Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  Vocal psychedelia’s no different. The most cutting-edge music today at the turn of the 2020s makes you feel like Dorothy, dizzy amidst a tornado of digitized posthuman voices. To listen to a trap dancehall set, say, is to be audibly swarmed by deformed performers whose voices all seem to squeal and shatter and evaporate in ways that implode your brain. Entire soundscapes emanate from their vocals alone. You’re driven to delirium as artist after artist interfaces Auto-Tune with some perplexing vocal delivery or other mutative and mangling audio effects.

  The vocally psychedelic genres of the past few years are just as pioneering, unprecedented, futuristic and impossible to the ears as genres like dub, jungle and grime were in their day. It’s not mere shallow hyperbole to say so — sounds are being produced now that literally couldn’t have been made using the musical technology of the past.

  There’s been a paradigm shift. Where innovation used to arise from breakthroughs in synthesizer and sampling technology — jungle’s sped and spliced breakbeats, say, or acid house’s 303 squelches — now they arise from the digitally-processed voice. Auto-Tuned artists are the new synthesisers — they’re the new samplers — and the sounds they make recalibrate your consciousness. Your enjoyment goes beyond music to become an addiction to certain kinds of sonic stimuli — it’s as though the tracks operate not merely to entertain the listener but to scratch particular cognitive and sensational itches.

  While we may still call all this new music rap and dancehall, these titles are misnomers really. The music coming out now is as just as much of a break from what came before it as hip-hop was from the funk that preceded it, or house was from disco, or rock was from blues.

  You can’t honestly say that Playboi Carti’s “Codeine” is the same genre as music made by Waka Flocka Flame and Big Daddy Kane. Likewise, Big Voice’s “Chedda” isn’t the same style of music made by Buju Banton, Elephant Man and Shabba Ranks. “Codeine” and “Chedda” have more in common with one another than they do with their respective rap and bashment antecedents.

  Really, vocal psychedelia constitutes an entirely new macro-genre in its own right. One that’s already produced a whole multitude of new sub-genres, sub-styles, variations and innovations and which, like jazz, rock, house and hip-hop before it, has the potential to usher in decades’ worth of further breakthroughs in the years to come.

  This is the story of our new musical future...

  CHAPTER ONE

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

  Auto-Tune Arises

  To futurise used to be to dehumanise, to synthesise and to mechanise. “Faceless techno bollocks.” Jungle “without the annoying MCs”. Instrumental hip-hop. Instrumental grime… For nerds at least, the future happened in spite of the human; the voice wasn’t a vector for progress but rather a hindrance to it.

  Samplers dehumanised speech and song. They parted performance and performer. Ravey cosmic goddesses, RnB diva damsels, dubby delay-drenched Rastas — once sampled, all became avatars and abstracted cultural archetypes rather than real people living real lives. They were all notes in a character keyboard; gasping ghosts in the machine.

  But Auto-Tune has thrust the voice to the forefront of the sonic and technological vanguard and in turn has made personality paramount. Our humanity has been folded into the innovative process. To make something new with Auto-Tune all you’ve got to do is unleash your most unhinged self.

  We knew none of this when the effect first arrived though. For a while Auto-Tune felt like simply another fleeting fad that fit snugly into an old, increasingly mouldy, futurist lineage — yet another reinvention of robotic sonics in a decades-long production line of audio iconography: Kraftwerk, Zapp, “Planet Rock”, electro, techno, the vocoder, the talk box… Auto-Tune was stiff, sleek, pristine and precise, just like a Gary Numan synth or Lil Jon riff.

  We assumed that Auto-Tune heralded the ultimate victory of the antihuman musical imagination; the mechanisation of melody itself. For instance, Jim Jones and Ron Browz’s late-2000s Auto-Tune outing “Pop Champagne” was hard artifice as car crusher to the soul tradition, taking the voice — with its humanly curvaceous, carnal cadences and wounded warbling — and flattening it into inhumanly rigid timbral geometrics. Sinuous song made way for android angularity. Human authenticity was automatised and, ultimately, bastardised.

  If something remarkable was happening at all, we presumed, it was that we were reaching new heights of synthetic cyborgism (Auto-Tuned voices are after all literally half man and half machine symbiotically operating and interfacing with one another in real time). It was paradigm perfection more than it was a paradigm shift… Or so we thought…

  But we were wrong. As the decade progressed, new types of sonic cyborgs emerged that placed less emphasis on the synthetic and outright rejected the robotic. You’d get bio-cyborgs and mind-cyborgs; artists that made music evoking biotechnology and computerised cognition more than they did steel machines. Our humanity was soon to be upgraded. Music was about to become amazing again…

  RISE THE GAZA BEAST: VYBZ KARTEL, MAVADO AND THE BIRTH OF THE NEW FUTURE

  Marinate boy’s soul to vapor

  — Bounty Killer, “Jus Mek a Duppy”

  The Prophet of Lightening

  The war for the future was fought in Jamaica at the end of the 2000s. On one side there was Mavado — the Gully God — leading the surge for soulfulness against the synthetic tyranny of his rival Vybz Kartel, the Auto-Tuned murderous man-machine at the head of the Gaza Empire collective of artists. You could hear their battle play out across speakers in diss track after diss track. It was apocalyptic. Morbid, warring orchestration lead martial marches through the streets of your synaesthesia. Sweeping strings swarmed like the pests and locusts during the Plagues of Egypt. Producers like NotNice, Daseca and Di Genius nurtured nothing but naked, nuclearised aggression in their barbed-wire nests of arresting noise. Kartel’s “Kill Dem” was a pounding paramilitary parade goose-stepping its way inside your brain. Bashment was living up to its name — bludgeoning, battering and brutalising the listener with everything at its disposal.

  The artwork for Gangsta for Life: The Symphony of David Brooks depicts Mavado as scarred and battle-hardened. By contrast, the cover of Kartel’s Pon Di Gaza 2.0 portrays Vybz almost as an android, a badman C3PO constructed from chrome gold. These covers symbolised what was at stake in this conflict: whether to cling on to our traditional notions of humanity, or embrace our impending technological transformation.

  Mavado’s vocals are oaken and splintering. “Touch the Road”, “They Fear Me”, “Gully Side” are open wounds gushing with agonised emotion. But Kartel, his music exhilarated through electricity. He popularised Auto-Tune in bashment in the late 2000s, using it in a way that was infinitely more compelling than his contemporaries in American rap. Vybz Kartel created majestic machine music — Auto-Tuned cyborg euphoria — that made you feel as if giants and titans walked the Earth. “Weh Dat Fah”, “Weh Dem Feel Like”, “Nah”, “Gaza Commandments”, “Gwan Suh”, “Last Man Standing”, “Dollar Sign”, “Nah B****y Ting”, all saw Kartel reincarnated as raw spirit. These songs were epic tales of betrayal, warfare and revenge played out among gods, emperors and the great men of history. It was electronic ecstasy on a mythological scale. Feelings got purified to orgasmic intensity. Sadism, lust, ego — they weren’t so much expressed by Kartel in these tracks as ejaculated out of him.

  And that’s where the soul/cyborg dichotomy breaks down. That’s where the Metal Machine future dies and Mavado’s haunting humanity becomes redundant. The human/inhuman, man/machine nexus isn’t just inverted by Kartel in his tracks, it’s completely scrambled by him. Rage and mania had never been plugged into Auto-Tune with such fury, with such sheer ferocity. Vybz Kartel didn’t merely put his voice through the effect, he put his whole being through it; his passion, his majesty, his glory, his bloodlust. He gave birth to real-time electrified hyperemotion. He wasn’t killing so
ul, he was giving it sonic CPR — snatching it from the fatal claws of stale cliché. His golden skin on the cover of Pon Di Gaza 2.0 wasn’t, it turned out, simply about being a homicidal cyborg, it symbolised an alchemic augmentation of affect, an emotional gnosis in which searing soul becomes golden spirit. Kartel’s tracks were the primal screams of the new future.

  The Holographic Principle

  Vybz Kartel transcended mere mortal in his music and became a bashment Brahman; he was indivisible, absolute omni-emotion. You can’t say his tracks made you angry or playful or lustful or any other single set of emotions, you were just in awe, engulfed by the raw, pure white heat of feeling he embodied. He wasn’t projecting any one particular mood, it was just palpable, all-encompassing, post-human passion.

  Old future music made you imagine beyond the bounds of physical laws — sounds would soar faster than the speed of light or weighty bass would accelerate gravity until it became bone-crushing — but Kartel’s humanised future fucked with the physics of feelings. People talk of emotional “depth”, but Vybz’s Auto-Tuned cries collapsed and compressed every emotion in existence into an uncannily flattened, two-dimensional digital noise. The words “mi nah” in the chorus of “Gwan Suh” for example were like a blueprint within which a whole cosmos of futurised feeling was encoded and could be projected out.

  Kartel’s music was about the triumph of the will against reality itself, it was about ego exploding away the constraints of impossibility. His post-humanism was an exercise in eugenics applied to the emotional self in which fear, fault, doubt and weakness were all ruthlessly bred out of the gene-pool of his own being. Pitch-correcting technology had turned Vybz Kartel into an Übermensch and through him Auto-Tune became the sound of autocracy. He’d transformed himself and through his will to power he would go on to transform Jamaican society.

  To Give Birth to a Dancing Star

  In 2003 Kartel, at the time still just a newcomer, punched beloved dancehall veteran Ninjaman whilst they were onstage together. This clash between the icon and iconoclast was totemic of Kartel’s career moving forward. He was the progressive force in Jamaican music. He was at war with its history, with its traditions and with its values.

  Progress was Kartel’s rabid spirit animal. He let it stampede through Jamaican society — poking it and provoking it in every which way possible. Vybz Kartel not only embraced technological transformation, he incited societal overhaul by toying with Jamaica’s racial, religious and sexual taboos, trouncing, terrifying and traumatising traditionalists as he saw fit. No future was too distressing or dystopian for him, all that mattered was slaying his enemies — Mavado, Bounty Killer, Aidonia — the custodians of antiquated customs and dying priorities in this cacophonous culture war. Through Kartel, the future became an unstoppable, undeniable force of nature.

  Vybz Kartel was Zarathustra gloating of god’s death to facilitate his ascent to Übermensch stature. He was an electronic heretic declaring himself a “demon” and a “devil’s advocate” in Jamaica, a country with more churches per square mile than any other place on Earth. His rivals lined up to condemn him. Mavado branded him an atheist, Bounty Killer, with the title of a 2009 EP, promised to Raise Hell on Hellboy — but it didn’t matter, Vybz made a deal with the devil who’d delivered to him dominion over all of dancehall.

  Vybz Kartel used bleaching products on his skin to lighten its complexion, taunting a society still haunted by colonial-era shadism in which British rulers gave preferential treatment to lighter-skinned Black Jamaicans relative to those with darker tones. Mavado warned Kartel “mi nah bleach with cream, mi bleach with mi M16”. Bounty Killer likewise chastised Vybz for his altered complexion, calling him an “alien looking bloodclart”. But Kartel didn’t care. He’d cast himself as an avatar of the Jamaican underclass — their living embodiment — and as long as they were still bleaching their skin, he claimed, so would he.

  While Auto-Tune had wired Vybz into the modern musical landscape, it seemed that online porn had plugged his penis into a new internationalised, computerised global super-libido. In defiance of Jamaica’s traditional taboos regarding oral sex, Kartel’s muses were “freaky girls” willing to perform fellatio — “go down now, come up back my baby/weh yuh tongue deh, me a beg you put it pon me” he groaned in “Go Go Club”.

  As he’d done so many times before, Bounty Killer rose up to reinforce the status quo by reprimanding Kartel’s sexual preferences in his simultaneously swash-buckling and pearl-clutching diss track “Chatta Box”. He twisted Kartel’s lyrics to accuse him of a litany of sexual fetishes including necrophilia, and even went so far as to pronounce Kartel a “paedophile” on account of his luridly lustful lyrics about taking virginities, having sex on the school bus, and in front of girls’ parents. It was a fool’s errand though; controversy was the fuel for Kartel’s futurism.

  Operation Cast Lead

  Sound your alarm

  — Desmond Decker, “The Israelites”

  “War is in the air!” Mavado declared over the bawling organs of DJ Frass’ ecclesiastical “Israel Riddim”. To the Gully God, Kartel was soon to be “dead like Arafat”. “Israel, Lebanon, K [Kalashnikov] long like guitar in John Lennon hand” a defiant Kartel bellowed on “Nuh Badda Try”. The Gully vs. Gaza feud coincided with the actual 2008-2009 Gaza War in the Middle East and, judging by Mavado and Kartel’s lyrics, it seems the symbolism of the name “Gaza” wasn’t lost on anyone.

  In the real world, Gaza is home to Hamas, an insurgent group calling for the destruction of Israel. But in roots reggae Israel — Zion — was the Rasta utopia at the very heart of devotional Jamaican music, and there was Kartel, implicitly at war with it. The name “Gaza” was word weaponry, a semantic sniper rifle with its scope squarely locked onto the skull of the Rasta idyll — the patronising, quasi-pastoral folksy innocence imagined in the minds of reggae reactionaries. Vybz Kartel squeezed down the trigger and killed it.

  This antiquated ideal had been on the way out for a while in the decadent decades since dancehall’s inception, but it was ultimately Kartel who decapitated it in a sacrifice to the modern gods of synthetic texture. He ripped out — wrenched out — the roots from our conception/perception of Jamaican music. There were no more dreadlocked mystics “up in the hills”. No more timbale karang-kangs or rattling nyabingi percussion. No more clouds of weed smoke emanating from the Rasta’s chalice. Vybz Kartel and the global democratisation of digital modernisation had put these myths to bed.

  In April 1978, Bob Marley, Jamaica’s preeminent musical figure at the time, brought together the leaders of the country’s two main political factions onstage in an ill-fated effort to end their deadly dispute. Prime Minister Michael Manley of the People’s National Party and opposition leader Edward Seaga of Jamaica’s Labour Party had presided over a civil war in which their organisations (backed by the USSR and the USA respectively) funded local gang violence in an attempt to exert political control. In darkly inverted symmetry, December 2009 saw then-Prime Minister Bruce Golding bring together Jamaica’s two most popular musical figures in a similarly ill-fated effort to end their deadly conflict. Vybz Kartel and Mavado had spearheaded a rivalry that demanded allegiance from their audiences that reportedly resulted in fatalities amongst warring fans. “One love” was no more.

  What Is Great in Man

  Superman (with the big S on his uniform — we should, I suppose, be thankful that it is not an S.S.) needs an endless stream of ever new submen […] not only to justify his existence but even to make it possible […]. The comic-book Superman has long been recognised as a symbol of violent […] superiority […] Superman […] does not only have “superhuman powers”, but belongs to a “super-race”.

  — Fredric Wertham, Seduction of the Innocent

  “Before very long, the N*gro will be able to whiten his skin if he wishes”, wrote Robert Ettinger in his 1972 transhumanist polemic Man into Superman. With Vybz Kartel’s skin bleaching this problematic prophecy c
ame true.

  It won’t be long — if it’s not already the case — before Kartel is canonised as another of Jamaica’s deified mortals alongside the likes of Haile Selassie, Marcus Garvey and Bob Marley. With the title of a polemic he penned, Vybz proclaimed to be The Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto, the authoritarian embodiment of The People. He thrust himself into the centre of a populist, proto-politics in Jamaica, railing against poverty, police brutality and the country’s two main parties — what rastas call the “shitstem” — in tracks like “Something Ago Happen”, and he offered Gaza, himself, as the only viable solution to these ills.

  Vybz Kartel has already cultivated a cult of personality. Like Mao, he calls himself “The Teacher”. As if his name was bashment’s equivalent of “Inshallah”, dancehall’s discourse centres on him entirely. Every artist — whether ally or rival — is examined in relation to him; they’re cast merely as compliments and counterpoints to Kartel.

  The fascistic futurism he epitomised in the late 2000s was so tempting, and that’s what made it so frightening. For all that was questionable about it (it was after all a militarised, master race music revolving around the whims of a single strongman) it was irresistible in the way it sensationalised emotion. When you hear it smashing through your speakers, you’re overcome by everything it’s promising you: the strength, the power, the glory. It speaks to something truly dangerous in the human condition; it’s a deadly yet delightfully cocktail of narcissism, sadism and psychopathy.

  Vybz Kartel had made the first truly great Auto-Tuned music, but more than that, he made the first music that really felt as if it emerged from our new, twenty-first-century reality. His first Auto-Tuned tracks came out in 2007, the same year the first iPhone was released and, by extension, the beginning of the social media explosion (2007 was also fittingly the year popular porn sites XVideos and Pornhub were launched). In his use of the effect, and through his post-humanism, Kartel’s music reflected this new world in which digital technology has become the main medium and mediator of human expression and experience. Kartel’s music was the sound of symbiosis, and by battling with the past — and by beating it — Kartel had begun to build the future. Music would never be the same again.