RUSH: Here is Mitchell in Fresno, California. Hi, Mitchell. I’m glad you called, sir.
CALLER: Hey, Rush, how you doing?
RUSH: Very well, sir.
CALLER: In regards to Beyonce, you’d asked about the term chopped and screwed —
RUSH: Well, it does sound kind of funny out there, Mitchell, and I had the courage to admit I didn’t know what it was.
CALLER: You know, I used to actually work in a studio that my friends did some of that, and even I still don’t know quite what it is, but, you know, it’s just an audio effect. It’s sort of a sound effect they use across the song, and it created this whole genre of music that I guess that’s what she says she’s paying tribute to. But it really makes no sense because it has nothing to do with what you say in the song. That has nothing to do with one or the other. That’s just a bad excuse. But it fits right in line with the kind of world that her and her husband have — the way they carry themselves. He drew criticism over the years, been popular for using a nickname where basically he’s referring to himself as God and he’s gotten people in whole arenas to kind of wave their arms in the area like they’re worshiping him as a God. He draws a lot of criticism for that from people that, you know, even from that culture and serious stuff but, you know, when they’re running around with Obama all of a sudden like —
RUSH: Well — (crosstalk)
CALLER: — hypocrisy —
RUSH: Let me tell you about that. They don’t run around with Obama. They are God. Obama invites them to the inauguration and they show up. But they don’t go to the any of the parties; they’re too big for that.
CALLER: Yeah, I know you’re right, you’re right —
RUSH: She showed up and she sang the tune, or lip-synched it, and then they were off to other god stuff, while all the mortals went to the parties. They were too big to even go to the parties.
CALLER: Yeah, bow down, right? Yeah. So…
RUSH: Anyway, I looked up chop and screw. He’s right. It’s a mixing technique. Chopped and screwed — well, we got a break.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: As I was saying before I was rudely interrupted there by the obscene profit break, chopped and screwed is a technique, just as the caller said. It remixes hip-hop music, which I’m told developed in Houston. Well, the chop and screw developed in Houston, not hip-hop. The chop and screw technique remixes hip-hop music with the kind of music that was in Houston in the 1990s in the hip-hop scene. And it’s done by slowing down the tempo and skipping beats. It ends up sounding like a chopped up version of a tune, and so it’s called chop and screw. There’s even an app for it. You can get a chop and screw app. Chop and screw your iTunes music, you can get an app for it. Check the iTunes App Store, chop and screw your iTunes music, and you can do this mixing. It’s a specific technique.
Now, this is only a factor because it was referenced by somebody in the story about Beyonce’s new album, Bow Down. Well, the title song of the album, single, Bow Down, B-i-itches. And the “screwed” part, chopped and screwed, that comes from the name of the deejay who made it popular, “DJ Screw” Davis. He’s the guy who popularized the remix. Robert “DJ Screw” Davis. Kid you not.
So, anyway, folks, I want you to, again, it’s a request, not an admonishment. I want you to hang with me on this low-information outreach business. It’s working. Well, it’s like marketing. I’m not gonna give you the plan. We’re just gonna execute it, which we’re doing. Just hang in there, be tough.
Don in Charleston, West Virginia. Great to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Good afternoon, Rush. Continue with this low-information information about Beyonce. I remember years ago when she accepted a million dollars from the Khadafy family to sing for them before they left the country.
RUSH: Wait, wait, wait, wait just a second. Beyonce?
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: Was this during Destiny’s Child or after she’d married Mr. Carter?
CALLER: I don’t think she was with Destiny’s Child. She was big enough that Khadafy’s boys I think, not necessarily Moammar —
RUSH: She accepted a million dollars from the Khadafy family to sing for ’em? Oh, wait a minute, I remember that. Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I do remember that.
CALLER: No negative fallout from it at all.
RUSH: No, there wasn’t, of course not. None whatsoever. You are exactly, exactly right.
CALLER: May I make one more comment?
RUSH: Yeah. Fire away.
CALLER: Yes, sir. It has to do with the autocratic leaders that Obama was referring to. I remember back at the end of the Clinton administration he had an autocratic leader which was Arafat, and at that time he was trying to get a legacy for himself, Clinton was, so he had Arafat at his house more often than Hillary was there, and he got the Israeli government and Arafat together, and the Israeli government pretty much gave to him 99% of what he wanted, to get peace in the Middle East, supposedly, and Arafat turned it down.
RUSH: Yeah. It’s a hundred percent. The Israelis were arm twisted by Clinton to give Arafat everything he was asking for, and he turned it down and ran the other way and made additional, impossible demands. And the reason for that was, he didn’t want peace. He never wanted a solution or a settlement to any of this. That would have been the end of his power. It would be the end of his reason for existing.
CALLER: Sounds like Barry.
RUSH: Well, you know, it’s true of the civil rights movement in this country. There’s so many people that think that the activists in an issue are actually about solving it, and they’re not. They get rich off the acrimony. They get rich off the chaos. They get rich off of being part of the oppressed, if it’s ever solved. For example, if there is ever a day where the end of racism is proclaimed in this country, you’re gonna have a riot by civil rights leaders ticked off about the whole thing. Jobs will be lost. It’s never gonna be allowed to happen. Too many people are too famous, too prominent, and too rich. Khadafy gave Beyonce $2 million to sing for him, and she claimed that she gave the money to Haitian hurricane relief, if you recall. Anyway, I appreciate the call, Don, very much.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Here’s Rob in Dagsboro, Delaware. Great to have on you program, sir. Hi.
CALLER: Hey, how are you today?
RUSH: Good. Good, good, good.
CALLER: First thing, I’m 25, I’m a small business owner. I’ve been listening to you since I was about 19. I think I’m the only person my age around Delaware that listens to you. But, hey, what are you gonna do?
RUSH: Happy to have you.
CALLER: I don’t want to change the subject too much, but earlier you were talking about chopped and screwed. It’s actually a music style meant for people who drink a lot of Robitussin, they do the robo-tripping, or they drink Coricidin, because when you do that, supposedly you trip, or everything becomes slowed down and this and that. So this music was created by a few different artists who are known for rapping about, you know, sipping on syrup and Coricidin and —
RUSH: You mean codeine, right?
CALLER: Codeine, codeine.
RUSH: Codeine, yeah.
CALLER: Yeah, this past week, the rapper Lil’ Wayne had a seizure and they induced him into a coma, and, you know, it was because he drank too much codeine. And everyone’s praising him. They want him to get better, but he’s been doing this for years —
RUSH: So they came up with the mix to handle people who were slowing themselves down and chopped it all up —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: — so as to accommodate their heartbeat?
CALLER: No, you can listen to it. It’s like in the seventies —
RUSH: But it is regulating the heartbeat. I mean, look —
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: Rob, don’t go away. I’ve gotta take a break here. I’ve got time constraints, problems. But we’ll be back.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: I’m telling you, people were OD’ing on Robitussin. This DJ Screw guy died of a Robitussin overdose. Robo-tripping was a predecessor of chopped and screwed, and you can’t leave out purple drank when talking about this stuff, either, folks. That’s another form of OD’ing with codeine. Not cool, but they do it.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Look, folks, I want to explain where this all got started. I can imagine some of you out there today, “What the hell are you talking about, chopped and screwed and robo-tripping and purple drank?” We’ve gotta go back to yesterday to bring this up speed, to put this all in context, so that you understand what is going on here, because we’re not gonna accomplish anything if you’re in the dark and don’t get it, and I don’t ever want that to be the case.
Yesterday I began a discussion. Everybody is pulling their hair out. Like the CVS thing today. CVS drugstores have told their employees, “You’ve gotta show us your weight, your blood sugar, every health aspect of you, you’ve gotta go get checked, and your employment hinges on it. And if you smoke you gotta go to an addiction rehab thing. We’re not gonna have it.” It’s all part of Obamacare. Obamacare is demanding this. But the employees at CVS are not mad at Obama, they’re not mad at Obamacare. They’re mad at CVS. They think CVS is doing this. Not Obama. They’re not associating the government with it.
Now, you and I, we’re at our wits’ end. We’ve been waiting for something to wake people in the country up. I was talking about the futility of all this. The payroll tax holiday ended on January 1st, so people’s take-home pay in their first check of this year was smaller. Bernie Marcus, cofounder, Home Depot, said yesterday that most employees are not blaming the government. They are blaming their employers for not paying them as much. So in a discussion yesterday of a prediction I have made — you know, words, we’ve exhausted every word there is. We’ve tried every which way from Sunday to Monday to persuade people about what’s going on.
I said, “It’s gonna take an event that wakes people up.” And I said, “Not a hurricane, not a natural disaster. It’s gonna take something like Obama on an open mic openly dissing Justin Timberlake’s latest CD that just totally ticks people off and turns ’em against Obama.” And in describing that, I mentioned that something similar might be happening with Beyonce, because Beyonce has a new album out with a new single that is a 180 from the way Beyonce used to be before she hooked up with Jay-Z, Destiny’s Child. Back in those days she was urging women to not take it, be independent, don’t be part of some guy’s harem or any of that. You stand up for yourself.
Now she’s got a song called Bow Down, Bitches, Bow Down, B-i-itches, and it is basically, take it, like she’s done. She’s gone out, she found a guy, she got married, and it’s all worth it now. And there was a story in some UK newspaper in which she is universally ripped to shreds for this. She’s being criticized to no end for the 180 she’s done by a pop critic in a UK news story. I read that story and I comment on it as only I can, and I’m the only one that adds the word b-i-itches to the title, which is in there but nobody else was adding.
So today the New York radio station 1010 WINS is doing a story, the New York Daily News, all these people doing a story on what I am saying about Beyonce, and all I did was hold a mirror up to them. I hold a mirror up, they see themselves, and they blame me. That begot my playing sound bites today of the examples of me taking Beyonce to task for no longer being a feminist, and one of the sound bites was from channel 11 in Houston, and here it is.
RON TREVINO: Stars like R&B singer Keyshia Cole are calling Beyonce a hypocrite since she normally promotes girl power. Twitter is still going crazy with fans who refuse to bow down. And Rush Limbaugh even weighing in here claiming it’s bad for the president since Beyonce rubs elbows with the Obamas. People here in Houston say the rest of the world just doesn’t get it because the song pays homage to Houston’s “chop and screw” music style.
RUSH: What?
LILY JANG: Twitter. A lot of people think she’s overexposed. Let her just be.
RON TREVINO: Chop and screw. All right.
RUSH: Okay, there you heard it, the chop and screw music style in Houston. Well, quite naturally people said, “What in the name of Sam Hill is that?” So we began to explain what the chop and screw music style is in Houston. It’s a way of remixing music. And here are the roots of it. It goes back to the nineties, back in the days when people would go to clubs all overdosed and revved up on Robitussin. It’s called robo-tripping. If you’ve taken a lot of Robitussin, before they came out with the nonalcoholic stuff, it did do weird things to you if you took enough of it. And people would go to the clubs and trip on it. And so the DJ, a guy by the name of Robert “DJ Screw” is the guy who came up with the mix. He’s in Houston. He died of a Robitussin overdose, folks.
Have you ever heard of that? Robert “DJ Screw” Davis came up with the chop and screw. He mixed it based on people in clubs who were all hopped up. When you’re hopped up on Robitussin you’re actually slowed down. So it’s a way of mixing the music, skipping beats and so forth to replicate what’s happening in your body. You can go to the iTunes App Store, chop and screw your iTunes music. You can apply this mix to your iTunes music if you want. So we’ve had various experts in the discipline in this artistry call us today to further explain it. And we have Rob from Dagsboro, Delaware. He claimed he’d be listening since he was 19. He thinks he’s the only Delaware listener listening to this program. By the way, there’s two more that I know, Robert, so you’re one of three at least.
CALLER: I was saying in my age-group ’cause there’s no young guys —
RUSH: You might be surprised. But regardless, Robert here wants to explain, he is a chop and screw artist, and he wants to explain it in ways that you laypeople might understand it. So take a stab at this, my man.
CALLER: Okay. Just like in the late sixties, early seventies, when people would drop acid or smoke pot, they listened to Pink Floyd and Grateful Dead and Phish. That type of music was for those type of people, pretty much. And now the people that listen to the chop and screwed, not all of them, some people just like the music, but, you know, a lot of ’em —
RUSH: But it’s hip-hop music that you’re remixing, right? It’s hip-hop.
CALLER: Well, it’s anything. There’s been, you know, hip-hop, pop music, rock. I mean, a little bit of everything.
RUSH: So the chop and screw discipline could be applied to Pink Floyd if you wanted to?
CALLER: Oh, absolutely. Everything is being remixed already by DJ’s just trying to get recognition from it, you know?
RUSH: Okay, cool.
CALLER: But I think people are more intrigued by the lifestyle. They’ll listen to it, be like, yeah, it’s just slowed down 40 beats per minute or whatever. Maybe I should try the Robitussin. Maybe it will sound different. And, you know.
RUSH: The key is, why is it slow? Why try to replicate what people are experiencing while robo-tripping? You slow it down, right?
CALLER: Well, I guess it’s make more album sales because, you know, kids, it’s readily available for ’em to go to your CVS or your Walgreens, get DXM or Robitussin or, you know, even Benadryl, you know, and take as much as they can and turn on this music and listen to it. It’s an experience that the rappers glorified.
RUSH: Right. So the mix tried to replicate the way people felt while they were doing the Purple Drank or the robo-tripping or what have you?
CALLER: That would be it, yes.
RUSH: Exactly, there we go. And the guy who invented it overdosed on Robitussin.
CALLER: Yep.
RUSH: Robert “DJ Screw.” His last name was Davis. The only reason this came up is because the chopped and screw crowd in Houston is also dissing Beyonce for her Bow Down song. So, Rob, thank you for taking the time to call and explain this to the audience who is dying to know what this was all about.
CALLER: Thank you, Rush, for accepting my call.
RUSH: You bet. What is your line of work? Are you a mixer?
CALLER: No, I’m a musician. I own a pizza place. That’s my small business. But I’m a musician. I play eight or nine instruments. I’ve played in bands my whole life, but when you’re playing cover bands you have to learn all sorts of different music, and this is how you get into the stuff that I normally wouldn’t listen to.
RUSH: Do you like chop and screw?
CALLER: Not necessarily, no. Not a huge fan of it. I mean, if you like an original song and then they slow it, like I said, 40, 50 beats per minute —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and they repeat the same line 15 times —
RUSH: That’s what you’ve gotta do to people if their minds are fried. They can only keep up with one lyric line at a time. You can’t tell a story in songs like this with those people.
CALLER: Yeah. Well, I mean, pop music today, there’s no real storytelling the way it is, so… (sigh) I don’t know. When I listen to music today it upsets me, whether it’s been chopped or screwed or whether it’s been remixed or —
RUSH: Right.
CALLER: Anything.
RUSH: You wouldn’t play it at a wedding.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: No.
CALLER: No.
RUSH: That’s all people need to know.
CALLER: I’ll keep on listening.
RUSH: Rob, I appreciate the call. Hang in. I was a DJ, but I was a DJ on the radio. Well, now, we weren’t mixing anything. This was in the sixties. Disco hadn’t even shown up yet. We’re just pure old top 40. Mick Jagger before he got chopped and screwed.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: That’s my point, Snerdley. Snerdley just asked me if I thought Obama has any chopped and screwed on his iPod. See, that’s what I’m talking about. Obama’s gonna be somewhere, there’s gonna be an open mic, and he’s gonna diss chop and screw or he’s gonna diss Justin Timberlake’s greatest CD or some such thing and the kids are gonna turn on him. It will be that kind of event that’s gonna wake people up, if he comes out and disses chopped and screwed and says he wouldn’t dare have it on his iPad, the number of people he will lose. And, by the way, if as a result of this program, everybody now needs to show a photo ID to buy Robitussin, don’t blame that on me.
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