This is a crosspost from my blog at mattshadetek.com
J. BIEBZ – U SMILE 800% SLOWER by Shamantis
Some guy on Soundcloud called Shamantis took Justin Bieber and slowed him down %800. And it sounds great! Apparently taking strange pubescent elvis-ian boy pop divas and slowing them down produces glacially beautiful digital sludge. Who needs drugs?
He was gracious enough to put up a tutorial on how he did it too, which is a nice gesture. Expect to hear a lot more of these.
Now as great as this may be it cannot compete, in my mind with the original slowed down codeinated epics of people like DJ Screw, Michael Watts and the whole Houston screwed and chopped movement. Stuff like this:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-5z_Iswjiqs[/youtube]
Learn more about DJ Screw in this short YouTube documentary:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0elQjRozdWk[/youtube]
the Bieber slowdown is the most visible of several similar ones.. most notably ‘9 Beet’, when a Scandinavian dude stretched Beethoven’s 9th Symphony out to 24 hours several years back. it was up for free download for awhile but he took it down.
its totally unrelated to screw stuff both sonically and conceptually though… Screwshit is so wild b/c context is audibly present just leaning demonic slow loud & banging (S.L.A.B.); these superstretches go viral b/c of the opposite: Bieber’s pubescent cheese gets transmuted into epic sensual, you cant guess at the source sound but knowing it the results gain memetastic heft.
also: Monterrey Mexicans were slowing down cumbia records and talking over them DECADES b4 Screw did similar!
thaT said – RIP DJ SCREW! and props to the free software used in the Bieber slowdown, which i blog about here: http://www.negrophonic.com/2010/birthday-love-time-stretch/
Don’t reduce the Biebz mix to the causes of its virality. Sure it’s not as wild as screwed music, but it still goes even if only for its suggestion that the “epic sensual” is already latent even in the dungheap of the worst pubescent cheese.
As for screwshit though the Nicki Minaj Swishahouse mix at the above link shows that Mike Watts still thinks that 2010 Houston has something to say about screwed music.