Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  Published by Repeater Books

  An imprint of Watkins Media Ltd

  Unit 11 Shepperton House

  89-93 Shepperton Road

  N1 3DF London

  United Kingdom

  www.repeaterbooks.com

  A Repeater Books paperback original 2021

  1

  Distributed in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York.

  Copyright © Kit Mackintosh 2021

  Kit Mackintosh asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

  Introduction copyright © Simon Reynolds 2021

  ISBN: 9781913462246

  Ebook ISBN: 9781913462475

  Typesetting and design: Frederik Jehle

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

  This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  Printed and bound in the United Kingdom by TJ Books Ltd

  To Tamara Timofeeva

  CONTENTS

  FOREWORD

  by Simon Reynolds

  PREFACE

  THE TWILIGHT OF DYING IDEAS

  INTRODUCTION

  A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

  CHAPTER ONE

  AUTO-TUNE, AFROBEATS, TRAP AND BASHMENT AT THE TURN OF THE 2010S

  Rise the Gaza Beast: Vybz Kartel, Mavado and the Birth of the New Future

  CHAPTER TWO

  TRAP IN THE 2010S

  Post-Rap

  Slime Language: Mumble Rap Rejects Reality

  Touch the Sky Heavenly: Frag Rap

  CHAPTER THREE

  DRILL DURING THE 2010S

  No Face: UK Drill and the Aesthetics of Anonymity

  Giving Nothing But Energy: Brooklyn Drill

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BASHMENT AT THE TURN OF THE 2020S

  Fairytale Badman: Dancehall After Kartel

  Third Eye Open: Trap Dancehall and Trinibad

  CONCLUSION FUTURE MANIA

  GENRE CHRONOLOGIES

  The Sounds of Now

  TRAP

  Mumble Rap

  Frag Rap

  DRILL

  The Decline of UK Dance Music

  Road Rap

  Carns Hill’s Proto-Drill

  UK Drill

  Brooklyn Drill

  BASHMENT

  Gully vs. Gaza-Era Bashment

  After Kartel

  Trap Dancehall and Trinibad

  INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  For mixes of the music discussed in the book, go to https://www.mixcloud.com/NeonScreams/

  @NeonScreamsBook on Twitter

  https://neonscreamsbook.blogspot.com/

  THEY TOLD YOU THE FUTURE WAS FINISHED…

  … THEY LIED.

  BY SIMON REYNOLDS

  When electronic musicians in the 1990s talked about digital technology, they would often characterise their machines in terms of the superpowers they afforded. A Guy Called Gerald, for instance, talked about feeling godlike as he moved blocs of sound around the grid of Cubase. Other producers characterised the relationship in cyborg terms. Gabber pioneer Marc Acardipane described his digitally enhanced super-self as if it was military hardware or a space vehicle: “I’m a machine, I’m wired up […] I’m roaming the earth and it’s nice and doomy here.”

  Technology served as an extension of the self (like a car) or a harnessed force of nature (a horse, a dragon even). The power was exterior but it could be commanded. But in the twenty-first century, these Promethean fantasies gave way to a different relationship with technology: an intimacy with the digital that carries with it insidious feelings of dependency and invasion. Rather than machines as subordinate to our will, it’s ourselves who are at risk of subordination to external systems, or at least subject to an eerie blurring between the self and technology.

  But as Kit Mackintosh argues in Neon Screams, this isn’t the cold, dehumanised future — and future music — that people in the late twentieth century found either alarming or alluring. Dance music based around sequencers and sampling, especially in their early and most exciting waves, felt radically disembodied (even as it incited bodies on the dancefloor). Its relative dearth of audibly hand-played elements created the illusion of “untouched by human hands” — as if the machines really had taken over and what you were hearing was automatic music.

  These sort of notions, sensations and fantasies have by this point become utterly played-out: a set of clichés that grew ever more out of touch with the cutting-edge (un)reality of music in the 2010s. Instead, more recent developments in digital sound technology have dramatically increased the scope for individualised human expression. As Mackintosh explores, it’s the voice that has emerged as the privileged zone of artistic adventure in the twenty-first century. This is a trans-genre field of action, stretching from Top 40 pop to the experimental left-field. Using Auto-Tune and other pitch-correction and vocal design technologies, everyone in the 2010s seemed to be stretching the singing or rapping voice into queerly beautiful shapes, mutilating and restitching the fragments into Frankenstein’s monsters, or processing humanly generated sound into amorphous, swirly texture-clouds and glistening emotional landscapes.

  Neon Screams focuses on where the innovations have been most startling and disorienting: Black street sounds. Mackintosh’s survey takes in distinctively 2010s forms of Auto-Tuned hip-hop such as mumble rap and “frag rap”, his term for the fractured, irruptive yet almost choral style pioneered by outfits like Migos; Afrobeats and the Caribbean genres clustered under the banner of “bashment” that include Auto-Tune-blitzed dancehall, tropical dancehall, trap dancehall, and Trinibad; road rap, UK drill, and its American offshoot Brooklyn drill. This book is a particularly crucial intervention because most of these genres have been off the map when it comes to serious attention either from music critics or the academy (where people still write books about hip-hop that don’t register the fact that breakbeats and samples have not been significant elements in rap for at least twenty years). Meanwhile, what newspaper coverage there is tends to be sensationalist (the folk-devil scares about drill) or celebrity journalism that chronicles the career-path-to-fame of particular performers rather than tracking the larger patterns that define the state of the art.

  In a way, what Mackintosh is dealing with here is a digital-era update of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic”. Geographically, almost all the action takes place within an eight-sided polygon that connects Lagos, London, Brooklyn, Atlanta, Houston, Kingston, Montego Bay, and Port of Spain. Instead of the analogue era that Gilroy mapped, in which the traffic involved vinyl recordings and movements of immigrants, nowadays this culture works through a much faster dissemination of sounds and images, with YouTube being preeminent as a vector. As a result, there’s a curious quality with these musical subcultures of simultaneously being intensely territorialised (Trinibad proclaims its location, a tiny Caribbean island, in its name) and yet globalised (subject to virtually boundless dissemination, porously penetrable by external influences, the opposite of insular). This new revised Black Atlantic is a digital diaspora.

  The logic of dislocation is mirrored by a logic of disembodiment within the music itself — the digitally processed voice seems to leave behind its physical source and ascend into the ether. One of the reasons why perf
ormers in these genres have embraced Auto-Tune so fervently is that it feeds into and magnifies their own grandiose self-images. The phantasmic sound fits their fantasies of superhero powers, of going beyond the human frame and its limitations.

  Black popular music has long lived somewhere between street and screen. Reggae drew imagery, song titles and artist names from Westerns, gangster movies, and kung fu flicks. Rap looked to Mafia cinema and martials arts movies. Darkside and jungle palpitated with the influence of dystopian sci-fi and video-nasty horror, everything from Terminator, Predator, and Robocop to Evil Dead and Hellraiser. For all these genres, pulp movies provided models of heroic/anti-heroic manhood: their sagas of destiny and dynasty lent an aura of legend to gang clashes and personal struggles alike. Mackintosh tracks the continued seepage of CGI-laden ultraviolent entertainments such as 300 into 2010s scenes like UK drill.

  But “between street and screen” has a different and vastly expanded resonance nowadays, when there are so many screens and they are intimately interwoven with the fabric of our everyday life: smartphones, tablets, computers, videogames. There’s an unsettling coexistence and bleed-through between the disincarnate virtuality of telecommunications and the graphic carnality (and carnage) of real life (these contradictions perhaps most queasy in the erotic realm — dating apps, porn sites, sexting).

  One curious quality of the digital now is that the futuristic soft-machinery that supports our lifestyles seems to coincide with a contrary movement into the past: a resurgence of the pre-modern and atavistic. Young adult fiction and film revert to Medieval narrative forms like the saga and allegory. Political culture is rife with the superstitious fevers and secular demonologies of conspiracy theory. Angelology and countless forms of positive thinking (aka the Law of Attraction) propagate habits of magical thinking. You can be resolutely skeptical about the claims made by all these forms of irrationalism while still recognising them as social facts to be reckoned with. The quasi-magical quality of so many of the routine operations in our digital everyday seems to be activating latent and lingering non-rational parts of our being.

  But wait… I’ve not properly introduced the author. Here’s some things to know about Kit Mackintosh.

  He’s young — only twenty-five.

  He belongs to a generation that didn’t grow up reading music criticism or music magazines, either in print or online. His critical consciousness has primarily been formed on the internet, in the back-and-forth of message boards and, to a lesser extent, blogs.

  He hails from south London — New Cross to be precise — and although white, grew up from childhood surrounded by Black music. His first pop memories are UK garage and Timbaland-era RnB at the turn of the millennium. An upstairs neighbour ran a sound system, so dancehall and lovers rock were also in the mix from an early age. Most of his active listening has occurred in the period after the eclipse of pirate radio as the driving force in London underground music and has instead been attuned to the emerging and now dominant transmission channels for street sounds such as YouTube and social media.

  He’s a musician — first and foremost a drummer, but a multi-instrumentalist, who earns his living making music for companies and playing live in various bands professionally as well as for fun and expression. This fluency in rhythm, and in the nuts-and-bolts of music technology, makes for a highly unusual perspective for a critic.

  All these biographical factors mean that Mackintosh is especially equipped to grasp what’s going on in contemporary music. Thanks to his youth and his surroundings, he’s not prey to the preconceptions and biases of those of us who grew up within the predominantly analogue culture of vinyl, record shops, radio (legal and illegal), print media, and the rest. That means he has been able to approach this study of 2010s street sounds using terms and tools appropriate to them rather than to an earlier era.

  But to call this book a study is to mispresent and undersell. There is very little “studium” here, to use Roland Barthes’ term for sober, conscientious, workmanlike analysis. But there’s a hell, or heaven, of a lot of jouissance. As much as it’s a feat of theoretical speculation, Neon Screams is a fever-dream, a conjuration of what it feels like when this music takes over your imagination. Mackintosh’s writing aims not just to describe but to enact the way that these sounds engage “the cognitive mechanics of the mind”, how they “scratch particular cognitive and sensational itches” instilled by our increasing intimacy and interdependence with soft technology.

  Particularly striking in what follows is the way that Mackintosh surrenders to the mythopoeic visions emanating from this music, both sonically, lyrically and in terms of the artist’s persona construction and self-styling. It’s a book as much hallucinated as written, motivated equally by the desire to do justice to the music and to beat it at its own game. The prose bristles with the archetypal music writer’s impulse: jealous rivalry with the music itself. It’s a battle of grandiosity between these artists and their champion, who figures here as a Greek chorus striving to drown out the stage-front actors.

  In closing, consider the book’s poetic title. Compare Neon Screams with “Neon Lights”, from the album The Man-Machine: Kraftwerk’s most sheerly rhapsodic vision. In this song, the technotopian heaven is exterior, spread across the shimmering landscape of the city. But in the music that Mackintosh celebrates, the electric otherworld comes from within — it’s the voice, our most intimately personal and bodily possession, that is irradiated. Auto-Tune serves as an alchemical crucible in which performers — and through imaginative contagion, listeners too — become angels and monsters.

  SIMON REYNOLDS, JANUARY 2021

  PREFACE

  THE TWILIGHT OF DYING IDEAS

  Deindustrialise your musical imagination. Shut down the failing factories of tired once-futures. Metal Machine Music is no more.

  Tear yourself from the shrivelled teat of the twentieth century. Everything about the old future you once loved is rotting and in rigor mortis. Dance music’s done; it’s dead and desecrated with no hope of resurrection. Synthesisers and samplers have been sucked dry and now they’re completely depleted, they have nothing left to give you. You’re not going to get anything new or anything sonically impossible from either of them. Nobody has done for decades. Music doesn’t sound like spaceships and cybermen anymore. Nor does it sound like shrapnel or cold steel. It’s not about rocket-fuelled propulsion or mechanised movement. Robot rhythms are boring now. Techy timbres are trite.

  So fuck your dad futures. Fuck all your museum futures and your putrefying futures and your calcifying futures that have formed like plaque in the imaginations of music enthusiasts everywhere. This book isn’t about a pacified pantheon of pre-approved pioneers. It’s not about James Brown or Lee “Scratch” Perry or Public Enemy or Timbaland or Wiley. Nor for that matter is it about acid house or techno or jungle or garage or footwork… It’s time for new titans to shine and new sounds to astound. Declare gory and glorious jihad on all the jaded journalists writing stillborn obituaries to their distant youths; an insurgency lurks in the shadows.

  Nostalgia’s a venom, bleed it out of you. The past is parasitical; cripple it, paralyse it, do whatever you have to do to exorcise its wicked sickness from you. It’s nothing but a chafing, flaking phallus that’s hopelessly being throttled long after it’s been spunked to flaccid defeat. For the love of god let the poor thing go!!!

  We’ve been indoctrinated and corrupted by the orthodoxy of the robo-future for far too long; our synaesthesia’s suffocating in moribund musical metaphors and kitsch visions of the centuries and millennia ahead. Free your mind from this conceptual stasis.

  For decades we have witnessed the industrialisation of sonic sensation. From funk’s rhythmic division of labour, to the automation — the electrification, the mechanisation — of the synthesiser era, to rave’s economies of scale in which escalating tempos tracked rising rhythmachinic productivity; house 130bpm >>> hardcore 150bpm >>> jungle 160bpm >>> gabber — with its g
rowling, goose-stepping pistons pounding at maximum capacity — 200bpm+++.

  But listen closely enough now and you can hear the generators of the old future winding down; 90bpm <<< 80bpm <<< 70bpm <<< 60bpm… Rhythm is reaching absolute zero; the depowered lethargy zone of anti-grove and counter-momentum. The resting heart rate is now the tempo of tomorrow, the future has become human.

  False prophets fearfully warned you that the twenty-first century hailed the end of innovation and the death of progress. They told you it was “the slow cancellation of the future”, but really slowness was cancelling *a* future in an eruption of creative destruction that gave birth to everything that’s come since. We’re done with the old codified modes of sonic imagination. New metaphors have been born and our synaesthesia’s being transformed.

  So, come smash your old paradigms. Set them ablaze and be amazed by the sounds of the next century. It’s time to define the new musical sublime. There’s a whole new future waiting to derange you.

  Strap in…

  INTRODUCTION

  A DESCENT INTO THE MAELSTROM

  Sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven…

  — Edgar Allan Poe, “A Descent into the Maelstrom”

  The digitally processed voice is the new medium of the magnificent. That’s where the boundaries of sound are being brutalised and blown to oblivion. Vocal psychedelia is the omni-genre at the epicentre of our new musical mythology, from Jamaica to Africa to America.

  The most radical musics have always had a tendency to ravage you. They dement, torment and disorientate you as you get caught up in their swirling, whirling dervishes of inconceivable future sound. With jungle this meant being battered by an obliterating blitzkrieg of superspeed breakbeats. With acid rock it was about being drawn into a vortex of roaring distortion. These musical maelstroms are moods that become captivating in their chaos and kinesis. They’re atmospheres turned into manic motion.