Light gets spliced through voices in trap dancehall. Vocals sound as if they’re being pushed through the sharp wires of an egg-slicer as layers of multi-tracked, pitch-shifted Auto-Tuned vocals seamlessly, synthetically blend together in uncanny artificial harmony. It takes a while to figure out quite why what you’re hearing sounds so strange in tracks like Squash’s “Prodigal”, Chronic Law’s “Falsifier” and Daddy1’s “Main Danger”. The effect’s subtle but it makes speech sound like the surface of cracked clay. Single artists speak with the multiplied cries of a discorporate many.
Vybz Kartel’s Auto-Tuned vocals at the turn of the 2010s were 2D. Tommy Lee Sparta’s refined this further until his were just a one-dimensional spot at the epicentre of your consciousness. But with trap dancehall not only is depth reintroduced, about forty-seven other dimensions are too. Rebel Sixx — Trinidad and Tobago’s towering musical titan — perpetually phases and fluctuates between multiversal realities in his tracks. He’s forever suspended in the slipstreams of quantum superposition as he manages to simultaneously manifest in every form imaginable. Like the hall of mirrors visual distortions observers experience near neutron stars and black holes — multiple-imaging, the wavelengths of light stretching and squashing — Rebel Sixx’s vocal timbre shape shifts at every turn.
In his tracks — like “Me Will Dweet”, “Quick Evil Pt. 2”, “Dem Know”, “Evilous”, “Parliament”, “Rifle War” and “Looney” — Rebel’s voice will be shattered and fractal in one moment, then squished and squeaky in the next, but then bulbous and bubble-shaped immediately afterwards as successive layers of multi-tracking, pitch-shifting, reverbs, choruses and fuck knows what else are interfaced with his Auto-Tune. His voice will sound like anything from the radiant curvature of sunshine around the Earth’s atmosphere to the jagged layers of off-centre red and blue you see when you view 3D images without the special glasses on. Rebel Sixx’s music is an exercise in bending, refracting and contorting synaesthetic light.
The Delirium of Negation
Trap dancehall and Trinibad exist in the shadow of impending catastrophe — in the looming, gaping jaws of an imagined apocalypse. They feel like pre-emptive eulogies to human civilisation. It’s music haunted by machines. Visitations in virtual space. Synthetic spectres swarming through your synaesthesia.
Imagine a music made a millennium from now being uncovered another million years into the future: that’s how trap dancehall sounds. It’s unearthed a fossilised future that makes you feel as if you’re listening to it via restored holograms recovered from obsolete technology. You get that grainy, ghostly quality with it that you also get with old gramophone recordings, it’s almost archaeo-logical-sounding. Trap dancehall’s bass is subterranean. Its reverbs situate you in long-forgotten temples. Whole ancient civilisations sound as if they’re submerged beneath the soundscapes of the Fully Gaza and Narcos riddims. If your ears could squint, they might be able to make out some bustling bazaar buried underneath the layers of filters and reverb that obscure the ouds and flutes of Rebel Sixx’s “Tight & Good”, but it’s all been wiped from the pages of time. All the psychedelic potential of a decade’s worth of vocal innovations in bashment are unleashed thanks to trap dancehall’s new soundscapes.
Skulls and helmets of the fallen adorn the covers of trap dancehall artwork. The genre doesn’t worship murder and death like the bashment of old, it worships the dead themselves. Shawn Storm and Skillibeng sound hollow, dusty and mummified in their music. Storm even calls himself a “zombie”. Spectral singing weaves and glides its way through instrumentals. Chronic Law’s “Feel It”, Intence’s “Through the Gate”, these tracks sound as if they’re running off of telekentic fossil fuel extracted from buried souls.
Like dub, trap dancehall’s a time machine that takes you forward only to go back. Its exotic instrumentation doesn’t suggest some geographic exotica so much as it does a temporal one. The genre exists in that sweet spot between two mystifying unknowables — the ancient past and distant future, science and superstition, myth and machine, magic and engineering.
Another Duppy
To understand Trinibad is to wander through the desolate corridors of abandoned cognition; it has no memories and no associations. The music doesn’t harken back to anything, nor does it fill in the blanks. Rather it leaves you suspended in a perpetual year zero. Instrumentally it’s synaesthetic aphantasia. Listening to it you hallucinate states of consciousness but not colours or shapes or places or people.
Trinibad has wiped the archives of your mind. Frap rap sounded like a utopia in which consciousness was uploaded into computerised dreams, but with Trinibad the system crashed and all you’ve been left with is an empty shell of yourself trapped forever in virtual unreality. President’s “Seat of War Riddim” — used in Rebel Sixx’s “Killing Feeling” and Tafari’s “Buss Meh Gun” — performs audio acupuncture on your brain. It’s needling strings and reversing noises sound like syringes extracting fluid memories from your mind.
The effects of the sampling era stemmed from producers curating cultural memory. Ragga jungle tracks like Red Light’s “Sensi” seemed to ingest and digest the whole history of Jamaican soundsystem culture, only to then regurgitate it back out as a mangled machine mish-mash of shared references and touchstones. East Coast rap like Nas’ Illmatic did this in a more sophisticated way with the American soul tradition. But Trinibad — as with most of the cutting-edge music at the turn of the 2020s — feels as if it exists entirely outside our cultural reality and timeline. It doesn’t use any recognisable samples nor any culturally evocative sounds (no blippy 80s electro-style synths, for example, no faux-film score orchestration). Trinibad cuts you off from your body and your memories and makes everything hauntingly empty.
Vybz Kartel’s first Auto-Tuned tracks were all about emotional primary colours, and when he used the effect he turned the exposure up on these feelings a million-fold until they became blinding. His music wasn’t muddy, it expressed outright joy or rage or lust — there was nothing ambiguous or melancholic to it. But Trinibad is emotion in a social media world, it’s isolation with a digital sheen. Nothing really exists in it. Nothing’s quite experienced. It encapsulates the bleakness of our digitised existence.
The Evolving Physiology of Futureshock
Shock can trigger your fight-or-flight mechanisms or it can stun you. With rave in the 90s it was the former, as drugged-up dancers embraced panic and frenzy; (adrenaline) rushing on a cocktail of speed — of both kinds — siren samples and “Babylon shall fall” dog barks. Trinibad by contrast is paralysing. As with the Xanax-laced rap of the 2010s, Trinibad medicates itself against anxiety. It’s numbing, narcoleptic and frozen with fear. It’s instrumentally taciturn. Sonically catatonic.
Boy Boy’s “Adrenaline” isn’t the call to action its name implies, but rather the soundtrack to learned helplessness — of post-traumatic surrender. Rebel Sixx’s Shock Value doesn’t jolt you, it’s not a sonic stimulant but an audio depressant that dissolves you into dissociative dreamspace. With “Cramp Dem”, Rebel Sixx creates a nervous nirvana, a disembodied wonderment tinged with a hint of guttural apprehension. You’d want to say it’s oceanic, but that’s not quite the case, it’s neither warm nor weighty enough for that; it’s more dispersive than it is immersive. It’s an audible near-death experience. Sentience experienced without a self. It’s the sound of silence, the heat death of the musical universe.
From Dollar Sign to Dollar Sign
Listen how far dancehall’s come in a decade. In 2009 Vybz Kartel released his anthem “Dollar Sign”. As if to announce the emergence of a dancehall dynasty, ten years later his son Likkle Addi released a trap dancehall track of the same name. Vybz Kartel’s “Dollar Sign” is tough, muscular and imposing; Addi’s — which uses the “Fully Gaza Riddim” — is woozy, fumous and hexing. On the track Addi interpolates the chorus of his dad’s “Dollar Sign”, creating an eerie impression that it’s the same song, but at a later, more ad
vanced stage of dematerialisation. If Kartel’s song had left behind the physical body and real space for the digital realm, this is what it would sound like.
This all takes on an extra poignancy when you factor in the life circumstances of the father and the son. Vybz Kartel was sentenced to life imprisonment in 2014 when Lickle Addi was still only a child, and Kartel’s absence imbues Addi’s song with a tragic resonance. Kartel can’t be an everyday physical presence in his son’s life, but exists most of the time as an abstracted media image and virtual icon; a cultural father more than an actual one. It’s a testament to how humanised technology has become that an ambient instrumental can symbolically refract the literally intangible quality of a disrupted and dysfunctional father-son relationship.
In a mythopoetic sense, Sikka Rymes (Kartel’s cousin and spitting image) and Lickle Addi feel like the culmination of the post-human experimentation that Vybz Kartel embarked upon at the turn of the 2000s into the 2010s. The Gaza Crew chieftain began the new decade technologically modifying himself through skin bleaching and Auto-Tune. Throughout the 2010s, artists like Alkaline and Tommy Lee Sparta came along who pushed these metamorphic technologies of self-reinvention even further. Then at the very end of the decade, Lickle Addi and Sikka Rymes arrived in the popular consciousness: a pair of genetically-related Kartel clones, who magically enabled the incarcerated icon to be in the world despite his confinement. That clones like these could emerge within dancehall is an appropriately resonant ending to the 2010s, the first truly post-human decade for music.
Trap dancehall and Trinibad are the culmination of an era’s worth of innovation. They’re the latest iteration of a loose musical lineage that began with Auto-Tuned bashment and Afrobeats at the turn of the 2010s and which includes all the most exciting music of the last ten years or so. Mumble rap’s mutation is in trap dancehall. Frag rap’s cavernous majesty’s in there. Tommy Lee Sparta’s screeching vocals are in there. Even drill has made its way in with tracks like Vybz Kartel’s “Badman” and Skillibeng’s “My Gun”. And with trap dancehall and Trinibad the common denominator of all these Auto-Tuned genres is brought to the fore, it’s all about the abstraction of the self. Artists technologically augment their voices, and by proxy themselves, so that they become Übermenschen and oozy men and goblins and ghosts.
At the turn of the 2020s there’ve been stories of genetically modified babies being born in China and thousands of people in Sweden having microchips inserted into their arms. Humanity’s on the precipice of a post-human future and genres like trap dancehall, in their way, pre-empt this. The Auto-Tuned supermen and sub-men found in the music — these sonic gods and gremlins — act as inspirations and cautionary tales about the new hyper-humanity unfolding before our eyes. They magnify what’s magnificent and what’s malicious in us. Whether you like it or not, street music in the last decade or so — more than any other style of music or entertainment — has created a futurism fit for this emerging world. Trap dancehall is the latest in this post-human musical lineage. With any luck, it won’t be the last.
CONCLUSION
FUTURE MANIA
Music simulates the future. It war-games it. All those sci-fi sounds it produces, all of the vivid and visceral audio imagery it conjures, are premonitions and prophecies of the world that awaits us. You can be a cynic and say this is all bullshit (and you may well be right), but music becomes so much more rewarding if you don’t. So fuck it, have some fun. Suspend your disbelief for a bit and allow these musical delusions to run amok.
No other popular art form is still charging forward into the future like music is. It seems to be the only medium still envisioning novel Tomorrows. Like a Voyager satellite, music is this lone, isolated technology ploughing through the outer cosmos of our collective dreamspace.
There used to be a time when science fiction movies were these undeniable cultural touchstones — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator, The Matrix — and they provided a framework for the future music of their day. Everything from Sun Ra to Detroit techno was lifting from these films and from other popular media like them. The generation who created jungle, for example, had grown up on Star Trek and Star Wars, so ideas like “warp drive” and “hyper drive” were there in their conceptual bloodstream, helping them make sense (consciously or otherwise) of the lightspeed beats they were hearing.
But that era’s over now. Sci-fi is no longer producing these kinds of omnipresent cultural monuments. It’s not giving a definitive form to the futurism of our collective imagination and that’s actually quite exciting: it makes future music that much more mysterious. In the last fifteen years, new noises have been uncovered by musicians that we have no set way of interpreting or wrapping our imaginations around. Sounds have been created that make no sense; they have no correlates in the wider culture so they just seem to be completely alien to our ears.
Our futures have become hazy, fluid, malleable and at times contradictory as the mediums through which we get our future fix have become fractured and scattershot. Tracks subconsciously extrapolate entire tomorrows from a whole range of diffuse and disparate sources. There’s climate change, there’s the ghostly intangibility of digital existence, there’s post-truth, there’s the kind of tech-savvy superstition you get with ISIS and QAnon (who use cutting-edge technology to peddle all sorts of Dark Ages delusions about Satan worshippers and the like) and then there’s the radical morphosis you get in video game avatar creation and deep fakes and those apps that transform and refashion your face in all sorts of demented ways… All this stuff is being subliminally fed into our new understanding of this peculiar and uncanny idea of the decades, centuries and millennia ahead.
Music in the last decade or so has taken all of these hovering futurist threads and woven them together into a glorious new sonic tapestry depicting unprecedented utopias and dystopias. There’s a whole sonic mythology hinted at in new music, in which mankind dematerialises and inhabits these virtual realities where we can endlessly modify ourselves and shape-shift to become demons, demigods, spirits, sprites, angels and apparitions. It depicts an occasionally glorious, often horrifying hyper-humanity attained through digital technology.
Like the ghost girl in The Ring or the phantasm in The Poltergeist, the future has a habit of climbing out of our screens and consuming reality itself. In the 1960s HAL 9000, the AI antagonist from 2001: A Space Odyssey, was make-believe, but through everyday AI like Siri and Alexa he’s pretty much become real. The robot armies of The Terminator films were just figments of the imagination. But now “bot armies” are a real thing. The membrane between reality and the imagination is porous; dreams are bleeding into our waking world. So you better get to grips with this new sonic science fiction. There’ll come a time when it’ll start coming true and it’ll start coming for you.
Music, after all, simulates the future.
GENRE CHRONOLOGIES
THE SOUNDS OF NOW
Bow! Bow! Bow!
Before we even get into specific scenes and styles, something needs to be said about the general instrumental sound palette of modern street music. At the turn of the 2010s there were two trends in US rap that, over the course of a decade, would combine with one another and in doing so give birth to the overall timbral flavour found in mumble rap, frag rap, UK drill and a little later on in trap dancehall and Trinibad too.
The first of these was a dreamy take on hip-hop called cloud rap which, as its name indicates, was based on vaporous, airy and ethereal arrangements. You had tracks like ASAP Rocky’s “Peso” that twinkled with a fairy-dust (Tinker)bell main motif, and Lil B’s “I’m God” that sounded like producer Clams Casino had done a rap remix of a half-remembered Enya concert plucked from someone’s subconscious.
Though it initially began life as a niche internet genre, cloud rap’s ambience soon spread to street music around the world. You can hear the influence of “Peso” for example in mid-2010s proto-UK drill tracks like 67’s “Take It Ther
e” and “Hookahs”. But this serene sound was only one side of rap at the turn of the 2010s. There was a completely different style dominating mainstream hip-hop at the time too.
“Trap” has been floating around as a genre descriptor for decades. You can basically use it to describe any type of lethargic, 808-based hip-hop with tempos below 100bpm or so — everything from Three Six Mafia tracks like “Now I’m High, Really High” from the mid-90s through Gucci Mane and Young Jeezy releases in the 2000s and right up to present-day frag and mumble rap.
But something wonderful happened to trap in 2010 that set everything that’s come since apart from the trap that came before. The production was suddenly stepped up and trap tracks became these sonic colossuses. Trap had always had a borderline kitsch quality before — its defining 808 drums and booming bass had a Lego-like clunkiness to them, making them sound like a preset on a children’s music toy. But now the music was jacked up on the audio equivalents of dick pumps, Viagra pills and penis enlargement surgery. The whole genre was bulbous and bombastic. Just compare a 2009 Lil Wayne track like Young Money’s feeble-sounding “Steady Mobbin” to his humungous “6 Foot 7” from only a year later.
To picture a newer trap track like Rick Ross’ “MC Hammer” was to visualise a man with basketball-sized testes swinging between his legs. In fact, in the early-2010s rap sounded how Rick Ross looked. Bald, bulky and bearded, his physical presence alone dripped with tectonic-shifting levels of testosterone.
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