But Slater and the Rum World remixers are real people from Houston who really love the music of their city.
Watch enough and you might start to feel cynical about it all: the simplicity of the processes involved, the minimal variation from a clear formula, the way the videos can seem to reduce art forms with rich histories to empty aesthetic signifiers (syrupy vocals and sad anime characters). Watch one slowed + reverb video and YouTube will invariably recommend you another, and another, and another.
I’ll see YouTube comments like, ‘Nice to see chopped and screwed is living on through this art form.’ And a bunch of kids will start attacking that person like, ‘That’s not where this comes from.’ Seeing that hurts my heart.” Still, Slater says, “I don’t want people to forget the roots of where this really comes from.
Neither Rum World nor Slater makes a point of mentioning Screw or Houston on their channels, though such specificity might pierce the uncanny effect that has drawn so many people in. The songs that people want to hear, in other words, often owe a sonic debt to Screw before they’ve even been slowed, having absorbed it directly or through Screw-influenced artists. Rum World’s archives also contain plenty of tracks by Tyler, the Creator, whose frequently pitched-down vocals are plainly derived from Houston rap. Scott, a Houstonian, wears his chopped and screwed influence proudly, while Tame Impala’s Kevin Parker produced a Screw-y song about getting high and feeling like “slow motion” on Scott’s ASTROWORLD. What people want to hear, according to Rum World’s highest-trafficked videos, involves a lot of Tame Impala and Travis Scott, two artists whose visions of psychedelia are particularly well-suited to this treatment. I wanted to slow down songs that no one had ever done before.” “I went through a lot of stages: ’50s crooners, ’80s Japanese pop, classical music. “I wanted to be different from other channels,” Djellali says. His most popular video, with 2 million views, is a slowed + reverb version of Paul Anka’s squeaky-clean 1959 hit “Put Your Head on My Shoulder,” set to a clip of two anime characters gazing into the ocean at night. His videos hew to Slater’s template except in one key respect: instead of sticking to woozy contemporary rap and pop, he also slows down older tunes that are sometimes comically out of step with prevailing notions of Gen-Z cool. Djellali, a 19-year-old born in Algeria and raised in Spain, had never heard of chopped and screwed music before he started his own slowed + reverb channel, which he named Hound Dog, in reference to Elvis Presley and Big Mama Thornton. Slater may have first synthesized the slowed + reverb aesthetic from his own idiosyncratic tastes as one Screw-listening, anime-watching teenager in Houston, but as it spread through YouTube, it became increasingly decoupled from the particularities of its origin and open to new ones. Slater provided a blueprint that many others have followed: Start with a moody song that’s already popular on YouTube ratchet up the sense of druggy melancholy by slowing it down and adding a touch of digital echo pair it with similarly wistful animation watch the views pour in. Moore, known to his 24,000 subscribers as Slater, is regarded among aficionados as the originator of the “slowed + reverb” phenomenon, a simple DIY remixing style that has thrived on YouTube in recent years. By April of last year, it had disappeared, but not before leaving an entire internet subculture in its wake.
Within a week, the video had 20,000 views. The 20-year-old had digitally slowed the song down to about 85 percent of its original tempo, rendering the vocals thick and elongated, something akin to the sound of a 45-rpm single played at 33. In 2017, Jarylun Moore uploaded his second-ever video to YouTube: a homemade remix of Lil Uzi Vert’s “20 Minutes” accompanied by a looping animation of a pink skeleton.
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