Switched on Pop - Too Fast? We’re Curious: The sped-up remix phenomenon

Episode Date: January 10, 2023

Over the past few months, you may have heard your favorite song pop up on the Internet – just slightly faster. You’re not alone: the phenomenon of the “sped-up” remix has taken over social media, with everyone from Lady Gaga to Thundercat getting the tempo treatment. The popularity of the craze has led to millions of TikTok videos, Billboard number ones, and songs becoming relevant again, decades after release. Ever since the proliferation of these “remixes,” the big questions remain: where did these songs come from and why are they here?  On this episode of Switched on Pop, we explore this exact phenomenon, tracing its roots from Thomas Edison to Cam’ron to vaporwave to nightcore. Songs Discussed: “Dream On” – Aerosmith (sped up) “Escapism” – RAYE, 070 Shake (sped up) “Bad Habit” – Steve Lacy (sped up) “Miss You” – Oliver Tree (sped up) “Say It Right” – Nelly Furtado (sped up) “Bloody Mary” – Lady Gaga (sped up) “Heat Waves” – Glass Animals (slowed down) “Juicy” – Notorious B.I.G.  “Juicy” – DJ Screw “Jolene” – Dolly Parton (slowed down) “リサフランク420 / 現代のコンピュー |” – Macintosh Plus “In Da Club Before Eleven O’ Clock” – DJ Rashad “Monster [Nightcore]” – Meg & Dia, remixed by Barren Gates  “Concrete Angel” – Hannah Diamond “Witch Doctor” – David Seville “Oh Boy” – Cam’ron, Juelz Santana “Cool for the Summer” – Demi Lovato (sped up) “Them Changes” – Thundercat (sped up & Chopnotslop remix) “That’s All” – Genesis Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. the Eater app at Eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switched on Pop. I'm producer

Rianna Cruz. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So the other day when I was browsing TikTok, I heard this. I didn't know that I could enjoy Aerosmith any less than I already do. Right. So that is a sped-up version of Aerosmith's Dream On. Ear piercing. Okay. It feels so slow now. It feels so slow now. feels like glacial. Like, it's the slowest talk on Earth. Right. And the audacity of it being an aerosmith dub got me thinking about how TikTok and other video platforms have been founded on user-generated audios, but specifically over the past few months, something called sped-up audios. Audios? What are we talking about? I'm so confused about everything that's happening right now.

Okay, old man. Buckle up, Charlie. You can't scroll on TikTok for more than a a minute without hearing one of these. And like we just heard in the Dream On example, sped up audios are songs that are accelerated in tempo and sometimes pitched up ever so slightly to be faster and lighter. Take the song Escapeism by Ray and 070 Shake currently charting at 73 on Billboard. This is the original. A little context if you care to listen. I find myself in a shit position. The man that I love I think that's a pretty great song, but the popularity of the song is motivated by remixes. Notably, a sped-up version, which has 334,000 videos on TikTok, and even a super sped-up version that has even more videos. The sped-up version that is officially on Spotify has just a mere 30 seconds shaved off, but it sounds like this.

I like what it does the voice a little bit. I was thinking the same thing. Yeah, but let's take it up a notch and hear the escapism super sped up version. We're verging into drum and bass territory here. I like it a lot more than I expected I would, to be honest. Yeah, that's sort of the core sentiment. Everybody kind of likes them a little bit more, and we don't really know why. Everything is getting sped up in the past few months.

like Steve Lacey's bad habit. Wanting me. Free pubeson, Steve Lacey. Yeah, that had an interesting effect. It made it sound very childlike. Miss You by Oliver Trey's blowing up right now. So good. Nobody can play piano that quickly that on beat.

You know, it's so inhuman. It's crazy. Even old songs are being boosted by the sped-up treatment. Say It Right by Nelly Furtado. Sped Up version has nearly 25 million Spotify streams. Into it. Yeah, this one slaps.

And it's crazy because these remixes are putting songs back on radio. Bloody Mary by Lady Gaga was released in 2011, but it's back on the radio now, propelled by the sped-up remix soundtrack and clips of the show Wednesday. Guess how many videos that has on TikTok? I'm going to go with 2.3 million. What? That's outrageous. I'm going to say 800,000.

Charlie's Moore in the ballpark, 3.5 million videos. Prices right rules. I win. Woo. Damn. All right. So this has led to a sort of craze around the sped-up audio. There's full Spotify playlists and the market dedicated to sped-up remixes. The playlist sped-up songs on Spotify has almost a million likes, and a similar playlist called Teen Beats has almost 2 million. The tag sped up on TikTok, this stat blew me away.

15 billion views. What? More views than people? What is happening? It's nuts. This is really interesting. I mean, I think Charlie and I probably have the same question at this point, which we could maybe ask simultaneously. One, two, three, why?

That is happening. So, yeah, like you guys said, the big questions are, where did these come from? Why do they exist? And why do people listen to them? But before we talk about sped-up remixes, we got to talk about their predecessors. The concurrent trend of the slowed down remix. That's happening too? It's happening at the same time the sort of slowed and reverb movement, but also serves as a predecessor.

The playlist slowed and reverb has 64,000 likes, and slowed edits have millions of views on YouTube and millions of videos on TikTok. Can we chill out for a second? Absolutely. Here's an already chill song, Heat Waves by Glass Animals. And here it is slowed down. That is a deeply chill, slowed down. That is a deeply chill, slowed down, and reverbed version of glass animals. I mean, when I'm hearing that, I'm thinking this has some historical precedent, like the slowed down effect.

I think probably the first kind of anteced. that comes to mind is the chopped and screwed music of DJ Screw out of the Houston hip-hop scene in the early 2000s. He would take an iconic track like Juicy by the notorious B.I.G. I'm blowing up like you thought I would call a Crip, same number same hood. It's all good. And here's DJ Screw's chopped and screwed version. That's got two things going on, right? We've got the screwed thing, which means slowing it down,

but it's also chopped where we have some alterations to the original, where certain beats have been duplicated. So it's just a little bit different, but it's in the same vibe. Right, right. Just like this slowed and reverbed phenomenon that Rian is describing slows down the track but also adds these layers of reverber. to make the slowdown track kind of sound even more gooey and sludgy. Well, then it makes me think that one of the antecedents here has got to be dub music,

which would have taken original recording and sent it through tape machines and reverbs to put the song in an entirely new context. Oh, totally. I think the influence of Jamaican dub of the 60s and 70s is really important here. And I also think this phenomenon of like speeding up and slowing down music goes. back even further because it's one of the properties of the first kind of recording technology, the record player, that you can pretty easily take a recording and simply by changing how fast that record spins make it sound faster or slower. So it's a really easy manual process. And people were experimenting with this from the very birth of recording, like our friend Thomas Edison back in 1878 when he was demoing the very first phonograph machine.

And at this point, they weren't even using vinyl or shellac or even wax. Even microphones. They were using tinfoil. No joke. Tinfoil. Okay. Musicology. And so they would bring this tinfoil phonograph around to different cities and they would show up in your local.

music hall. And they would also have a cornet player play a melody into the phonograph. And then they would show how you could slow it down or speed it up. So imagine you have this cornet player playing something, I don't know, maybe like this. And then in playback, it'll get faster and slower and slower. And people would have their 1878 faces melted right off. So people have always been transfixed by the sort of slowed and sped up phenomenon. Totally. I mean, even 10 years ago, a recording of Dolly Parton's Jolene being played at 33 and a third speed rather than the intended 45 RPM speed went viral because people couldn't believe how uncanny it sounded. Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, Jolene, I'm begging of you, please don't take my man. Wow.

And you can see why that captured people's imagination, because simply by slowing this track down, it transforms it. The groove sounds completely different. You can appreciate how pitch perfect her vocals and her phrasing are. It's a really interesting and revealing kind of musical process. and something that we've been obsessed with for like over a century as musical listeners. I mean, I find it interesting that the Dolly part in video was posted to YouTube because I think YouTube culture has played such a big part in moving these mixes into the public consciousness. Thinking of a scene like Vaporwave, for example, which was a microgenre in the 2010s,

but it essentially like chopped as screwed lounge music. and blew up due to the popularity of songs like Macintosh Plus's Lisa Frank 420. I kind of feel like you're building an argument that says that there's a pendulum swing from the 2010's vapor wave slowed down everything on YouTube to now we're just speeding everything up in the 2020s. Oh, absolutely. I mean, as much as I want a vapor wave revival, I think the 2020s are ushering in the sped-up remixes era. and YouTube has always played a factor in popularizing different tempo remixes, but sped-up remixes are sort of a new phenomenon. It has roots in electronic offshoots thinking of like UK garage, Juke, footwork, and other DJ-based genres, which tend to have sped-up vocal samples as quarterstone of the tracks. Looking at Juke, DJ Rashad's in the club before 11 o'clock is a great example.

Oh, this makes sense because these genres all. have BPMs over 130 or so. And so if you want to find a sample to get it into your track, you're going to have to speed it up and it's going to pitch the thing up. Right. The normal BPM of footwork, I think, is like 160. So it makes a lot of sense that these are sort of in tandem. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

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The idea of the sped-up remix also has a precedent of selling all the way back to the 50s and 60s. You've probably heard this one before the novelty hit, Which Doctor. And if you're thinking that sounds like Alvin and the Chipmunks, it's because it's by the same guy. It was once the biggest song in America, the success created the Chipmunk characters, and the rest is history. I love that this is the oar text of all contemporary sped-up TikTok audios. It also gives us the name of a very popular genre from the Outs, Chipmunk's Soul. Yes, absolutely. And, Nate, if you're too antiquated and you don't know, it's the pitching up of R&B and soul samples and hip-hop, namely from producers like Just Blaze.

You could hear it on Cameron's classic, oh boy. That's fascinating, because Chipmunk's Soul has got slow BPM beat up sampled vocals. I like the contrast. The big sort of heyday of Chipmunk Soul was in the early 2000s, but a more modern example that more aligns with the. the current fad that we have now is the subgenre of Nightcore. The New York Times wrote a really great article on Nightcore in relation to sped up remixes, but the core of the idea is that there's anime visuals with dub steppy and Eurodance tendencies supplementing sped up already existing

songs. This is one of the big Nightcore songs that I used to hear in like 2018 on like musically and the early days of TikTok. It's monster. by Megan Dia, Nightcore Remixed by Baron Gates. So much like the Dolly Parton remix on YouTube was slowing down Dolly Parton, Nightcore is like turning the RPM on a record player up to 45. Nightcore. That whole subculture needs a like flashing lights and fast sound content warning before participating, I feel like.

Alvincore. Totally. It's like for very online younger people. And more recent underground pop scenes like the PC music subculture have harness this energy in more traditional pop songs. Thinking of a song like Hannah Diamond's cover of Concrete Angel by Gareth Emery and Christina Novelli. Heather Boppin into it. I mean, I love it personally. This is my jam.

So we have precedent in juke, footwork, electronic offshoots, nightcore, all of that. That leads us to today, where the popularity of sped-up remixes has led to artists directly commissioning producers for said remixes. An article from Business Insider called it splintering, where multiple unofficial remixes of the same song take off simultaneously. It used to be done with club remixes. But now, Johnny Cloherty, who is the CEO of the music marketing agency song fluencer, said that often producers would be commissioned on the low to remix tracks. upload them organically and make it seem like they're coming from nowhere, but it's a big industry plant type of release where they seem organic, but they're actually coming from the inside. The sped-up mixes are calling from inside the house. And when you say that they are sped-up remixes, let's be real.

I don't mean to doubt the fun that we have when we hear these things, but it's not really a remix because all you got to do is you drop this thing in your software, you stretch the audio, region one way and ba-dung remix it's different than DJ screw and dub and nightcore they're not adding anything right they're just changing the speed right which makes it so fascinating because it has led to artists releasing official remixes of their songs on official streaming platforms demilovato has released a sped-up remix of cool for the summer die for each other we're cool for the summer Thundercat has released both a Chop Not Slop remix of Them Changes as well as a sped-up remix. Chop Not Slop? Did I hear that right? It is essentially the modern Chopped and Screwed done by DJ Campbell Stick and O.G. Ron C.

Here's the original. Already Slow. Here's the Chop Not Slop remix. And here is the officially remixed sped-up version of Them Changes. Listening to a chopped and slopped and a sped-up version of this song back-to-back makes me think about what these two approaches do to a song. And something that I notice is when I'm listening to the slowed down chopped, not-slopped version, I have this kind of dissociative experience. I kind of like lose sense of time. My mind starts to drift and I find myself just kind of like,

slowly bobbing my head. Whereas when I listen to the sped up version, my whole body's like, like, tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, tut, tut. Like, I feel my heart, like, starting to erase a little bit. I guess what I'm saying is I have completely opposite psychosomatic responses. And I guess that's part of the appeal of a sped up remix. It impacts the body, right? Like a sped up remix is going to make you, for example, scroll faster, work faster, whatever.

Because it's like an auditory, Adderall kind of where it revs up. your body, you know, and a slowed down remix, specifically a slowed and reverb, mimics the feeling of relaxation, kind of winding your body down, you know, like lying down on your bed, staring at the ceiling type beat. Yeah, shift in heartbeat almost. So would you say that the effect that these songs have on our body is part of the reason that people are making these remixes? So, you know, including that, there's a couple of reasons as to the why, why people would do this, why these are popular. It kind of mimics the precedent of terrestrial radio where radio at times speeds up songs. I turned on the radio the other day and I heard that's all by Genesis,

but instead of the opening chords sounding like this, it sounded like this. It's subtle. It's subtle, but it's kind of like, hey, we need to get to our seven-minute commercial break a little bit faster and it could use those extra 15 seconds for a sponsor. Right, and if you do that multiple times in an hour, it gets in more commercials, you can play more songs, and in a little conspiracy theory brain, it makes them sound fun and more brighter. So in comparison on other stations, it's not as exciting. Right, because every radio station has its own compression algorithm. They're all treating the music just a little bit differently, so they sound the best. And I wonder if it even is related to the fact that it used to be very common for singles to have a radio cut, which would be.

shorter. Again, better for radio play. But in the age of radio no longer being dominant, maybe not as many people are producing those radio ready shorter songs. And so, yeah, just speed it up a little 5%. Yes, exactly. I did that in less than five minutes on garage band. I sped it up less than 10 bpm. And the song ended up being 30 second shorter. So that's exactly it, Charlie. It kind of mimics the sort of prioritizing of three-minute pop songs. in a traditional sense. And extending to TikTok, these songs,

these sped-up remixes, blow up on these platforms because they're ideally timeframes of 15 seconds to a minute. It exposes people to more of the songs and sort of feeds the rabid consumerism that's on the app, inviting users to participate.

Because like I said, I made that Genesis sped-up version in less than five minutes. You know, it's extremely easy to make these, whether it's on Audacity, Garage Band, or even something like logic. I feel like it's connected to the adage of don't Boris get to the chorus, but it's more like, don't Boris play the chorus even faster so you can hear the entire chorus before the 15 second video is over.

Yeah, that one doesn't have quite the same ring to it, Charlie, but I see where you're coming from. Sorry. And another element of why this sort of culture has moved from YouTube, like we previously talked about, to TikTok, is that TikTok has a sort of relaxed copyright right policy when it comes to remixes, where Nightcore and other remixes get struck down often off of YouTube, but on TikTok, user-generated content is designed to thrive, where remixes can blow up and tie into the original in this sort of splintering like previously described. Which plays into your whole conspiratorial notion that many of these sped-up and slow-down

remixes are industry plants because there already is a culture on TikTok of. of user-generatedness, of I did it on my own. And so in order to feel like you're playing to the algorithm and playing to the culture, you have to seem as organic as possible. And overall, it's making people more money. Steve Lacey is the king of TikTok lately. Bad Habit hit number one. We did an episode on it.

But in an interview with The Guardian, he said about the bad habit sped up remix. The label asked me if I wanted to put out a sped-up version of bad habit. I said, no, that sounds effing gross. But okay, sure, I'm number two and I want to be number one. So go ahead. Oh, and it worked. Wow. He did go number one.

So these are directly correlating to chart success. Yeah, and more streams. You know, if someone is going to do the user-generated version, you better go and claim it and do it first because you want all of those streams which add up to very small fractions of pennies. But more fractions of pennies if people are listening to you. the original, the slowdown, and the sped-up. But you know who's really losing in this? Who?

Remix DJs. Oh, absolutely. All the great producers that used to make the even more creative slowdown and sped-up versions. I mean, right, totally. People are going to lose in this situation. But I guess there are reasons for these remixes to stick around. I mean, as a fan of Nightcore, I can totally see the appeal, right? It's fast, it's high-paced.

In the case of Slowden Rever. it's calming. I'm not sure if there's extensive artistic merit, but it's something that seems mutually beneficial for the artist and the user. And in the age of TikTok and radical consumerism, I think that has to count for something. Well said. Thanks, Rihanna. At least I don't have to feel guilty about getting down to these sped-up audios. Switched-on Poff is produced by Rianna Cruz, edited by Art Chung. This week, we're engineered by Bill Lance. Illustrations by Iris Gottlieb, community management by Abby Barr, our executive producer, There's a Hanna Rosen and Ashokarwa or a member of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture.

You can find more episodes of Switched on Pop wherever you listen to podcasts and our website, www. www. www.switched on pop.com. Where we also now have some very pretty merch made by Iris. What are we talking? We talking. We got toots. Cheese streams? Oh, toots. Yeah, great.

Mostly tootes. But also, we got Tis. We got all the things you might want. Toots. You can find us on Twitter and Instagram at Switch on Pop. And what do you think about Sped Up remixes? Are you a fan? Are you not a fan? What's your favorite?

We'll be back again on Tuesday. Nate's going to be talking Siza. It's going to be a lot of fun. Until then, thanks for listening. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absurd of Carolina Herrera. A fragrance intense with character Gourmet and addicive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized and tonka-tosted.

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