Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  These ethnically eclectic instrumentals don’t conjure an Age of Aquarius Afrocentrism like the cosmic jazz of Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane and 70s Miles Davis, nor do they mirror the jet-setting cosmopolitan slickness of “world music”-era Timbaland (Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin”, Aaliyah’s “We Need a Resolution”). If anything, mumble rap’s instrumentals are an inversion of those frameworks. It’s an anti-escapism that uses overt unreality to cruelly remind listeners there is no way out, there is no utopian arcadia nor are there any boat parties in the Pacific full of crop-topped models for you. It’s pastoral eco-dystopia for the climate change age. It taps into something eerily pagan rather than paradise-like. The album covers depict an artist as a goat-headed Baphomet or a gargoyle-like creature or a mummified zombie or some other frightening form of folkloric idol.

  Any hint of bliss in mumble rap feels intangible, either as if it’s spectral or obscured by a mist of drug-induced amnesia. Music box bells — again, abstracted by various sonic effects — are deployed in loads of tracks, seemingly in there just to taunt you with this sense of the ungraspable sublime. Twinkling instrumentals that evaporate and dissolve into a sepia haze of indecipherable childhood experience and half-recalled dream. They sound as if they’re woven from snatches of ice cream van music, glistening fairy lights from long-forgotten Christmas evenings and lullabies that were played to you before you were properly conscious of yourself and the world around you. But it’s all so distant, it never properly immerses you, you can never really believe it’s true.

  Underlying mumble rap’s vocal morphosis is a sense of ontological flux. The voices in the genre have a shimmering, rippling sense of intangible artifice to them. All the contours that usually demarcate voices seem to seep and melt away. It’s like the “cinematic dissolve” in TV shows, when harps ripple and the screen undulates to signify that someone’s descending into a fantasy. The world you perceive around you suddenly goes blobby from slow buffering times. Drug guru Timothy Leary described an aspect of psychedelia he termed “dynamisation” as when “familiar forms dissolve into moving, dancing structures”, and something like this happens to the voice in mumble rap. Vocals wobble and warble as if they’re the last flickers of a candle before it dies and we can no longer see the reality around us.

  Mumble rap’s clotted sonics were really modern music’s creation from clay: “Out the Mud”, to quote a Lil Baby track title. Slime language was the primordial ooze of the mutant future. And yet, for hip-hop in the 2010s, mumble rap was only the beginning, there was so much more still to come…

  TOUCH THE SKY HEAVENLY: FRAG RAP

  Neurofuturism

  Frag rap takes mumble rap’s pioneering vocal processing and rhythmically reinvigorates it to mind-mangling effect. Through frag rap the “ad lib” — short bursts of background vocals, usually only a syllable or two used to compliment or counteract the main MC — becomes an artform, a whole exhilarating aesthetic unto itself. Performers like Migos and Playboi Carti use ad libs and fragmented rapping to metabolise sensation through binary rhythm, on and off staccatos constructed from ones and zeros, yes’s and no’s, sounds and silences. Each in-di-vid-u-al syll-a-ble is atomized into glimmering constellations of pixilated rhythm and musical Morse code. Ephemeral bursts of Auto-Tuned blips and blurts ricochet in the spaces between raps, they’re turbo-charged synapse sparks and jolts of voltage. Plug yourself into the neurological circuitry of frag rap. It isn’t music, it’s sonic electroshock therapy.

  Familiarise yourself with frag rap’s vocal rhythms, with social media’s information economy: they’re the same and our brains are being recalibrated by them. They’re teaching us the thought patterns and cognitive pathologies of the computer future. Pings. Pokes. Pop-ups. Snaps. Skips. Tiks. Toks. Tweets. Six second videos. Vlogger jump cuts. Character limits… This is the reality Young Thug’s reflecting in his and Travis Scott’s “Yeah Yeah”, and the one Quavo is in Migos’ “MotorSport” and Huncho Jack’s “How U Feel”, and the one Playboi Carti is in “@MEH”. Relish in the rapid and random dissemination of snippeted information. All stimuli will soon be imparted through the hyper-cybernetics of this technological Tourette’s syndrome. Mumble rap made mutation its central synaesthetic metaphor, but frag rap’s struck upon the real, most compelling cutting-edge of our impending reality, digital cognition.

  Through frag rap you get a glimpse of The Singularity, the pantheistic god-consciousness of the future online super mind. It presents the world as though perceived by omniscient digitised sentience inside the collective human hard drive. It’s the Cloud full of the fizzing nattering and chattering of crowd-sourced thought. A poly-consciousness in which a single electronic voice is fractured into many and converses with itself. The genre allows you to envision a global, user-generated schizophrenic nervous system that twinges and itches with every idea, inclination and feeling in existence as you become a single receptor in the neurology of humankind. Artificial voices exist inside amorphous noise, becoming the strobing information streams of a post-physical Matrix constructed within the collective human imagination — communication inside confected computer dreams.

  Dancing with Phantom Limbs

  “I can’t feel my body”, Future squawks in “Oxy”. “I just popped this Xan I can’t feel my face”, Playboi Carti slurs in “Place”. Frag rap is all about the abolition of the physical self and reconstruction in the impossible spaces of imagined realities — its sonic solipsism that decouples rhythm from muscular reflex and reaction. Oxycodone, Xanax, codeine — they all tranquilise, they all numb and they all nullify the nervous system, allowing artists to exist in disembodied states, so that frag rappers become brains without bodies, electronic souls pre-empting existence in a post-physical future.

  To enjoy frag rap is to induce your own electronic epilepsy — to succumb to rhythmic sound seizures. Derealisation, déjà vu and dissociative identity disorder are all effects associated with seizures and they’re all experienced when listening to frag rap too. It’s like sonic REM, but rapid mind movement rather than rapid eye movement. The music puts the listener into a state where their body switches off while your neurons fire chaotically and incoherently.

  Frag rap takes mumble rap’s vivid virtual soundscapes and makes them utopian; listen, for instance, to the intangible Chinoiserie of Huncho Jack tracks like “Black and Chinese” and “Dubai Shit”. But the genre goes a step further as artists’ voices create space too. Their raps are fragmented to the point that they become blocky and geometric, generating impossible audio architecture in the mind’s eye. Hollowed vocal reverbs create hallowed caves where myths are made. And with frag rap your mind is never situated in a single synaesthetic scenario for too long. Its jittering temporality means you’re teleported from one imagined terrain to the next, switching every split second. A voice will lurch out right in your face then it’ll cry from some faraway place. It’ll be dry one second then drenched in tsunami reverbs in the next, or it’ll be muscular in one moment and then ghostly out of nowhere.

  For decades, street music fetishised downward pressure — “the drop”, one drop, “Drop a Gem on Em” — it was firmly rooted below the feet to the streets and to the underground. Older fragmented music operated in this same framework too — footwork, as its name suggests, is drawn to the floor. Bounce music (its name indicative of going up, only to come down again) was all about the sonic simulation of (and lyrical preoccupation with) sex, in particular the vertical mechanics of it. Frag rap — if it’s even sexual at all — mimics orgasmic transcendence. The sublime, shivering, ejaculatory surrender to the para-physical realms of momentary physiological — and mental — obliteration.

  Something about frag rap’s slow tempos and dream-scape arrangements suspend staccato raps in frozen moments. Movement becomes telekinetic, occurring via the mind rather than from any solid impact. Frag rap’s all syncopation and no resolution. It’s a projectile vocal percussion that shoots into the air and never lands again. Quavo’s lyr
ics leap up and reach out to the cosmos: “when I take drugs I go to the moon”, “get high touch the sky”. Frag rap is musical antigravity. Todd Edwards-style garage, bounce music and litefeet (a regional style of New York hip-hop) were all earlier iterations of fragmented music which relied on sliced and diced samples that worked with bpms fast enough to generate a kind of centrifugal force that mimicked gravity, but frag rap tracks like Migos’ “Cocoon” don’t do so, they’re too slow. Instead, the music’s movements are darting and diagonal. The listener is jerked up or along a horizontal axis, but never down. Frag rap raises you. Your ears interact with the music in a vacuum — hovering above the sonic gorges and audio abysses of serene instrumentals — and you never come back again as you’re elevated ever further into the ether and into forever.

  Not content with merely disintegrating your body, frag rap wreaks havoc on your temporal awareness too, brutalising it in the way a genre like gabba does to you physically. Time itself becomes the medium through which you perceive momentum and velocity while listening to it. Frag rappers intricately perform audible origami with sheets of linear time, folding the past and the future in on themselves as ad libs reiterating the main vocal so that you live the same moment twice within a split second: “shawty bad” <<< “bad”. Time flickers and hiccups around artists’ utterances; voices flash before your ears like the neuralyzers in the Men in Black films, raps become mind-wipes that give you a kind of short-lived, rapid-onset form of Alzheimer’s disease.

  Listening to frag rap you feel as if you’re being broken down piece by piece so that your mind, your body and your soul all become atomised and everything that exists does so in a moment — not before, not after. Every thought, every blink and every breath feel completely separated from the next in your consciousness, each one is a disparate, self-contained reality all of its own. Every second becomes a genesis and an apocalypse.

  It’s Lit

  Frag rap’s future is made not of metal, nor of mumble rap-esque mutant fluid. It’s made of impalpable immaterials: vapour and light. On Quavo and Travis Scott tracks like “Huncho Jack” and “Go”, Auto-Tune and reverb turn voices into clouds of coruscating perfume. Everything in frag rap “flashes”, “shines” and “glows”. Any solid substances that are evoked in the genre are defined by how they interact with light. Artists’ processed vocals become crystalline and then liquefied — refractive then iridescent — as they interweave and dart between sleek cyborg liquid mercury melody and solid glacial raps.

  Gluttonous consumerism becomes intoxicating capitalist animism through the prism of frag rap’s sonic neuromythology. Performers are like prosperity theology mystics — at once shameless and shamanistic. Though it’s patently ridiculous for rappers to talk about buying luxury cars and having sex with big bummed girls as some kind of victory over Satan (which they do with no hint of irony), you get so caught up by the music that you can’t help but believe in what they’re saying. The sound worlds in frag rap are just so much larger than life that you become completely susceptible to the idea of this music as an epic, archetypal battle between the forces of good and evil; it’s taking the feeling of salvation-through-struggle you get in things like John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and Pharoah Sanders’ Elevation, but situating it in the soundscapes of the year 3050.

  Artists refer to luxury goods with such poetic coyness that you begin to digest lyrics as scripture. When they rap of being “flooded” with jewellery your mind doesn’t think of diamond-encrusted necklaces, but the Great Flood. When Offset raps “bought her a fur, look like a wildebeest” in Migos’ “Slippery”, you don’t picture a pretty girl in a coat but instead a golden calf or some kind of Ox-headed idol. Migos have a peculiar, and actually rather endearing, habit of featuring lyrics in which they rattle off lists of older relatives — uncles, aunts, grandmas — but the music’s so mystifying and otherworldly that their lyrics actually start to feel like a form of ancestral worship.

  Frag rap is the utopian inversion of mumble rap’s dystopia; a musical Apollo to mumble rap’s drugged-up Dionysius. It’s not gross, it’s glorious. The quasi-pastoralism you get in mumble rap, conjured by the genre’s flutes, exotic instrumentation and visual iconography, feels like folk horror Pagan paranoia compared with frag rap’s Edenic state. Drugs are dodgy in mumble rap, but in frag they are delightfully dreamlike. The genre upgrades your brain, making your thoughts fast and sharp, not slow and sludgy. And frag rap doesn’t feel like an illusion or lie. It really does conjure a gloriously shining life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  DRILL DURING THE 2010S

  NO FACE: UK DRILL AND THE AESTHETICS OF ANONYMITY

  Just 4 U London

  UK drill has all the best bits of British street music — the delirium-inducing drums, the backwards “dred” bass, the badman chatter — but with none of the imported foreign frills or fancy dress. There’s no Belgian Eurofuturist flights of sci-fi fantasy like you got with hardcore, no Americanised good times garage vibes and not even that much Jamaican rudebwoy roleplay like you had with ragga jungle. It’s British street music stripped of any of its imported dance music hallmarks. It’s London distilled to kill.

  Like in Power Rangers when all of the robot vehicles merge together to form a giant composite Megazord machine, UK drill takes all of London’s listening habits and plugs them into the circuitry of its unstoppable, colossal rhythmachine. British urban music has always specialised in these Frankenstein monster rhythms sewn together from cutlets of the most cutting-edge drumming going. With jungle in the 90s that meant chopping up hip-hop’s breakbeats in a way that replicated bashment’s jagged rhythms and then blasting the resulting patterns off at a million miles an hour to match rave’s rocket-propelled pulse. UK drill does something similar. It takes trap, chucks in tons of bashment’s rhythmic accents and then turns it all up to grime tempos, but goes even further by rearranging the results around African rhythms, reflecting the city’s ever-diversifying cosmopolitan makeup. The carnal, carnival drums you get in Afrobeats are sped up, chewed up and then spat out by UK drill to become tetchy trap ticks. They’re not sexy anymore. Instead, they’re like the scratchy sounds of a schizophrenic trying to pick an illuminati-implanted microchip out of their arm.

  UK drill has plucked the stiff, skeletal remains of jungle from out of the swamp of London’s collective folk memory. In the years since jungle’s demise, its rhythms have been transformed by rigor mortis. Though similar to jungle in many ways — with its fidgety, intricate asymmetry — UK drill’s drums are regimented, rigid and militarised. Drill’s about precision, not the frenetic flailing you got with jungle’s percussion. The automatic rifle fire of UK drill’s rolling snares are rattled off through a silencer, they’re clipped and cautious, not cacophonous and cantankerous. After all UK drill’s modernised London’s rhythmic sensibilities — drill’s drums aren’t breaks, they’re 808s.

  The genre takes its name from Chicago drill, but the similarity between the two styles is more sociological — psychological, even — than it is sonic. UK drill is like its Windy City namesake in terms of its street-realist lyrics, its hood videos and its associations with violent crime, but not particularly similar in terms of the actual sound of the music itself.

  Voodoo and Juju (West African witchcraft) linger in the ether of UK drill’s imagination. They’re referenced in lyrics and are the subject of wild online conspiracy theories about artists. Internet posters purport that performers are using these magical practices to, for example, beat court cases and even to come back to life after being murdered in gang warfare. But that’s the thing, while drill’s lyrics may be preoccupied with death, sonically it’s all about resurrection; it’s bringing London back to life.

  No Face

  Choosing an archetypal UK drill track is both easy and difficult. There’s so many of them to choose from. There are so many that sound alike. But really that’s the point, that’s how this genre works. To borrow Amiri Baraka’s phrase, UK drill is changin
g-same music (or, to use the genre’s vernacular for stabbing someone, it’s chinging-same music). Drill is comprised of an almost uniform sound world of muffled, funeral-march pianos, swampy bass, droplet drums and murky churchyard reverbs. Played for a lengthy period of time, it becomes meditative and immersive. While the instrumentation often encourages apathy, it can also seduce you into still surrender.

  UK drill’s lyrics fixate on physical death, but in another sense the genre’s sonics impart a kind of ego death in the listener that chimes with its aesthetic of anonymity: faces are masked, clothes are uniform, the collective gang identity trumps that of the individual. Rather than personalised nicknames, performers strip themselves of any individuality or character so as to become codified and conflated with their gang. Cast your eye over any given UK drill YouTube video and you will likely see a hieroglyphic patchwork of numbers and initials in the title — 410, 67, LTH — these are all signifiers of gang affiliation which are almost indistinguishable from the code-like monikers artists adopt for themselves: AM, LD, C1.

  In old American hip-hop “mathematics” was about uplifting yourself to become a “knowledge god” through the teachings of the Five-Percent Nation (a spinoff of the Nation of Islam), but UK drill’s numerical fixation simply speaks to a cruelly reduced view of human life. Loski, for example, mocked the death of four members of the rival gang 150 through the sum “they say 150, but it’s 146 instead”. Drill’s blurring of the boundaries between the individual and collective manages to both echo the collectivist unity of the bygone rave dream and represent its moral antithesis; British music’s gone from facilitating a drugged-up dancer’s “feel good” to a nihilistic gang member’s “feel nothing”.