R.I.P. Screw
by Travis Scott (featuring Swae Lee)

Album: Astroworld (2018)
Charted: 26
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Songfacts®:

  • This song is a homage to DJ Screw, who is renowned in the hip-hop community for creating Houston's chopped and screwed DJ technique, which gave the city its defining, syrupy sound. The head of the Screwed Up Click (S.U.C.) collective, Screw's remixing method was to slow down the basic tracks of a cut ("Screwing"), before applying techniques such as skipping beats and record scratching to produce a "chopped-up" version of the original. The Texas DJ was highly prolific releasing over 200 mixtapes until his death of codeine overdose in 2000.
  • The song samples in the intro Screw saying "Southside" from his 1998 track of the same name and it concludes with a clip from a 1998 local newscast about the DJ's influence.
  • Swae Lee joins Travis Scott on the track. The pair previously collaborated on Scott's 2015 Rodeo song "Nightcrawler" and on "Close" from Rae Sremmurd's album, SR3MM.
  • The song was produced by FKi 1st, whose other placements include Post Malone's "White Iverson" and Iggy Azalea's "Work." This was the fourth beat that the Atlanta producer played to Travis Scott, and it proved to be the one they liked. After the Texan rapper Travis added in the samples they all headed to Hawaii where Astroworld executive producer Mike Dean had his own studio. There Dean added some finishing touches.

    "He added the dope bass Moog," FKi recalled to Genius. "It's something you can ride to. The vibration's perfect. And the final sound from the beat, some more analog gear from Mike."
  • FKi first worked with Travis on the song's initial instrumentation in early 2018 but didn't hear the later versions of the track. "We collaborated on the beat. It started off with the main loop of the song, and then [Travis] turned that s--t into a movie," he told DJ Booth. "With all the ups and downs, it's like a roller coaster. It stops for a second, then dips. Everything throws you for a loop."

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