Barry Jenkins, director of Moonlight, continues to disrupt stereotypes of black masculinity. In the LGBTQ masterpiece Moonlight, he challenged biases surrounding blackness and queerness through a long list of experimental artistic choices. Like, creating a score filled with chopped and screwed classical music. And Barry is still exploring his love for the Houston-born sound. This week, he released an entire album of chopped and screwed Grizzly Bear remixes he created with DJ Candlestick.
Barry and Candlestick remixed tracks from Grizzly Bear’s 2009 album Veckatimest and this year’s Painted Ruins, naming their album Purple Veckatimest/ Painted ruins (CHOPNOTSLOP). The record has racked up over 9K listens in under 24 hours.
We don’t think that many people will be riding low in their drop top banging Barry’s new album. But the hybrid tracks do make for an interesting listen. And the off-kilter creation does have at least one super enthusiastic fan: Grizzly Bear’s Ed Droste.
“Can’t believe the director of my favorite movie last year “Moonlight” did a full on chopnotslop remix of both Veck and Painted Ruins!!!” Ed tweeted.
“yr music means the world to me,” Barry replied.
Since rappers like Mike Jones, Bun B, and Chamillionaire dominated airwaves in 2006, the chopped and screwed sound has been a steady mainstay of rap and urban-tinged pop music. In 2013, Beyoncé, a Houston native, rapped in a bass-heavy, stretched out chopped and screwed voice on “I Been On” and Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop” was heavily influenced by the sound.
In Moonlight, Jenkins used chopped and screwed to help accomplish his mission to “bring the arthouse to the hood.” “We had these violins, cellos, and bass violas that are being filtered through the perspective and sound of Miami,” he explained of the film’s composite score.
Will Barry find a way to include chopped and screwed music in his upcoming adaption of James Baldwin’s If Beale Street Can Talk? We can only hope so.