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Twista Collection

Eighteen tracks from a Chicago rapper who once held a world record for speed and spent the rest of his career proving that was the least interesting thing about him.

Twista Height Weight Body Statistics Girlfriend Biography ...

Twista

Carl Terrell Mitchell came out of Chicago's West Side in the early nineties as Tung Twista, and got his first real attention by being certified as the fastest rapper in the world — a novelty that could easily have ended him.

What saved the career was that the speed turned out to be musical rather than athletic. He does not simply rap quickly; he subdivides the beat into patterns that most rappers never attempt, and he does it while maintaining diction clear enough that the words land. That style — later called chopper — became a whole subgenre, and Chicago and the Midwest are still full of its descendants.

The other thing that saved him was taste. His best records are built on soul samples and real singing, and he has always been more interested in warmth than menace.

What to listen for

"Slow Jamz" with Kanye West and Jamie Foxx is the biggest record here and one of the funniest rap singles of its decade — a song that is entirely a list of quiet-storm records, built on Luther Vandross.

"Overnight Celebrity" is the other Kanye production and the one that shows the flow at its most controlled.

"Sunshine" with Anthony Hamilton is the best-sung thing here and the most emotionally direct.

"Wetter" was the late-career hit and is considerably better made than its reputation suggests.

"Girl Tonite" with Trey Songz and "So Lonely" with Mariah Carey are the R&B crossovers, and the Carey pairing is the one that surprises.

The Pharrell productions — "Lavish", "Give It Up" and "When I Get You Home" — are where the beats are strangest.

The Speedknot Mobstaz tracks are the Chicago crew records and the place to hear him without a famous guest.

Go deeper

Adrenaline Rush (1997) is the album that established him and remains the purest expression of the style; Kamikaze (2004) is the commercial peak.

For the chopper lineage he helped invent: Bone Thugs-N-Harmony from Cleveland, Tech N9ne from Kansas City, and the whole Chicago drill generation that followed, who inherited the city's rhythmic vocabulary even when they rejected everything else.

Listening note: the speed is musical rather than athletic. He subdivides the beat into patterns most rappers never attempt while keeping the diction clear enough for the words to land, and that combination is what turned a novelty into a whole regional style. Half the Midwest's rhythmic vocabulary starts here.

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