The Truth

Album review

Since DJ Screw's death in 2000, the leader of the south Texas-based "chopped and screwed" style is Michael "5000" Watts, a Houston-based remixer who has taken DJ Screw's idiosyncratic style and ran with it. A chopped and screwed version, in its simplest incarnation, is simply the original track slowed down to somewhere between 50 and 75 beats per minute, with occasional drop-outs and other bits of dub-style sonic trickery added. The results are legendarily supposed to mimic the effects of a cough syrup high, but just as often, it simply sounds like you're listening to the album on a Walkman with the batteries dying. The Truth (Chopped and Screwed) is simply Watts' version of Tru's underwhelming 2004 comeback album, The Truth, and while the original album's fundamental flaws -- most notably a lack of really inspired rhymes -- are largely obscured by the novelty of the new settings, Watts sounds like he's pretty much just going through the motions here. At its best, this style can produce a genuinely hallucinogenic musical experience, on a par with Lee "Scratch" Perry's most out-there work, but on The Truth (Chopped and Screwed), Watts' customization of the original tracks suggests that the remixer is starting to run out of ideas.
© Stewart Mason /TiVo