At midnight on December 9, 2022, R&B singer SZA dropped SOS, her long-awaited second album. Within twenty-four hours, fans around the world had uploaded their own self-created “slowed + reverb” versions of SOS to YouTube, and many gained thousands of views mere minutes after posting. What accounts for this? What is slowed and reverb, exactly? Where did it come from, and why is it so popular today?
“Slowed and reverb,” also stylized as “slowed + reverb,” is an audio-visual musical genre that involves the participatory production of slowed-down versions of popular songs, typically created by using digital audio production freeware. Slowed and reverb works are sonically indebted to chopped and screwed music and are often accompanied by iconography remixing pop-culture media. Since around 2017, fan-made slowed and reverb videos have proliferated online1 with remixed works principally found in user-created TikTok videos, as well as algorithmically curated playlists on...
University of California Press