Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  CHAPTER TWO

  TRAP IN THE 2010S

  POST-RAP

  Alien Dreamtime

  I watched these little elf tykes jumping in and out of my chest… And I felt language rise up in me that was unhooked from English, and I began to speak…

  — Terrence McKenna, Alien Dreamtime

  Rap’s ready to implode. Maybe it’s already done so. It’s frantic and fraying at the edges. It’s shedding its skin. Cracks are forming across its face. Blood’s gushing from its eye sockets. It’s disintegrating.

  Listen to Playboi Carti’s sonic-seizures on “Codeine”. Let his hieroglyphic hiccups and helium screams arrest you. Let them infect you. Let them mangle you. Contort your consciousness until it clicks into the swelling bells of Carti’s kaleidoscopic clockwork world. Inhale his DMT delirium and feel electrified as you’re overpowered by raw, pure hallucinatory potency.

  Then succumb to Young Thug on “Yeah Yeah” with Travis Scott. Hear the two-syllable shards of bizarre leap out from his throat as his tongue becomes a flailing leviathan with limbs made of VHS tape. Listen to his squeals as he evaporates into iridescent vapor. It’s an assault course for your sanity, just like Future’s “Oxy” with its fractal flashes of frenzied non-sequitur sound-psychosis.

  These tracks are rap in name only. Really they’re something far more alien — far more hexing — that hasn’t been named yet. They’re premonitions, not just of a future music, but of a time when man has been irreparably mutated by machine and his mind has become deformed through disinformation. The results are at once sublime and horrifying…

  If Hip-Hop Should Die Before I Wake

  What killed rap, then? It wasn’t Auto-Tune, not directly anyway. Rap survived that for a while. Lil Wayne was rapping on “Oxy”, he was rapping on older tracks like “Lollipop” and “Every Girl”, and yet he’s Auto-Tuned on all of them. The effect’s not the culprit. It may have marked the beginning of the end, but things have escalated far, far beyond that.

  It wasn’t Auto-Tune that killed rap, it was the annihilating abstraction — the outright rejection — of the spoken word, what once had been the pulsating heart of hip-hop. It had been the one thread that’d run through every era, every twist and turn from Sugarhill Gang to 2 Live Krew to Rakim through to Wu-Tang, Lil Wayne, Gucci Mane, Waka Flocka Flame… that’s what’s been superseded. That’s the fallen phoenix from which this new unnamed music’s arisen.

  Rap — if we’re still to call it that — is now unrecognisable and completely irreconcilable with everything we once knew it to be. Jay Z’s bars sound suffocatingly antiquated spliced between Future’s sonic monster-truck-revving shaman mania on DJ Khaled’s “I Got the Keys”. The two artists are so wildly divergent from one another that you perceive them with completely different parts of your brain. Jay engages your linguistic faculties, while Future’s outbursts spark the parts of your nervous system that process sensation. Future circumvents thought so that you hear him as noise, not voice. Listening to the two rappers go back and forth is the equivalent of hearing Jimi Hendrix trading licks with Herb Alpert.

  No genre could sustain this much deviation from its core conventions. New technology always signals the impending demise of an established style, they can struggle on for a little while but ultimately genres die when they’re newly electrified or digitised. Jazz climaxed in a cosmic crescendo of electronic current in the 70s — the fusion-era Miles Davis, Alice Coltrane — and then retreated into reactionary acoustic irrelevance. Disco adapted to the digital revolution by becoming house; there was just too much alien in its system — synthesizers, samplers, drum machines — for it to sustain itself as it was.

  Auto-Tune has similarly inseminated hip-hop. Rap carried an embryonic new music while it gestated, but now it’s given birth to a batshit insane bastard child. It’s time to cut the umbilical cord.

  SLIME LANGUAGE: MUMBLE RAP REJECTS REALITY

  Mutant Music

  The new future oozes. It writhes and it perspires. It salivates and coagulates. It’s alive and it’s biological. In the twentieth century, our visions of the centuries and millennia ahead glistened with the clunky chrome hardware of robots and rocket ships. But in light of recent developments in biotechnology, the very materials upon which our notions of the future are constructed have been reimagined. We now prophesise that the technological advances of tomorrow will be ones that penetrate and permeate our organic tissues. Hard drives, for example, will no longer be made of plastic and metal, but will instead be developed from a substance more akin to brain tissue. Surveillance cameras will resemble corneas. Listening devices will be indistinguishable from the human ear and it’s from this biotech aesthetic that mumble rap garners its ludicrous futurism.

  In the hands of mumble rappers, Auto-Tune’s typically technological-sounding timbres are transformed and warped into organic noise. Performers relish in the remoulding of the effect, making the sound it produces no longer rigid and robotic, instead making it take on sonic qualities that evoke bodily tissues and secretions. It becomes warm, wobbly, jiggling, splattering and gelatinous. As its name makes clear, mumble rap is orally fixated and the descriptive language evoked and invited by the genre — words like slimy and slippery (which routinely make their way into mumble rap tracks) — are adjectives that also fit the inside of the mouth. Mumble rappers’ approach to vocals is all about exploring and accentuating the feel and the internal architecture of their oral cavities in combination with the intensified texturising effects of Auto-Tune. A croak in the back of a performer’s throat, for instance, will leap out and get set alight by the effect so that it’s roaring and distorting, or a bit of spluttering will suddenly feel turbo-charged, becoming radiant and radioactive in the listener’s ear.

  Mumble rap has unleashed an entirely new timbral lexicon on the music-consuming public. It’s opened up a whole realm of synaesthetic potential centred on the organic instead of the metallic-mechanic. Hip-hop’s no longer hard and hefty-sounding, it’s no longer produced by Bomb Squads and Brick Squads, it’s no longer hardcore or ruff ryding, it doesn’t break/beat you. After all, rap’s now being released on the liquefied-sounding Young Slime Records.

  Funk was arguably the first popular sonic iteration of the old machine-future and its stiff rhythmic precision remained in the DNA of so much that followed in the decades afterwards, from house to hip-hop to garage to grime. But mumble rap dissolves funk and turns it into gunk — just listen to the The Blob-ified hi hats in Lil Gotit’s “Toe to Toe” or Future and Young Thug tracks like “Patek Water” and “No Cap”. The solid, metallic sounds you usually associate with hi hats (produced in pre-digital times by hitting two metal cymbals on top of one another with a wooden stick) have given way to a kind of digitised sludge as producers muck (in both senses of the word) around with phasers, filters and pitch shifting on rolling hi hats, making it sound as if they’re squirting and squelching. Young Thug’s “For My People” goes a step further, taking this technique and applying it to a whole percussive patchwork of bickering cowbells, making the track sound like a Salvador Dali melting clock version of Steve Reich’s glockenspiel workout “Drumming Pt. IV”.

  Old sonic science fiction conjured images of steel-skinned cybermen and spaceships (techno trailblazers Cybotron, Herbie Hancock’s “Rockit”, Metal Heads’ “The Terminator”, and Public Enemy’s Terminator X, for that matter) but the flights of fantasy inspired by mumble rap revolve around body horror mutations more than they do machinery; it’s John Merrick music, not robot rap. Listening to Lil Gotit’s deformed droning on “Instead”, you start to picture his lower jaw melting Indiana Jones-style; he raps as though his mouth is still numb after dental surgery.

  Ironically though, it’s actually through digital processing that these kinds of bodily-sounding sonics are created. It’s a combination of Auto-Tune and pitch shifting that makes Gotit sound as if his face is horrifically disfigured. The sleek android timbres you usually get with Auto-Tune are tos
sed away so that what you’re listening to actually ends up making you feel like you’re squeezing raw, minced beef between your fingers.

  Mumble rap is exposure therapy for the mutant future. There’s something unsettling and uncanny about mumble rappers that comes across in their music and in their self-presentation — there’s a gooey post-humanism to them. The fish-eye-like visual effects used in Young Thug’s “With That” video, for example, give you glimpses of some freakish new type of humanoid by distorting and contorting those on camera so that their bodies are inflated and remoulded in ways both cartoonish and grotesque.

  Both Young Thug and Future claim to be aliens and you do get this sense of the otherworldly just looking at mumble rappers. With their Medusa-esque colourful dreadlocks and fixation on snake imagery (the artwork on 10FIFTY x Lil Gotit’s Hood Fifty, Future and Young Thug’s Super Slimey, Lil Baby x Gunna’s Drip Harder, etc.) mumble rappers come across like some transitional species between humans and the reptilian overlords so popular in conspiracy theories (just check out Gunna’s monstrous, Gorgon-esque appearance on the cover of Drip Season 3, for example). Artists’ wilfully reckless drug use in this context comes across almost like a form of perverse biochemical engineering in which they pump themselves full of pills and potions to see what kind of new Mr. Hyde-like lifeforms they can become.

  With all the slime imagery, amniotic instrumentals and aqueous slang —“dripping”, “slippery”, etc. — you could almost imagine mumble rappers as an amphibian race of beings already adapting to the submerged world soon to arrive thanks to climate change and rising sea levels. Artists like Lil Gotit and Lil Keed seem to have emerged from Young Thug through some kind of amoeba-esque mitosis. Like Pepe the Frog manifesting in real life, mumble rappers have invented an amphibian identity for themselves through which they subvert societal norms. Yet they’re less like online trolls and more like mythical tricksters. They don’t talk in legible language but in a fluorescent madness that’s like mystical sigils ushering in a brand-new world.

  Purple Reign

  Drug use is central to mumble rap’s dozy phenomenology, so much so that it feels like the music is parasitically feeding off the energy (or perhaps more accurately, the lethargy) of opioid epidemic-era America. It’s become something of a cliché, albeit a pretty astute one, to say that 90s rap was the music of drug dealers, whereas modern hip-hop is the music of drug fiends. Everything about mumble rap — its lyrics, track titles, mixtape names, album artwork and even its mumbled vocals, which mirror the slurred speech of those recreationally abusing codeine — are full of overt references to drug consumption. In fact, if Future is to be believed, the whole genre pretty much emerged from one narcotic-fuelled night. He claims his murmured delivery on the 2011 track “Tony Montana”, an influential proto-mumble rap track, wasn’t intentional but the by-product of drug-induced lockjaw.

  The specific effects and side-effects of addictive pain killers and anti-anxiety medications like Xanax, Percocet and OxyContin are clear in mumble rap’s soundscapes, which can be lush, languid and sedate on the one hand or, more often, sickening and slippery (at times recalling sensations of opioid-induced diarrhoea). But really, the contact high you get from listening to a mumble rap track doesn’t feel like the effects associated with any one particular bit of medication. Your mind just feels submerged in a murky marshland of poly-drug dissociation where uppers like “molly” (MDMA) are taken in conjunction with “purple drank” (a prepared form of codeine-based cough medicine mixed with hard candy and soft drinks like Sprite) and any other drugs going. The genre has created its own ecology of intoxication.

  When taken in conjunction with music, drugs develop their own mystiques and mythologies. Weed is now inseparable from Rastafari and Five-Percent Nation theology in the public imagination because of its association with reggae and rap. Our ideas of MDMA are likewise completely contextualised through rave’s hands in the air ecstatic rapture. In mumble rap, drug consumption becomes an Orpheus-like descent into the underworld; the music sounds like you’re being tormented by all the shades in Hades. Drug use in mumble rap isn’t about meditation or even medication, it’s an act of self-flagellation.

  Yet for all the pills popped, the pain and the panic never go away. Trauma, of both the physical and emotional kind, is at the very heart of mumble rap. Listening to Lil Keed’s demented vocal contributions on his brother Lil Gotit’s “Runnin Bands”, you can hear the stress to his vocal cords as he strains and stretches himself trying to maintain his fraying falsetto. It’s harrowing and agonising to listen to as you almost hear taut strands of muscle fibre snapping in his throat. It’s the musical equivalent of the flesh-rending transformation in An American Werewolf in London, in which we see the protagonist’s entre anatomy get refashioned in real-time as he becomes a werewolf. As is so often the case in mumble rap, Auto-Tune enables emotional expression that artists are simply unable to achieve with their voices alone; at one point in “Runnin Bands”, Lil Keed lets off a scream that the effect turns into a whistle so impossibly piercing to the ear that it sounds like the cry of a bald eagle.

  Jabberwocky Jihad

  Information warfare is being waged against reality itself. An absurdist insurgency of freaks and fiends has taken over rap and our syntax is under attack. They weaponise clusters of indecipherable verbal cacophony and fire it straight into your brain. Language has always been a means of control and slang has always been the lexicon of resistance, but slime is the rejection of this paradigm in its entirety. The alphabet is a hex that has us hypnotised — under the spell of spelling — but mumble rappers are intellectual terrorists wreaking havoc on linguistic logic, law and order. It’s agitprop pop in a post-truth age.

  As you can imagine, the term “mumble rap” was initially intended as a slur. Coined in 2014 by VladTV interviewer Michael Hughes, the name was popularised by Wiz Kalifah in a 2016 New York radio interview on Ebro in the Morning. During the interview Kalifah condescendingly informed a younger generation of rappers that they needed to “evolve”, but what he couldn’t see was that these artists were the ones actually evolving rap through mutation and it was precisely this development that older hip-hop enthusiasts like himself found so offensive. Mumble rappers were doing away with traditional ideas of MC craft (clear diction, extended narratives, referentially dense lyrics), instead their music was exploring the possibilities of incantation and outright insanity. In the process, they rewrote the rules of rap forever.

  Mumble rap may be the first genre since the birth of rap itself to be defined pretty much entirely (or at the very least primarily) by its vocal innovations rather than particular instrumental attributes. A mumble rap track will combine frenzied phonetic — or, with Auto-Tune, phonetech — experimentation, a preposterous use of pitch that’s often neither recognisably melodic nor conversational, and the use of Auto-Tune on monotone raps to warp vocal timbres rather than to hit particular notes. Performers will wretch rather than rap or they’ll shriek or whoop or make some other bizarre and abstracted noise we don’t even have words for (and of course they’ll mumble from time to time too). Their tone will slide around with no particularly communicative intent. Future’s proto-mumble track “My”, for example, features Scooby-Doo falsettos that definitely aren’t tuneful, but are way too ridiculous to just be a part of the usual ups and downs of conversational intonation.

  Auto-Tune becomes frantic and convulsive when it’s used without a clearly intended tonal pitch in rapper’s voices. It’ll rapidly oscillate between different notes as it desperately scrabbles to latch onto a stable pitch, meaning that vocals tremble and undulate with a completely artificial vibrato. Usually, Auto-Tune smooths out voices, ridding them of their natural grit and inconsistencies, but in mumble rap artists use the effect for the opposite purpose: to completely destabilise their delivery by accentuating this warbling quality. At its most extreme, it sounds like there’s a little man in performers’ throats speed-boxing their tonsils like a punching b
ag; their voices flutter like butterfly wings. You can hear it in the words “big racks” being bleated out by Lil Gotit in the chorus of his track “Argentina”, or in Playboi Carti’s “Codeine”, where he sounds like he’s drowning in liquid Auto-Tune.

  Despite these more mutative applications though, this digitised warbling has also allowed mumble rappers to reinvent a vulnerable soulfulness for the Auto-Tuned age. The effect imbues voices with a quivering quality that makes performers sound like they’re crying. On “Section 8”, Lil Baby’s achingly intimate performance using the effect resembles, of all people, Tracy Chapman. At one point in “Global” he even raps “thinking about what I’ve been through, I could make a tear fall”, at which point bubbling Auto-Tune overwhelms his voice as though he’s collapsed into inconsolable blubbering. So many of the emotional signifiers experienced through mumble rap vocals don’t come from artists’ raw performance but are conferred by technology itself. What you’re hearing are sounds that are at once genuinely affecting while actually being artificially affected. It’s a new incarnation of humanity only attainable through technology.

  Hollowgraphic

  Computer-confected emotions are creepy. They’re unnerving and as such everything in mumble rap feels unreal. The genre’s soundscapes are a distressing mishmash of Heart of Darkness-style horror-exoticism, peacock-coloured oozing hallucinatory fluidity and an intangible holographic artifice. Tracks are full of gamelan bells, Pygmy whooping and The Wicker Man-esque wyrd folk flutes which have all been tampered with digitally, so that they’re murky or shimmering in a way that somehow makes them feel false, almost as if they’re computer-generated artificial memories.