Moonlight director Barry Jenkins remixed the living hell out of Wilco's Yankee Hotel Foxtrot
Aux Features barry jenkins
For better or worse, 2020 has been one weird-ass year. Pandemics, the continued unravelling of our societal fabric, Hillbilly Elegy—it’s been a lot to handle. Thankfully, our cycle around the sun has given us a few silver linings towards the end, such as last week’s election results and now…well, look, there’s really no way to preface this but to just come right out and say it: a “chopped and screwed” remix of Wilco’s seminal 2002 release, Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, gifted to the world by Houston’s Chopstars and Barry Jenkins, the acclaimed director of Moonlight, If Beale Street Could Talk, and the upcoming prequel to last year’s photorealistic CGI remake of The Lion King.
Yankee Purple Foxtrot is a Houston-centric reworking of the classic Americana album from Jeff Tweedy and company, and certainly lives up to its Lean-inspired name (the “Jesus, Etc.” remix is particularly badass). This isn’t the first chopped and screwed remix of from Jenkins, either. As Pitchfork notes, the director has also slowed down both Veckatimest and Painted Ruins from Grizzly Bear.
It’s long past time for us all to begin healing as a nation. Yankee Purple Foxtrot appears to be just the soundtrack we need to come together.
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11 Comments
It’s terrible
What characterizes a “Houston-centric” sound? (Genuinely asking as someone who knows a lot more about Wilco than current musical styles.) I listened to some of this and the main change, to me, is that it seems to be tuned down and slowed down a bit, which doesn’t really add a lot, in my opinion. It’s not like YHF was a super up-tempo listen to begin with.
That’s pretty much it. Houston’s own DJ Screw invented chopped and screwed music, which, per Wikipedia, “is a technique of remixing hip hop music which developed in the Houston hip hop scene in the early 1990s by DJ Screw. The screwed technique is accomplished by slowing the tempo down to 60 and 70 quarter-note beats per minute and applying techniques such as skipping beats, record scratching, stop-time, and affecting portions of the original composition to create a ‘chopped-up’ version of the song.” Does that justify the existence of this album? It does not.
Chopped and screwed is def one of the cases where the idea of it sounds worse than it does in practice; but on the other end of the coin, bad examples of the genre just sound uninspired/lazy. If you’ve never listened to any DJ Screw originals, I’d recommend checking some out just to see the difference between the OG and the progeny. When it gets down to it chop and screwed really is an extreme music style, almost like psychedelia in the way it layers dense loops over itself slowly and warps the familiar (sometimes introducing elements of other songs slowly in, transforming the piece like a Theseus ship) the explicit focus on mind-altering substance consumption, and live performance/community. You’ll notice that most of the tracks the YHF tape tap out in the single-digit minutes (and were already at low BPMs), whereas Screw regularly takes shorter tracks, and uses them as springboards for 10min+ hypnotic epics. I’d also say working analog and having live turntablism really helps make stuff pop.
Here’s a couple links to ones I dig in case yr interested!ps: god i hate the grays
Thanks for the explanation! Yeah, your examples are much more interesting than the Wilco remix. I’ll check out more of DJ Screw’s stuff. It doesn’t seem like the YHF material really has the potential to achieve that hypnotic quality that makes this genre work. (And also, I’m not sure music that’s so closely associated with drug use is a great tribute to a band whose leader famously struggled with and triumphed over opioid addiction.)
No problem! And yeah, re: Wilco and Opiods, that’s a somewhat dissonant situation. But also, I have complicated feelings about chopped and screwed as a subgenre leaning (pun intended) so hard into the purp thing (ie: Yankee Purple Foxtrot), given the nature of Screw’s passing. But then again, I feel similarly if I think too hard about Roky Erickson or Syd Barret or any of those early psych rock casualties whose substance experimentation was directly related to the form of the art and the birth of a genre. I guess in the cases of these genres and releases, I always assume that the allusions are coming from a good place/as a tribute (unless given reason to think otherwise), and one of experience with said substances, hopefully made safer and more informed by the trailblazing of those who initially experimented with the drugs. But tl;dr, as much as I like all the component elements of this specific project, as a whole it just seems misguided on a lot of levels.
As a lifelong Houstonian, thank you for sharing good examples of this! I’d also commend OG Ron C’s remixes of Thundercat’s “Drunk” (titled, beautifully, “Drank”) and Frank Ocean’s “Channel Orange” (“Channel Purple,” of course). I just cannot run away from this Wilco effort fast enough.
Haha no problem, and agreed re: Wilco here. But also ty for those recs!! Love me some Thundercat and that sounds like a great match.
P.S., June 27 is still my favorite Gray Tape and is a minor holiday in the OBK household.
While doing a cursory scan through this project, I agree with you that I’m not sure the source material is the most natural fit for twisting into this genre, which does usually take more upbeat songs and are often used as hip hop instrumentals. But it’s referred to as Houston-centric and specifically “Chopped and Screwed” because it was pioneered by Houston DJ Screw who first started the extreme slowing down, messing with beats/tempos etc to make trippy/wavy beats in the 90s, whose influence has gone on to be felt in a lot of mainstream hip hop production since his death of a codine OD back in 2000. Also the reason purp is so associated with it (not sure how I feel about that haha). But it’s fun music for late nights if any of this has piqued yr interest!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DJ_Screw
I would have never thought it possible to make Wilco even more boring