let killers live when children die, before advocating for the practice of love in the face of death’s inevitability.
In all forms of DJ mixes, the curation or selection of songs to include is key to the construction of a good set that communicates the themes, feelings, or energy that the DJ wants to convey to an audience. Screw’s selection of “One Day” as the first song on this particular screwtape, his introduction and shout-out to community members that he and likely many of the Southside Houston residents who bought his tapes either from his house or at the record store he’d open later, the stretching of a 5 minute track out to 15 minutes and the repetition of topical lines by the rappers on the cut-up track all work to encourage the listener to sit and feel the full weight of lyrics even heavier than the sludgy yet smooth down-pitched instrumental. Screw put this track at the beginning of a tape titled Endonesia, a play on words that gives an imagined physical location to the altered state of consciousness reached at the end of a blunt. By putting a track with such somber and emotionally impactful subject matter at the beginning of this tape, Screw acknowledges the psychedelic druggy surface appeal that his remixes hold in their temporal, spatial, and rhythmic alterations of hip hop, but he also subverts the expectations of the unknowing listener to demonstrate how the slow chopped and screwed sound also has the power to emphasize a deep contemplation and reflection on life, death, and grief. Along with other songs on the mixtape that mention the prison system, militarized police, and the loss of loved ones, “One Day” provides a critique of political forces of exploitation and oppression experienced by Black folks in the United States. Note how Screw’s idea of creating relaxing music is not one advocating for listeners to tune out and escape reality. Instead it promotes tuning in and being attentive to an analysis of the present. He’s using slowness to advocate for a political reading of hip hop, rather than solely focusing on its aesthetic features as something trippy you can get high and vibe to.
I’d like to compare chopped and screwed music to more recent styles of remixing that incorporate tempo adjustments. On TikTok, many creators use sped-up versions songs to soundtrack videos. Many of these sped-up versions have gone viral and thus boosted engagement with the original song. In the case of Steve Lacey’s “Bad Habit,” originally at 84.5 bpm, a sped up version at 111 bpm boosted the song’s popularity and helped give Lacey his first number 1 hit. As of October 2022, there were 495 000 TikTok videos featuring the original song, and 164 000 with the sped up version of “Bad Habit.”
In an article reporting on the sped up song trend and viral TikTok content, Lucy Habron writes:
“By removing elongated pauses and compacting slow moments into a fast-paced string of words, speeding up a song erases all the moments that a listener would usually use to analyse the meaning of the song or their thoughts on it. Instead, sped-up versions value an overarching vibe, maintaining the general aesthetic of a track without the need to consider it too deeply – a perfect formula when users are simply looking for a sound to match their visuals.”
https://whynow.co.uk/read/tiktok-sped-up-songs
A cynical reading of this might suggest that this overemphasis on vibe and aesthetic forces the song to adhere to the standards of viral music on TIkTok. And it seems antithetical to how DJ Screw aimed to foster deeper listening experiences and emphasize lyrical messaging with his remixing techniques. I want to expand on an argument made by Sinnreich and Dois that situates chopped and screwed music as part of a counter-hegemonic movement referred to as “slow media.” Slow media and slow music run in opposition to the fast pace at which media production and dissemination is regulated and “necessitated” by forces of capital. Delivering media, products, or experiences in compact packages in rapid succession allows the public to consume a greater number of things. Faster and shorter versions of songs allow for more songs to be listened to, or for the same song to be listened to a greater amount of times, thus bringing in more streaming revenue. In the same way that the capitalist class has taken initiatives to increase the pace of workplace productivity, promoting fast modes of consumption increases the productivity of one’s leisure time. This further perpetuates the myriad of ways in which free time replicates time spent on the job in terms of performing acts that put greater amounts of capital in the hands of industry behemoths. The sensory and information overload created through the proliferation of data through multiple streams at once is the most idealized form of media consumption as seen in the eyes of capital. Scrolling through an infinite feed of Instagram posts and advertisements while one listens to a branded vibe-oriented playlist filled with sub-2 min songs made up largely of acts signed to the three major record labels is a barrage of data and sensory input, but of what might be valuable to us, only basic affective surface levels make any impression.
But resisting the hegemonic pace of programming and communication, slowing things down may allow for an emphasis on the quality of media and gaining a deeper understanding of it. Slowing down is an intentional choice to resist the pressure to “stay up to date,” and instead embrace reflection and a sense of present stasis in opposition to an unrelenting forward acceleration.
The slowness of a screwtape encourages listeners to sit and stay within the now, and gives it the time to unfold and be analyzed closely. With the subjective matter and affective quality of “One Day,” Screw further emphasizes the lyricism of the MCs to convey that the present is not good, and that it is harming many within the community. It may be his attempt to further stimulate a dialogue between listeners, and not just discussion that moves on quickly without steps taken towards overcoming dissatisfaction with the status quo. Slowness might suggest a tuning out from the hollow barrage of data and vibes, by turning towards knowledge and understanding through the time-consuming and laborious efforts of collective study, discussion, and organization necessary to resist the status quo of capital and then struggle towards the overcoming of its mechanisms of power. And this time and effort could allow for a collective reclamation of time and effort from its stripping away by capital itself.
References
Allah, B. (November, 1995.) Givin It To Ya Slow. Rap Pages. Retrieved from: https://ifihavent.wordpress.com/2006/12/05/givin-it-to-ya-slow-dj-screw-interview-from-rappages-1995/
Grinspoon, L., & Bakalar, J. B. (1994). The War On Drugs — A Peace Proposal. The New England Journal of Medicine, 330(5), 357–360. https://doi-org.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/10.1056/NEJM199402033300513
Harbron, L. (2022). Why Is TikTok So Obsessed With Sped-Up Songs?. whynow. Retrieved from: https://whynow.co.uk/read/tiktok-sped-up-songs
Human Rights Watch. (2000). I. SUMMARY AND RECOMMENDATIONS”. Punishment and Prejudice: Racial Disparities in the War on Drugs. Retrieved from: https://www.hrw.org/legacy/reports/2000/usa/Rcedrg00.htm#P54_1086
Sinnreich, A., & Dois, S. Chopping Neoliberalism, Screwing the Industry: DJ Screw, the Dirty South, and the Temporal Politics of Resistance. Hip-Hop Theory: Time, Technology, and the 21st Century.