LD: Why has there been this shift away from a more hardware-oriented futurism though?
KM: The shift really reflects a kind of democratization of the future. So, in the twentieth century the technological cutting-edge was things like space rockets, nuclear weapons and maybe industrial automation. They were all things that required huge amounts of power and money to get your hands on and so essentially it was government and big companies that, in a sense, owned the future.
That’s not really the case anymore. Now we’re all chatting to AI daily. You’ve got weird kids making celebrity deepfake porn who seem to have a better grasp of the technology than governments do. QAnon and ISIS and the hacktivist group Anonymous are all emblematic of the future spiraling out of control and out of the hands of the powerful.
These days, the most exciting, news-grabbing technological frontiers aren’t those that particularly fit into that old robotic, metal machine aesthetic. Music I guess is just reflecting that change in outlook.
LD: There you’re talking about the future manifesting through particular subcultures. I wonder if a major reason people don’t feel like there’s not much future music out at the moment is because they just haven’t heard it and, by extension, they aren’t having any meaningful personal or cultural experiences with this music. With jungle the sonic cutting-edge was being broadcast over pirate radio day in day out, with every DJ playing the biggest anthems in every set. With new music isn’t it more the case you have to seek it out and actively choose to click on it? It isn’t really the soundtrack to a culture or to the zeitgeist in a way older music was, is it?
KM: Oh, this music is very much alive and out there. When I’ve been talking about people neglecting this music, I’ve been referring to the (disproportionately white, middle-aged and middle-class) musical cognoscenti. In terms of normal punters, they’re totally on board with the music. Tommy Lee Sparta, Alkaline and Vybz Kartel are the most popular artists of their respective generations in Jamaica. Some of the rap I talk about has racked up hundreds of millions of views on YouTube. You can’t go fifteen minutes in south London without hearing some kid listening to drill. I’m not rifling through online obscurities in the dark corner of the Internet here or bringing to light some obscure regional scene. This is all music I’ve encountered out in the culture.
While I was writing Neon Screams I would regularly go for a walk and hear the exact tracks I’d just been writing about on that day or during that week playing out of people’s phones or cars as I went by. I felt particularly smug one day when I was on one of these walks and all at the same time I had a bloke to the right of me fixing his car with trap dancehall booming out of it, to my left I could hear someone listening to Brooklyn drill in their flat, while a car pulled up in front of me with Migos blaring out of it. It was as if my whole book had materialized in front of me in a single moment. So this music does properly exist in the world, it is the soundtrack to our culture.
But you are right insofar as our ideas about subcultures aren’t what they used to be in the twentieth century. Before there would have been hippies and punks and b-boys and ravers… I’m not sure how much that kind of thing has existed in my lifetime.
I suppose drill is associated with the whole “roadman” thing, which could be viewed as a subculture. It has its own uniform and slang and all that. There may well be a kind of mumble rap-adjacent drug culture in Atlanta that outsiders don’t know much about where people have colourful dreadlocks and that sort of thing.
One sort of subculture-type element surrounding new music is a kind cyber-criminality which is manifest in drill’s online presence and also in the international phone scamming which gets glorified in trap dancehall quite a bit. I tend to use “Internet culture” as a pejorative really, it’s not my cup of tea, but I think this stuff where digital technology is bleeding out into or interfacing with real world cultures is very cool and futuristic.
LD: Moving back to the music, your central idea is that there are all sorts of things that can be done with Auto-Tune, which goes against the caricature of Auto-Tune being very homogenising.
KM: It’s interesting, isn’t it? There’s that typical “kids these days” response to new music you get with older people where they’ll say “it all sounds the same”. I’m sure my grandparents would have said that about rock in the 70s and maybe your parents might have said the same about rap when you were growing up in the 90s. It’s this attitudinal meme that reincarnates through different conceptual avatars every decade or two. Auto-Tune scepticism seems to be its latest incarnation.
Auto-Tune doesn’t homogonise voices at all, whereas I think things like the vocoder and talk box did. The sound Tommy Lee Sparta gets on “Target” is completely different from the one Future gets on “I Got the Keys”.
In the 90s you had people using Brian Eno’s idea of “scenius” (these kinds of collectivised breakthroughs achieved via groupthink rather than through individual genius) to describe how advances were made in dance music. Whereas Auto-Tune makes the individual the important thing. New sounds now really come from these distinct quirks that people have in their voice and Auto-Tune encourages artists to home in on their unique qualities to get even better and weirder sounds. So the technology is sort of incentivising individual expression.
You can basically compare Auto-Tune to the electric guitar. Wes Montgomery, Jimi Hendrix, Johnny Marr and My Bloody Valentine all used the electric guitar, but they’re all getting these completely different sounds out of it. That’s the same with artists using Auto-Tune.
I think the Jimi Hendrix comparison fits something like trap dancehall really well. Hendrix would do a guitar solo and you’d have all this distortion morph into feedback and then that would be put through a wah wah pedal and then he’d suddenly start throttling the whammy bar. There was all sorts of stuff he was doing to evolve the sound throughout a song or a set. That’s similar to what someone like Rebel Sixx did for example.
LD: Auto-Tune’s the new synth really. It’s got that childish thing of looking at yourself in the carnival mirror, but it’s doing that but with the voice.
KM: Yeah, that’s exactly what it is!
LD: So what makes these experiments constitute a whole new macrogenre though? Couldn’t you just say they’re new developments in pre-established styles?
KM: This is an important point. Rock was born in the 50s or 60s, depending on which way you cut it, and that paved the way for decades more new music. The same could be said for hip-hop and dancehall in the late 70s, house and techno in the 80s, all that UK dance music from the 90s that’s sometimes called “the hardcore continuum”. So, when I say vocal psychedelia’s a new macrogenre, I do genuinely mean it’s as big of a breakthrough as those other forms of music.
If we’re allowed to say that, for all their similarities, Phuture’s “Acid Trax” belongs to a whole different macrogenre than Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love”, then it’s only fair that we class vocal psychedelia as its own thing. Tracks being made by Tommy Lee Sparta or Big Voice or whoever are at a bare minimum as different from older dancehall like Elephant Man as “Acid Trax” was to “I Feel Love”. The same goes for the difference between something like Playboi Carti’s “Blue Cash” and Waka Flocka Flame or whoever a decade earlier. You can’t honestly say those things are the same genre of music.
I’ve played some of this vocally psychedelic stuff to people who have a fairly good grasp of 90s rap or dancehall and yet when they hear this new music for the first time they have a tough time even saying what continent it’s from, let alone what genre it is. It sounds Indian to them or something. That, I think, gives a good indication of just how far the music’s moved on from what it used to be.
A good comparison I guess would be between something like Eric B. & Rakim’s “I Ain’t No Joke” and “The Boss” by James Brown. There are similarities there — the horns, the spoken word element of them both — but the whole axis of how the music operates and the kinds of emotions
and moods each track evokes are, at the end of the day, too different from one another to lump them in together. I’d say the same degree of difference applies between vocal psychedelia on the one hand and the rap and dancehall of the past on the other.
LD: So are all the innovations really just happening in the voice then? There’s nothing new happening in the instrumentals?
KM: No, I wouldn’t say that. There have definitely been interesting things happening in the instrumentals. So drill for example has all these new rhythms in it. I’m pretty sure all those mad rolling hi hats in trap weren’t really much of thing before the 2010s or weren’t as rabid as they are now. All those weird digitised pastoral sound-scapes you get now aren’t really like anything that came before it, at least in street music.
So there is lots of interesting new stuff in the instrumentals, it’s just that those things aren’t the focal point of innovation now. It’s basically the inverse dynamic of what you used to get in UK dance music for example. The MCing did evolve as jungle turned into garage and then grime and those changes were important and did have a big impact on the listening experience. But it was the instrumental shifts that were the most significant and futuristic sounding. It’s that same ratio between instrumental innovation and vocal pioneering, just the opposite way round now.
LD: It’s strange in a way that you place so much emphasis on these digital voices and yet, other than dancehall in the late 2000s, you don’t seem particularly interested in the first wave of Auto-Tuned music.
KM: Yeah, that is strange. I don’t know really. I did a couple of mixes at one point. One was chronological mix of dancehall from 1981 to now, where every year was represented by a track or two. The point in the mix where the Auto-Tuned stuff came in was incredible. Proper exciting. You could viscerally feel the music rupturing and something new erupting out of it. Then I did a similar thing for the history of hip-hop and the first Auto-Tuned stuff on that just sounded a bit meh. It really took for the late 2010s wave of vocal psychadelia to kick in for it to feel like something proper astonishing was happening.
LD: But it’s not only that early Auto-Tuned rap, you don’t pay too much attention to Afrobeats either.
KM: Well I like some of the old Terry G stuff, I thought that was prophetic in terms of eccentric Auto-Tuned voices. There’s also this Iyanya track “Ur Waist” which is one of my favourites from the early 2010s. It sort of predates the thing of creating these kinds of voicescapes using Auto-Tune, which became a defining feature of music at the turn of the 2020s. The call and response stuff in Afrobeats could be a bit like proto-frag rap at times too.
But to be honest most Afrobeats works as pop rather than as future music. So something like Maleek Berry’s “4 Me” is really, really lush and gorgeous, but I can’t say that it’s super out-there sonically. It wouldn’t surprise me if Justin Beiber or someone made something similar, whereas I couldn’t even begin to imagine a pop star making music like Tommy Lee Sparta or Rebel Sixx.
I suppose Afrobeats basically became a tamer, less sonically adventurous alternative to dancehall in the 2010s. There was loads of stuff with all these fuzzy, trancey synths earlier in the decade and then later on the music fit very easily into that kind of post-Kygo tropical pop sound (Ed Sheeran’s “Shape of You”, Drake’s “One Dance”). A lot of Afrobeats pretty much sounds like a vaguely “exotic” twist on EDM and that sort of thing.
That all being said, I don’t want to understate Afrobeats’ social impact. Here in the UK there’s this (mostly friendly) rivalry between Jamaican kids and African kids, so Afrobeats did become this huge social signifier for a lot of people in London. It was really the soundtrack to an African-British identity asserting and celebrating itself.
It’s interesting though, African music — not so much Afrobeats, but South African genres like gqom and these Afrodiasporic styles like batida and taraxxo — would have been a huge part of a dance music fan’s story of the 2010s I imagine.
LD: How come?
KM: Well, I have a bit of theory about it. Basically, Jamaican music has always been a part of British dance music’s mythology. I’m sure there are a few people out there who basically see British dance music as an outpost of Jamaican soundsystem culture. Criminal Minds had this hardcore track in the early 90s called “Baptised By Dub”, which I think’s a good example of this. So if you go through the history of British dance music you have Ital Rockers and “Roots N’ Future” and ragga jungle and Buju Banton samples, selectahs, rewinds, “yardie flows”, “meditate on bass weight”… So it was all this Jamaican stuff permeating the sound of the music and the catch-phrases and the kind of ritualistic lexicon of it all for decades.
But by the 2000s that kind of thing’s already becoming this weird, creepy kind of culture hoarding. So dubstep for example was a genre named after a thirty-year-old style of Jamaican music. It was harking back to a Jamaica that didn’t exist anymore, if it ever truly did. The canon of Jamaican artists that arose out of this sensibility was, by this point, full of aging and dead icons like Capleton and King Tubby.
Then the Vybz Kartel-era comes along with all these kinds of sonic neologisms, which I think a lot of the UK’s Jamaican music enthusiasts found a bit offensive. I guess Auto-Tune was too transformational for them, so you begin to get this exodus of hipsters away from Jamaican music who go and try and replace it with African stuff. After Kartel, all of a sudden there’s webzine and blog interest in South African music and trendy DJs putting it in their sets. I think things like gqom became popular because they pretended that Auto-Tune didn’t exist. There was a hope for some people that if you could make something a bit dubsteppy with some African drums in it, all of a sudden a new frontier would open up in music. Obviously in my reading of things Kartel was the beginning of something amazing, rather than the end.
LD: There’s an interesting dichotomy in the way you talk about Vybz Kartel’s early Auto-Tuned music. You say that the technology’s not dehumanising him but making him “hyper-human”. How does that work?
KM: There’s always been this dynamic in music of machines helping artists to express the way people feel but can’t really convey within the limitations of the human body. So rave’s pitched-up diva squeals or guitar feedback can scream in way that we might want to, but are just physically incapable of doing. Vybz Kartel’s doing the same thing, using technology to tap into whole stratospheres of emotion, but doing so in a far more overtly posthuman way.
LD: In Neon Screams there are a lot of examples of you writing about music in a way that’s like science fiction or mythology or conspiracy theory. Talking about Vybz Kartel as being posthuman is an example of that for example. Why do you write in those terms?
KM: Well first of all because it’s fun. To be honest I haven’t read much music journalism at all really (so I could easily be talking out of my ass here), but of the bits I have read, so much of it is staggeringly inane. I see stuff where people review a mixtape in terms of, I don’t know, major label interest or something, but very little writing where somebody goes “this track’s so aggressive it makes me want to kick a kitten in the balls” or “the drums sound like they’re being played with lightsaber drumsticks”. Not even just a simple “this song makes me think of the colour green”. So much of it is completely uninspired and completely uninspiring.
There’s that quote, “writing about music is like dancing to architecture”. I actually think that’s true, especially now we’ve got YouTube where you can just go listen to a track to see if you like it or not. So, if you are going to dance to architecture, the dance better be fucking good on its own terms. Likewise, any bit of writing about music should be fun in and of itself and using lots of silly theories and flights of fantasy makes for a better read and more importantly for a better listen too; who wouldn’t want to listen to dancehall that sounds like Terrence McKenna machine elf music?
Conspiracy theories are particularly useful because they’re almost like these glitches in human
ity’s pattern-recognition software. There’s one conspiracy I once saw where they managed to conflate the twin towers, the two pillars of the kabbalistic Tree of Life and DNA’s double helix so that it incorporated everything into one neat package — geopolitics, mythology, science. That type of thing is a great little mental mechanic to use with music, it means you can extrapolate a whole sonic universe out of a single track or even just a fleeting sound.
But these conspiracies and mythologies and all that aren’t just rhetorical conceits on my part, they do actually articulate how I feel when listening to the music. When Vybz Kartel screams “skin too tough fi bleed” with his robot voice, I do literally picture some robot bloke with bullets bouncing off his chest.
LD: After Kartel’s first Auto-Tuned music, you seem to think there was a bit of a lull for future music for a few years. What happened?
KM: Yeah, those were the sugar rush years. It seemed like the entire culture in the early-2010s succumbed to a kind of diabetic maximalism. Everything got very cloying and fizzy. Candy Crush, Marvel films, garish anime becoming the lingua franca of the Internet — that sensibility was everywhere and you got it in music too with things like Skrillex and Rustie.
LD: araabMUZIK as well.
KM: Yeah, exactly. I mean, not so much the cloying part of it, but the maximalism of Lex Luger and Pinero Beats and Daseca were all a part of that trend in a way. Things like Call of Duty too. It wasn’t actually that long after the iPhone was first released and things like Twitter, I guess it was just humanity having this collective stimulation craving as we adjusted to having these hyper-arousal machines constantly in our lives.
I’d say 2016 is really the year music sprang back to life. You had a handful of interesting things by Alkaline and Future and Young Thug before that, but I think 2016 was the year future music had CPR and came back to us. That’s the year Tommy Lee Sparta discovered a whole new way of Auto-Tune with tracks like “Darkness Rise”, “Not a Badness” and “Felony”. Migos released “Cocoon” that year, so that’s the point frag rap starts getting good. Travis Scott and Young Thug’s “Yeah Yeah” got leaked and Future did his feature on DJ Khaled’s “I Got the Keys”, both of which start to usher in the era of mumble rap being genuinely innovative rather than just a bit novel. Drill got going in 2016 as well. All of which rather tidily coincides with these zeitgeist-defining events like the election of Trump and the Brexit referendum, so that was the period the decade really got its own identity in all sorts of ways.
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