Director Barry Jenkins has a lot on his plate.
The Academy Award-winning film director made waves in 2016 with Moonlight, and followed that up in 2018 with the success of If Beale Street Could Talk. Currently, Jenkins is working on a prequel to Jon Favreau‘s reboot of The Lion King for Disney. Somewhere between all of that, Jenkins applied the chopped and screwed method to Wilco‘s acclaimed 2002 studio album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot.
Pioneered by DJ Screw in the 1990s Houston hip-hop scene, the chopped and screwed style is defined by taking a song and slowing it down to roughly 60 or 70 beats per minute. Along the way, DJs are able to add their own flourishes to someone else’s music by skipping beats, record scratching, and more. Unsurprisingly, Jenkins was able to make the classic Wilco album his own and by sharing Yankee Purple Foxtrot on Monday.
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While Wilco’s music was never really at the breakneck pace that facilitates a chopped and screwed remix, the results are unexpectedly rewarding. For example, the opening track “I Am Trying To Break Your Heart” gets stretched out to a nine-minute slow-crawl funk. Additionally, all of the superfluous noises and grating external effects that abound on Yankee Hotel Foxtrot blend right into the remixes evident on Yankee Purple Foxtrot.
This is far from Jenkins’ first brush with the genre. In the soundtrack to his breakthrough film Moonlight, he included a chopped and screwed take on the Jidenna track “Classic Man”. He has also gone one to release remixes of the scores to Moonlight and If Beale Street Could Talk using the same techniques. In 2017, he worked with Houston’s DJ Candlestick on a pair of Grizzly Bear albums. On this latest undertaking, Jenkins once again worked with DJ Candlestick in addition to fellow Houston native OG Ron C.
Listen to the oddly hypnotizing chopped and screwed version of Yankee Hotel Foxtrot from director Barry Jenkins below.
Barry Jenkins – Yankee Purple Foxtrot
NOBODY asked for this BUT… in a world where Jeff Tweedy and the boyz was from Houston, TX… @candlestickem, @OGRONC and me present YANKEE PURPLE FOXTROT
Some Americana for the timeline given recent events. The #YeehawAgenda is alive and well
https://t.co/Ez5YWkJcu3
— Barry Jenkins (@BarryJenkins) November 9, 2020
[H/T Stereogum]
The post ‘Moonlight’ Director Barry Jenkins Shares Chopped And Screwed ‘Yankee Hotel Foxtrot’ [Listen] appeared first on L4LM.
