Screwed

Let me introduce DJ Screw. He made approx. 230 mixtapes with local southern states hiphop and just made a very simple remix of every track: He slowed down the tempo drastically (sometimes half beat) making the beats extremely laid back and the flow of the rap into a dazed kind of story-telling.

The story goes, that “screw music”, or hiphop that got “chopped and screwed” as they called it, became more wide spread in the early 90’s as the increase in use of “purple drank”, a mix of cough syrup containing codeine and promethazine).

Some have called DJ Screw and his Screwed Up Click (a scene of other remixers that chopped and screwed hip hop) a “lazy avantgarde”, because they made this completely genious music without really much effort: they just slowed the tracks down, so the beat would fit the hot texas atmosphere, the opiate drugs they were taking and the mood of sitting in a lazy car queue in mass-motored Houston.

That’s a pretty good example of how drugs, a hot humid climate, mass-motoring and laziness can come to matter together.

Granted, not so good for a cold scandinavian fall, but pretty good for a sunday with hangovers.

I went through some 3 hours or so of mixtapes yesterday, and here’s a pick of DJ Screw. I was to lazy to find and compile stuff in a zip, so here it is on grooveshark:
Screwed playlist

The Revolution Will Not Be Televised (Nothing Will Be Televised Remix)

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People always remix the sounds of music. So now, allow me a discursive remix:

Television. Is it dead. I think not. Television matters: as the triumphant suffering of self-therapeutic Oprah talk shows, individualizing all the ills of society saying “you can change yourself! And we know you can!”. As the big Other of news distortion. As a master, a god, telling you what you will know. As the mediated experiences of life lived through unreality shows. Television still rules the nation my daft brothers. Television is opium for the cold mass individuals my marxist comrades. Television, whatever its medium, will be destroyed though, and there will be no new mutations of its technology afterwards. There will be no digital television, or live-streamed internet television. The revolution will not be televised or quasi-televised. Nothing will be televised, because nobody will want to watch it. They will live it.

Gil Scott-Heron – The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

Some smart fellow made a fitting video of clips to go with it (the sound track seems to be a more stripped down live-version of the song):