LD: But hasn’t the escapist sensibility of that “sugar rush” era lingered in the music? Just look at the kinds of drugs rappers are taking, it’s all Xanex and codeine. Where’s that “fuck the system” edge in the music? With weed in the 90s it had this “natural mystic” countercultural component to it. Is that really alive in the music anymore?
KM: There are several ways I could approach this, I guess. So, I could agree with you and say by taking those drugs these artists are siding with big pharma. I could compare all the codeine and all that to soma in Brave New World and say they’re the literal opiates of the people.
Or another cynical answer to your question is to basically frame all this music as the culmination of a decades-long phenomenon which has seen the counter-culture become steadily more nihilistic and narcissistic. So, in the 60s soul was part of the civil rights movement, ska was the soundtrack to Jamaican independence and rock was a component of the anti-war movement. It was music that engaged with the world in a positive way. Even as early as the 70s, music had lost the belief it could change the world; that’s when you’re getting cosmic jazz and roots reggae which are more focused on finding spiritual fulfilment within the status quo or within Babylon than they are about overthrowing it. Punk to me seems to me to have largely been this very superficial and inconsequential form of rebellion about wearing eccentric clothes and saying rude words rather than the betterment of the world. Then of course the 80s and 90s give you gangsta rap and rave; genres that are pretty much amoral (when not outright immoral), but they at least still have a vague “fuck the system” stance and there’s some sense of community in them.
From that perspective you could say that in the twenty-first century you either have the outright cruelty of UK drill or the numbed-out, narcotic nothingness of a lot of modern rap. These things are countercultural in a literal sense — as a society we don’t celebrate murder or drug addiction — but it’s all a bit grim.
So those are my two pessimistic takes on the state of things, but to be honest that’s not really what I’m getting when I listen to the music. Any notion of cool is sort of predicated on “sticking it to The Man”. I don’t really think something can be cool without in some way resisting something.
Vybz Kartel used to make some political music, “Something Ago Happen” feels like a kind of cyberpunk protest music with all of its Auto-Tuned denunciations of Jamaican living standards and corruption and all that. Guy Fawkes masks (those V for Vendetta ones used by Anonymous and the Arab Spring protestors) crop up with Alkaline a lot and in UK drill videos. They’re a bit like the new anarchy symbols or new black flags in the sense that they’re this general “fuck the system” symbol that’s spread through youth culture. All the Middle Eastern references in dancehall and drill like Gaza and Bin Laden and all that operate a bit like the Afrocentrist and anticolonial symbolism you got with music in the 70s — things like Miles Davis’ “Calypso Frelimo” which was named after an anti-colonial group in Mozambique.
Then even that codeine rap you were talking about actually makes me think of Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles which is about a group of kind of psychedelic terrorists. Mumble rap to me is this Dadaist insurgency. To be pretentious about it, when capitalist realism is the order of the day, madness and unreality becomes your only weapons against that. So all the drug use there plays into that idea in my mind.
LD: There is something very futuristic about people hacking their brains with anti-anxiety drugs and anti-depressants, but when I listen to post-drill Chief Keef (which I guess is a bit mumble rap-adjacent) it makes me think of the kabbalistic Tree of Death. It’s this dark, murky inversion of psychedelia. He’s just isolated himself in LA in this hermetic lagoon of drugs.
KM: Oh, I definitely agree with that. But of course that kind of thing can be incredibly aesthetically compelling even if it’s psychologically quite sinister.
LD: That’s very different from what I get from Migos, which sounds too clean and shiny.
KM: There’s some Migos stuff I really, really love, but I can see what you mean with that. I think Huncho Jack (which features Migos’ Quavo) is an improvement on their sound, that leaves behind any showbiz gloss to become something very shiny in a kind of religious, Jacob’s ladder-type way.
But you are right that their sound taps into something different from mumble rap or Chief Keef. Scientologists talk about ideas as “tech” and that’s really how I see frag rap, when I listen to it my mind suddenly sharpens and before you know I’ve got that intense Tom Cruise gaze.
LD: So is this more psychedelic reading of modern rap informing your idea of it being a bit pastoral?
KM: There is a general pastoralism you get in psychedelic cultures (the hippies’ flower power, raves taking place in big open fields), so that might have something to do with why producers are drawn to flutes and gamelan bells and all that.
There does seem to be a general digi-pastoralism in the air in the twenty-first century though. Loads of operating systems have grassy hillsides or snowy mountain ranges as their default desktop pictures. You have big tech companies called things like Apple and Amazon. There’s Twitter’s bird logo.
LD: You get similar linguistic used by big companies in general. “Income streams.” “Branches.”
KM: Right, exactly. Then in entertainment there’s all this computer-generated wildlife dominating the culture. Films like Avatar and Annihilation. Games like Minecraft, War of the Worlds and Red Dead Redemption. There’s the popularity of CGI-driven fantasy like Lord of the Rings and Game of Thrones.
So there’s a general eco-futurism that’s not just manifest in music, but all over the place. I guess our pervading notion of the future at the moment is one of environmental catastrophe, which I don’t think producers are reflecting consciously, but it is an interesting synchronicity. It’s as though we’re mourning the natural world or trying to develop a digital alternative to it.
LD: That kind of pastoral aesthetic doesn’t have much to do with normal ideas of “street” music though, does it?
KM: Well, I think in older forms of music the very literal concept of the street, as in concrete roads and buildings, was sort of signified in the sounds of the music. The gritty textures of early Wu Tang kind of sound like sidewalks. The same with the breakbeats in jungle. And even stuff like grime or Lex Luger had a certain hardness in it that made the music feel concrete. There’s been a shift away from that.
Part of that has to do with dematerialization and digitization maybe. When real-world instruments were sampled, you’d get these physical signifiers encoded in the music. A snare drum sample would have room sound in it and the sound of a wooden stick and a metal rim and a plastic drumhead. The more you deviate from acoustic sound, the less of that kind of thing you’re going to get, so the music’s not going to quite feel of this world.
LD: Wouldn’t you say that drill sounds of this world though? It’s “street” music in your very literal reading of the term, isn’t it?
KM: Well sort of. It very much does sound like a rainy day in south London. It reminds me of Mobb Deep with all those bleak pianos.
LD: UK drill is the etherealization of Mobb Deep in a way. It’s so haunting.
KM: Well, that’s exactly it. It’s got that dual quality to it, it’s at once dark street music and something slightly otherworldly. In way it’s a bit like Burial, it’s this sort of ghostly memory of rave insofar as it revives jungle-esque rhythms and dred bass and all that. But when Burial did that stuff, he was doing it as a conscious sort of musical thought experiment. What’s strange about drill is that it was something happening subliminally throughout an entire culture.
LD: Are you still listening to much drill nowadays?
KM: I dropped off from drill I guess at some point in 2018. I get very squeamish when university students start getting interested in music in the UK, they denature it as artists essentially start to tailor the music to appeal to these lucrative university crowds. You’ll get
these kids who’ve grown up listening to Arcade Fire or something going to university and suddenly want to get into “street music”, while still holding on to the more rockist mindset they’d grown up with. So, there’s a degree of rhythmic sophistication they’re lacking in their listening habits. They probably wouldn’t have made peace with lyrics that are violent or homophobic or misogynistic, they probably want music to be a bit “literary” or angsty or whatever and they’re probably not particularly up to date with the most cutting-edge stuff coming out.
You can hear how all of these things manifest in a kind of student-friendly incarnation of grime in the 2010s. A lot of the most popular rappers from this crop were actually quite rhythmically clunky. There was this element where it felt like they were going out of their way to present themselves as inoffensive by coming across as a bit silly. You had things like Grime4Corbyn where artists were campaigning on behalf of Jeremy Corbyn, the leader of the Labour Party during the 2017 general election who was beloved by student types. The music was revolving around the sensibilities of people at university. Not to mention by that point grime was a decade old or more.
So that sort of thing started creeping into drill after 2018 or so. There were these crossover hits like Big Shaq’s “Man’s Not Hot” and Russ’ “Gun Lean” that were essentially comedic novelty songs. That all put me off a bit.
But there is something I can’t quite put my finger on with new drill. There’s a point where genres get fully established and then suddenly lose something. It’s some twinkle in the eye they used to have. It’s like Invasion of the Body Snatchers, these genres sound the same, they’re made by the same producers and artists and yet there’s something slightly off. They’re not their usual selves. It’s very eerie. I think that happened to UK drill really.
I do also just have a thing than music should evolve maybe every two or three years. No need to muck around keep making the same thing all the time. Move on to something new. So after a couple of years of drill I’d got the point really.
LD: So has dancehall moved on from where it was two years ago?
KM: Oh yeah, definitely. You were already getting these great bits of vocal psychedelia creeping in before the trap dancehall stuff, particularly with Tommy Lee Sparta, but trap dancehall’s definitely been a huge leap forward.
I have a little bit of a mythology about how dancehall’s evolved in the last decade or so. It’s basically as if the genre’s evolution has all stemmed from these sort of Vybz Kartel cloning experiments gone wrong. So, at first there was Kartel as this perfect, post-human Übermensch figure. Then some fuck up happens at the cloning facility and you get Alkaline who’s deformed-looking and strange sounding. Another attempt gets you Tommy Lee Sparta with his voice all fucked and weird.
But now we have trap dancehall where you’ve literally got Kartel’s blood relatives, these genetic matches, making music. So Sikka Rymes is Kartel’s cousin and he’s a spitting image of him. Kartel’s sons are also making music too. Likke Addi (as in “little Adidja Palmer”, which is Vybz Kartel’s real name) has this song “Dollar Sign” that interpolates the chorus of a Kartel song of the same name from a decade earlier. It’s almost like this subtle admission that he’s actually a clone.
LD: It’s strange listening to artists like Tommy Lee Sparta and Alkaline when you think back to the kinds of voices that used to dominate dancehall. These big, gruff masculine voices like Bounty Killer and Buju Banton. It’s another example of modern music moving away from these traditional notions of street toughness.
KM: Interestingly though, even with these voices the lyrics are still about the same guns, girls, ganja and gangstas. In a way I love that. Firstly, I just think it’s a very rich contradiction for your imagination to play with. How does your mind make sense of the idea of a scrawny, digitized imp gangster?
It also makes the future feel very inadvertent. Sometimes it seems like these artists have stumbled upon making sci fi music. It’s as if they weren’t going out intending to do so, but the future’s become so undeniable that the music ends up coming out that way, even if their focus is just on the normal gangster mystique.
You mentioned the old voices being masculine. It does do new dancehall a huge disservice just to dismiss these piercing voices as feminine. They’re not feminine really and putting it through that lens just makes it sound like the same old androgyny we’ve had in music for decades. What you’re hearing isn’t womanly, it’s startlingly posthuman.
LD: Why do you think there was a sudden switch to these types of voices?
KM: I’d imagine it’s just that these voices get the best out of Auto-Tune. But as I said about drill, it is good to always do something new, so shifting voices like that is just one way of doing something different.
Intergenerational insurgency is a driving force of innovation. It’s always great if you’re young and you can find music that pisses off your parents or your older siblings or older kids or whoever. There’s no sound more sublime to a teenager’s ears than to hear a pissed off parent yelling “turn that fucking noise off” from another room. It means that it’s your time to hold on to cool in the never-ending relay race of cultural cachet.
There’s also something really tragic that happens to once cool or once dangerous music. They eventually get consumed by the middlebrow. So, you’ll get your aging punk icons doing butter and insurance adverts. You’ll get old jungle tracks suddenly being played at playdate parties. Recently some kind of 90s dancehall pastiche went viral with lyrics about Boris Johnson being a bumbahole which the liberal-minded middle classes all found very funny. So really, I endorse any strategy youth culture chooses to deploy to escape the incessant sprawl of the acceptable and the inoffensive.
LD: Do you have a hostility towards older music then?
KM: No, not at all. Rhetorically it’s a great framing device to be very polemical and denounce things and pick fights and all that. I think it makes for exciting writing, but in my heart of hearts I really love loads of old music. Jungle and Mobb Deep and 70s Miles Davis and Pharoah Sanders were all happening before I was born and yet they’re some of my favourite music of all time. What really inspires me is viewing all this music from across the decades as being all part of this great Afrofuturist adventure.
LD: The future as an endlessly receding horizon.
KM: Yeah. Appreciating that Jamaica blew my mind with dub once and then again with trap dancehall and in so many other ways in between those two styles doesn’t diminish either one for me. It makes it all so much richer and so much more meaningful. All the music gets placed inside this huge, sweeping historical phenomenon which you then feel like you’re a passenger of.
I had this little framework in the back of my mind when I was thinking about all this new music. I basically split the eras of future music along three broad lines. There was Mythic Machine Music, stuff like dub and cosmic jazz in the 70s which was all about the future facilitating some kind of spiritual awakening, a bit like how in 2001: A Space Odyssey interplanetary travel facilitates the protagonist attaining enlightenment.
Things like Wu Tang and some of the more hippy-ish elements of rave were holdovers from this mythic era, but really after Kraftwerk you get this age of Metal Machine Music, which culminates with lots of the antihuman sounds of hardcore rave and grime and stuff like that.
Then with Auto-Tune we entered the Man Machine Music era, which is all about technologically augmented forms of humanity. You can then even divide that into Mutant Machine Music like mumble rap and Mind Machine Music which is all about neuro-futurism.
So once you’ve got into that idea of a kind of cognitive futurism, you’re ending up with something that feels very gnostic, meaning in a way you’re all the way back at the beginning with music feeling mythic again. So, it’s all come full circle now. All of a sudden all future music feels like different refractions emanating from the same ideals and states of consciousness.
LD: So what are you favourites of the Neon
Screams era?
KM: Well, it might just be because it’s the newest and so the freshest to my ears, but trap dancehall does amaze me. It’s the culmination of almost everything music’s achieved in the twenty-first century so far.
I love so much of this music though. That first wave of Auto-Tuned Vybz Kartel music is so mighty and life-affirming. Tommy Lee Sparta invented one of the greatest sounds ever with that voice he does. Huncho Jack is incredible. At it’s very best, the stuff that combines frag rap with mumble rap, like the Playboi Carti leaks, does just sound completely, incomprehensibly futuristic even if it might not quite fit into my notions of cool. You couldn’t have predicted that music before it happened, it’s just so out-there. While UK drill wasn’t the most futuristic music of this whole era, it was often the most poignant. It really celebrates a whole folk memory of a London that often feels like it’s on the way out. So I love that, but in a very different way to the other stuff.
LD: And finally, where do you think music will go next?
KM: It’s so hard to say. You never know really. As of writing the book there’s a bourgeoning strain of Jamaican drill. I’d love it if that evolved into something really new and exciting.
The UK hasn’t had a go at vocal psychedelia yet. In the 90s British musicians did things with synthesizer and sampler technology that was miles ahead of anything happening in Jamaica and the US. So you never know, they could do the same with Auto-Tune and make the most startling music of the 2020s.
Neon Screams Page 13
