Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  CHAPTER FOUR

  BASHMENT AT THE TURN OF THE 2020S

  FAIRYTALE BADMAN: DANCEHALL AFTER KARTEL

  They sing and moan and shout and scream. Every now and then by spell they go through abdominal contortions, just as if some infernal spirit of wondrous strength gripped them and through into wonderful convulsions every fiber of their being. Their eyes and faces with the demon of possession made a horrible site to see, and once you have seen it you will never forget it.

  — A.J. Emerick, Jamaica Mialism

  Free, Base

  No cocaine… I don’t want to go insane

  — Wayne Smith, “Under Mi Sleng Teng”

  “I used to smoke coke on the block.” Imagine it! Bashment, with all of its madness and manic chattering and fury and frenzy and ego and unrestrained extroversion, all of it off its head on coke! For decades dancehall had, as far as its lyrics were concerned, resisted the drug. Since the genre’s very inception in its digital incarnation in the mid-80s right up to the early-Auto-Tuned era — from “Under Mi Sleng Teng” to “Gaza Commandments” — no matter what other sonic and social twists and turns the music took, there was one constant message: just say no to coke. But that’s changing, there are now music videos where you can literally see artists snorting the stuff on camera. Demons have taken hold of dancehall’s soul.

  Though it’s true that Tommy Lee Sparta only “used to smoke coke” his music has seemingly never stopped feeding off of — and drawing from — these raw youthful experiences. Whether the drug permanently rewired his developing young mind or he still somehow gets a kind of trans-temporal contact high from his former self, Sparta’s sound is feverish, fiendish and foaming at the mouth. His output, which transformed all of bashment in the latter-half of the 2010s, is like the machine shrieking of Miles Davis’ cocaine- and amphetamine-fuelled Dark Magus reimagined for the Auto-Tuned twenty-first century.

  Tommy Lee Sparta pioneered what can only be described as a “goblin voice” style of Auto-Tune. Tracks of his like “Murda Dem”, “Darkness Rise” and “Target” are insane. In them, Tommy turns into a siren in both senses of the word, simultaneously occupying the role of a mythological, magically enchanting singer and an air raid alarm. Through some strange, nasal, squealed delivery Sparta intensifies Auto-Tune’s usual neon synaesthesia into something piercing and laser-like. If you could somehow stare at the sound he made, your retinas would instantaneously be singed to a crisp. His voice is so shrill that you can’t help but wonder if he’s not really human, but rather a military-grade weapon purpose-built for maximum penetrative capacity. He could slice a nuclear bunker in half with his vocals alone. Where drill and mumble rap tapped into the hopelessness of the late-2010s, Sparta’s siren-esque vocal effects encapsulated the sheer hysteria of the era.

  Sparta’s singing is laser-mind surgery. Listening to his music is like applying a defibrillator to your brain. You can’t even think when you hear his vocals; they bore into your forehead and incinerate your every idea. It’s as if the rage and chaos of the whole cosmos — of our entire kinetic reality — is being blasted straight into your head with your mind at the crushing infinity point of all existence; the cacophony of everything compressed into this audible infrared dot.

  His voice operates as a surging synapse signal with so much power that it makes your whole sentience seem sour. The sound he created is up there with the roaring distortion of the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” or the nanotech tapeworm of Phuture’s “Acid Trax”; a true musical shock of the new.

  If Thine Eye Be Evil

  It is the spoken word, the curse of the song, to which the special magic clings in all beliefs about obeah practice.

  — Martha Warren Beckwith, Black Roadways: A Study in Jamaican Folk Life

  “I’m gonna put on an iron shirt and chase the devil out of earth/I’m going to send him to outer space to find another race”, sang reggae legend Max Romeo in his 70s classic “Chase the Devil”. It seems that the devil heeded his instructions. Satan did find another race — an alien species of demonic dancehall artists — and chased them back through outer space and all the way back into bashment.

  The imp is a twenty-first-century archetype. From the motion capture CGI that turned a man into Gollum, to social media turning humans into “trolls”, these digitised goblin monstrosities are subliminal, mass-cultural cautionary tales about how technology can transform us, both physically and morally, into something grotesque. Dancehall’s gremlin-esque artists — the Tommy Lee Spartas of this world — are no different. What motion capture does with actors’ bodies, Auto-Tune maps onto the contours of these performers’ voices and transforms them into nightmares.

  Bounty Killer warned Vybz Kartel during the Gully vs Gaza war that his bleaching would turn him into a “deformed hunchback” or a “vampire”. With the generation of bashment artists who have emerged in the decade since, these fears of gothic monsters coming to life came true. Younger artists such as Tommy Lee Sparta and Alkaline bleached themselves to the extent they looked ashen, like the living dead (Alkaline’s name is in fact likely a reference to bleaching “soaps”). Their physicality was inhumanly spindly and scrawny, all contorted and crooked. The way Tommy Lee Sparta holds himself, for example, reminds you of those girls in exorcism films whose anatomy is mangled, angular and arachnid.

  Alkaline in particular looked completely horrifying in the first half of the 2010s. Not content with simply bleaching his skin, he claimed to have actually tattooed his eyeballs (which led fellow dancehall artist Mace to almost blind himself trying to do the same). His eyes were a solid carbon-fibre colour and they didn’t appear to have any pupils; they were just these gaping black abysses that created an effect unnervingly situated between Bambi-like wide-eyedness and the outright diabolical. Alkaline looked like Medieval depictions of jinn, coming across like a grotesque caricature of a genetically-modified “designer” baby.

  Conspiracy theories, in many ways society’s id, often conflate gender transitioning, genetic modification, cloning and cyborgs as elements of a literally diabolical scheme on the part of a Satan-worshipping cabal hell-bent on world domination. With Alkaline’s nightmarish self-presentation of the early 2010s, this paranoid premonition of the future materialised before our eyes. Alkaline ended up looking like a Vybz Kartel cloning experiment gone horrifically wrong.

  But with the track title “Obeah” — named after the sorcerers of Jamaican occult arts — Alkaline hinted at another, far less sci-fi context for his look. Antiquated accounts of obeah practitioners describe them as having a “‘wall-eye’ or some other peculiar facial deformity” (to quote nineteenth-century police officer Herbert T. Thomas), a description that was perfectly applicable to Alkaline in the first half of the 2010s.

  Obeah had become a fixture of Jamaica’s popular imagination thanks to Nanny and the Maroons, the guerrilla insurgents that fought against the British in the eighteenth century who, it was claimed, deployed sorcery to secure successes in anti-colonial combat. Where Vybz Kartel had used the name Gaza to signify and inspire underclass insurgency, the new generation of dancehall artists in the 2010s used new metaphors to describe the lives of outsiders and outlaws. In aligning themselves with “the antichrist”, with “witchcraft”, with “voodoo” and “pocomania” (a Jamaican folk religion centred on communion with spirits) these artists had suddenly transformed the iconography of Jamaican spiritual resistance: it wasn’t Rastafarian, it was sacrilegious.

  Diabolic Apparatus

  Auto-Tune was to Tommy Lee Sparta and Alkaline what turn-of-the-century psychoanalyst Victor Tausk referred to as the “schizophrenic influencing machine” imagined in the minds of the mentally ill to be controlling them against their will. Digital vocal effects have possessed Tommy Lee Sparta and his rival Alkaline, making them do things and become people they’re not; reaching feline vocal extremes solely to bring out the futurism of Auto-Tune.

  On “Target”, Sparta talks of warfare and yet he al
most sounds like Kate Bush on “Wuthering Heights”, with his searing soprano screeching. Likewise, Alkaline’s vocal timbre in “Whey Yuh Have” — which inexplicably keeps getting pitched up so that its fleetingly flicking into a female register — is completely out of whack with his macho proclamations like “why the fuck would I want to be another man/My life’s happy, plus my cocky long”.

  To listen to Tommy Lee Sparta’s lava lamp morphing persona on “Murdah Dem” though is to witness the true breadth of his sonic schizophrenia. Sparta jump-cuts between Freddy Kruger cackling, bellowing like a muezzin from the next millennium, then growling like a rabid hellhound ripping raw flesh off of your bone. It’s as if someone keeps switching the Snapchat filters of his cognition. He makes you ask yourself the question: Once we interface with machines, who will truly be in charge, us or them?

  Stealing Shadows

  Like Lynda Blair’s constant vomiting in The Exorcist, the devil possessed dancehall in the 2010s and plagued it with all sorts of peculiar pathologies. With every release of Alkaline’s in the first half of the decade, his voice seemed to be afflicted by one disease on top of another. On tracks like “Gyal Bruk Out” or “Kweng Dem”, Alkaline would have all these pitch-shifted, multi-tracked Auto-Tuned voices snaking in and out of the arrangement so that it felt like your ear had threadworm. Or his voice would somehow of crunch through some kind of chorus effect making you feel as if there was a broken bone poking out from your flesh after a car accident. His contributions to “Above a Dem” were particularly freakish, with him rabies-spluttering liquid silicone into your ears.

  Vybz Kartel, the original “devil’s advocate”, was particularly affected by this phenomenon; his vocals didn’t just make him seem ill, he sounded as if he was dead. He became a mournful shadow of his former, glorious self. Kartel’s sound had gone from gruff to ghostly, from cyborg-like to spectral, in the years after his incarceration. Though he’s not actually allowed to record or use electronic devices in his cell (he could face solitary confinement as punishment) his Instagram activity and topical prison-era lyrics suggest he’s doing so, and evading detection. On releases like “Highest Level” and “Infared” you can hear the haunting sonic hallmarks of his captivity, his voice sounds hollow and illusory. The audio quality of what he’s sneaking out is so poor that it sounds as if he’s swallowing cobwebs as he raps. His tracks sound worn, distorted and almost translucent by virtue of the gamut of effects — overdrive, pitch shifting, treble-heavy EQing — used to mask and give flavour to these poor production values. It’s the sound of downfall; tragedy turned into timbre.

  The Rock of Our Salvation

  Bashment’s mid-2010s dark patch, it turned out, didn’t stem from permanent demonic possession, but from the purging of Pazuzu: it was an exorcism. All of the frenzied flailing and wailing that defined the era made way for a new day as the genre did a complete 180 at the end of the decade. You can see this shift just looking at Alkaline — he stopped bleaching and his eyes went back to normal (it turns out those “tattoos” were actually just contact lenses, even though he’d spent three years insisting that wasn’t the case) and in the process he went from being heinously hideous to rather handsome.

  Things had just gotten too grim for bashment. Everyone had been at war with one another; Tommy Lee Sparta and Jahmiel, Popcaan and Mavado, Aidonia and Masicka (aka the Genacyde Boss), Alkaline and anyone with a microphone it seemed (Vybz Kartel, Popcaan, Sparta…). Outside of dancehall, Jamaica was suffering too. A state of emergency was put in place as homicide rates rocketed up in 2017 to levels not seen in a decade — both Alkaline and Tommy Lee Sparta were arrested during this period on suspicion of violent crime, though both were released afterwards. Rather than reflecting the murderous mayhem taking place on Jamaican streets as Gully vs Gaza-era bashment had done, the genre’s sound-scapes became an escape. Producers ditched the morbid orchestration and opted for smooth, soothing and silken plucked synths, sunshine steel pans and tropical organs. While tracks still may have had titles like “Total Murda” or lyrics like “split him head in a half with a pick axe”, as a listening experience bashment became lush, not luridly violent.

  This newer strand of bashment needs to be experienced live though, not (just) for the usual reasons — the atmosphere, the girls, the drugs, the volume, the MCs — but because of the way that the soundsystem itself is now plugged into Auto-Tuned artists’ cyborg circuitry. For a track to make complete sense you don’t only need to hear performers Auto-Tuned, you need to hear these artificial voices then pitched up at dances until they become helium-squeaking, solar screams. Tracks like Rygin King’s “Tuff” or Alkaline’s “City” just don’t have the same captivating magic without being sped up Alvin and the Chipmunks-style. Performers like Alkaline, Rygin King and Popcaan reach Tommy Lee Sparta degrees of vocal extremes when this happens, but rather than having goblin voice, these artists sound seraphic — they become like pre-Raphaelite cherubs amid their azure instrumental arrangements. Their voices are soul-dissolving as their tongues become the flaming sword of Uriel; like the dub producers of the 70s, these artists weaponise trebles in audio religious warfare.

  The reaction of audiences to this sound has also become an input into this new musical motherboard. Partygoers became data in an algorithm that increasingly pushed for shriller vocals. Vybz Kartel in the late 2000s was innovator-as-individual — he was a singular Übermensch trailblazer — but his fascistic vision gave way to a kind of sonic democracy in dancehall as it was now crowds that changed the sound of the music. It was bottom-up, collective sonic innovation, not top-down cultural transformation.

  Bashment became (to borrow a phrase from Erik Davis) techgnostic gospel during this era, a shimmering Pentecostalism in which the congregation whipped itself into splendorous ecstasy. DJs (confusingly, the title given to the MCs at bashment parties) erupted into frenzied bouts of proselytising, ferociously roaring in tongues with such joyous fervour they sounded as if they were having convulsing, violent orgasms. Gone were the lyrics about obeah and the occult. Christ was alive in this music, from the lyrics of Mavado and Jahmiel’s “Badness” to the repentant church organs of Vybz Kartel’s “Then You and Me”.

  Mutant RnB

  RnB’s not what it used to be. There was a stretch in the at the turn of millennium where it’d consumed not only pop music, but hip-hop too — it felt like there wasn’t a rap track released that didn’t have Ashanti on the hook. But it’s far less central to music now; it’s been siphoned off really just as pop-proper (Rihanna, Chris Brown) or something a bit hipsterish (PartyNextDoor, SZA). In Jamaica and the UK this lighter brand of bashment has filled the void left by RnB.

  Not only did this style of bashment cleanse the dancehall spiritually, it gave it a wholly new delicate eroticism. Bashment’s traditional jackhammer sexual athletics — not only expressed in the lyrics but implied but in its rigid-yet-pumping drum patterns — are rendered sensual through the smooth textures and warm organs of track arrangements. Everything is so impossibly digitally pristine that it sounds like having sex through an Instagram filter; it isn’t so much “dutty wine” as it was refined and divine. Never before had the “gyal tune” reigned so supreme, as artists like Popcaan became bashment Casanovas caressing your ears with seductive pop songs like “My Type”. It got so pervasive that even gunman tunes sounded like gyal tunes.

  But where RnB was about the intimate humanity of the voice, this new sexy bashment was all about an arousing unhumanity. Alkaline’s voice sounds like tape being fast-forwarded or some radioactive atomic wasp whizzing around in a jar. His vocals are so bizarrely Auto-Tuned on tracks like “Perfect”, “Depend Pan Nobody” and “Nuh Wife” it makes you feel like you’re fucking in the future as sexual magnetism seems to radiate out of Alkaline from some kind of phallic tractor beam.

  For the first time, the Auto-Tuned mutant future wasn’t dystopian, it was devotional and even sexy. This lighter bashment made morphosis seem orgasmic and even ra
pturous. These new Auto-Tuned humanoids could be joyous and coital, not just deformed and demonic. It was a divine respite from the darkness in dancehall before. Synaesthetic sunshine shone on the genre, but it wouldn’t be long until the spirits took over…

  THIRD EYE OPEN: TRAP DANCEHALL AND TRINIBAD

  Through the Gate

  Jamaica has captured trap and taken it hostage. It’s bound it, broken its bones and remoulded its rhythms. Through musical coercion the island’s producers have forced the genre to convert to the country’s sonic sensibilities. Trap’s rigid drum patterns were the last holdover of the Metal Machine era — a faint, fading trace of the old once-future — but in trap dancehall these rhythms become carnal. They move from the waist, they’re sexy and more “tribal” than they are techy — just listen to Intence’s “Nuh Regular Bwoy” or Skillibeng’s “Defy the Odds”. But this music is far more than just some inevitable infusion of trap into bashment, it’s so much more exciting, and so much more mind-bending, than that.

  The vocal processing in trap dancehall radically trans-mutates you. It disintegrates and rearranges you. Voices, the vectors of our shared humanity, becomes multiplied, virtualised, vapourised and eviscerated in the genre. Artists sing with a thousand tongues. Their throats become potion-concocting cauldrons. Vocal cords are transformed into these wormholes brimming with so many effects that your sentience just gets completely mangled by them.

  No music has ever pushed the processed voice to such impossible, ear-defying extremes before. Never has there been the kind of vocal morphosis like that heard in trap dancehall and its sonically desolate, Trinidadian sister-genre Trinibad. Listen, if you can even bear it, to Big Voice’s thermonuclear fire-breathing on “Chedda”. Or listen to Shane O’s “Deep Freeze” or Shawn Storm’s “Lasco”. Entire voicescapes emanate from these man-machine performers when they’re augmented by computer technology. Trap dancehall is where the transhuman meets the transcendent.