Trap became a kind of steroidal brutalism thanks to producers like Lex Luger (aptly named in honour of a bodybuilder/wrestler) and Mike WiLL Made-It in the early-2010s. Tracks like Waka Flocka Flame’s Luger-produced “Bustin at Em” and Ace Hood’s Mike WiLL-made “Bugatti” featured snare drums that crunched like bones under jackboot heels, basses that rumbled like besieged cities being aerially bombarded, orchestration that recoiled like artillery kickback and shrieking synths that sounded like a dentist’s drill boring straight into your skull.
Without the combination of Luger-style might and cloud rap-inspired intangibility, late-2010s tracks like Hucho Jack’s “Saint Laurent Mask”, Intence’s “Dope” or Moscow17’s “Scoreboard” wouldn’t have happened.
The popularity of these particular, contradictory traits in modern street music do subliminally seem to tap into the way we experience online existence. On the one hand, digital interfaces are all about dematerialization — cutting users off from the physical world — and post-cloud rap music mirrors this in its impalpability. But of course the Internet has also birthed a fiendish kind of stimuli culture. Teenage music audiences have been conditioned by digital communication and entertainment technology (phones, computers, games consoles) to become sensation junkies and human processing power has upgraded itself to keep up with the ever-increasing processing power of our new technology. Daily digital, multi-media, multi-sensory bombardment has remade our brains and trap’s maximalist qualities reflected this. The over the top, stomping trap-inspired elements of modern music actually sound like how it feels to interface with these mindless arousal machines, these hardcore war and porn portals. This music is the sound of now in more ways than one.
MUMBLE RAP
Becoming Biological
One of mumble rap’s big breakthroughs was taking the sound of Auto-Tune and turning it into something squishy, sticky, viscid and liquefied. Though this aesthetic didn’t fully materialise until the mid-2010s, there were a couple of artists in the late 2000s already edging towards this style of Auto-Tune. In bashment you had Blak Ryno’s glutinous glissandos swooping through tracks like “Gaza Christmas”, “Whine Up Yuh Body” and “Informa”, but in terms of hip-hop, Lil Wayne was really the first American artist to make Auto-Tune sound adhesive, pre-empting mumble rap’s mouth-sounding slimy cyborgism by a good half-decade or so.
From his not-quite-human, “goblin”-esque persona to his dreadlocks and the recurrence of the “Lil” prefix, Lil Wayne’s influence can be found all over mumble rap. His croaky vocals and squawked speech interfaced with Auto-Tune in a way that set him apart from his pitch-corrected contemporaries like Kanye West and T-Pain in the late 2000s. He sounded as if he’d just glugged down a whole bottle of glue before recording and was now having to heave his lips and tongue apart with every word he uttered. Listening to “Got Money” for instance, he didn’t sound like an android; his goblin gurgling was more reticent of those greasy clumps of pubic hair you have to dig out the shower drain.
“Stacks on Deck” was a particularly prescient effort from Wayne. It’s not a track you listen to, but one you wade through. It smothers your mind with sonic saliva. Syllables squelch out of Wayne with such disgusting tangibility you picture him as having a sea slug for a tongue. The track’s almost a form of audio dermatology, an exercise in making luminous mucous move within your skin.
Making a Monster
Future was the next artist to take Lil Wayne’s liquefied Auto-Tune aesthetic and run with it in the 2010s. He invented the whole “mumbling” style of rapping, which became central to making Auto-Tune sound as if it was dissolving in artists’ mouths.
This technique was evolved by Future over a mixtape run that began with 2014’s Monster. “Forever Eva” — the last track of his follow up mixtape Beast Mode — was a truly unsettling example of this new use of Auto-Tune. When you listen to it, you get the impression Future’s dissolute drugginess has damaged his brain irreparably as the track’s chorus just becomes this audible drool in your ears. Future essentially wails out the title phrase “forever ever” so that it sounds like he’s hollering “weeeh weeeh” at you — it’s just excruciating moaning, not an articulated verbal statement of emotion.
As the years went by this mumbled technique became more and more uncanny-sounding. Lil Baby’s slurred words on tracks like “Section 8” and “Get Ugly”, for example, all seep and bleed into one another until you’re just left listening to these murky whirlpools of indecipherable babbling. Imagine the liquid metal T-1000 from the Terminator franchise doing some kind of lava lamp-like interpretive dance, that’s how Lil Baby’s voice comes across on these tracks.
Another of Future’s Auto-Tune innovations during this era was to use the effect over sombre monotone vocals so as to highlight their textural qualities rather than using it with any specific melodic intent. On “Hardly”, for example, he does these weird seal barks during the chorus as each iteration of the word “hardly” emanates from further and further back in his throat. Thanks to Auto-Tune, an alarming sort of digitised audio-film forms over his voice that makes him sound as if he’s being asphyxiated with a plastic bag over his head. But for my money DJ Khaled’s “I Got the Keys” features some of Future’s absolute best texturising Auto-Tune — it makes his vocals sound frazzled and crackled in an incomprehensibly deranged way.
Future, more than any other artist, rescued Auto-Tune in the 2010s. For a while during the beginning of the decade, the effect had fallen out of favour, it’d been relegated to the rank of “silly 2000s fad” as performers moved on from using it. But Future proved that rather than homogenising voices, Auto-Tune could be used and abused in a whole multitude of new creative ways. It was only after he revived it that you then got this resurgence of pitch-correction creativity happening not only in US rap, but also in bashment too with the likes of Tommy Lee Sparta.
The Walls Are Closing
Drug music tends to come in two stages: first as farce, then as tragedy. You get a blissful beginning that’s joyous and often a bit whimsical, and then a grim and gritty phase that arises as the fiendishness kicks in and the spectre of overdose death looms. Luckily for the listener, this second, darker stage is often the more innovative and interesting period, which was definitely the case with mumble rap.
If you go back and listen to Young Thug’s earlier output from the beginning of the 2010s — things like 1017 Thug — it’s infantilised to the point of being annoying. Yes, he was sowing the seeds of vocal abstraction that would blossom later in the decade, but as a listening experience it was just plain grating.
Young Thug really came into his own during the middle of the decade with Barter 6 and his Slime Season mixtape series. When people talk about music “maturing” it’s normally completely gross — Sting with a lute, smooth jazz, jungle… that sort of thing — it’s a delibidinising nullification of what Luke Davis refers to as “teenage idiot energy”. But in Young Thug’s case this maturation was great, it completely recontextualised his vocal dramatics so that they no longer sounded puerile, they became paranoid and psychologically tormented.
During the mid-2010s, Young Thug released tracks like “Overdosin” that actually sounded like hospital-isation. You got this gasping white noise that resembled strained wheezing through a ventilator. There were these palpitating kick drums that reminded of you of a slowing heartbeat while in the background you could hear a faint descending synth that was like the sound of a heart rate monitor. Then there were other tracks like “Quarterback” and “Big Racks”, full of banshee screams or ratcheting sounds that felt like the first turns of some diabolical carousel twinkling with the fairy lights of lost souls. Through Thug’s new, brooding soundscapes you got to actually appreciate the innovations he’d made. The way he played with pitch and phonetics and schizophrenic aesthetics was new and it’d prove to be crucial for rap moving forward.
Future Thugs
Mumble rap in the latter-half of the 2010s was all about combi
ning and reconciling Future’s technological innovations with Young Thug-style vocal experimentation. It took Thug’s erratic extremity and plugged it into the Auto-Tuned tomorrow-machine to give it a completely futurist (or better yet Future-ist) sheen, so that you’d get things like Playboi Carti’s “Codeine”, combining Carti’s toddler-esque “baby voice” (as it’s known by fans) with deforming, warbling Auto-Tune.
The musical future really felt as if it was on its last legs before mumble rap arrived — there was a good half-decade where it felt like not much was happening at all. But mumble rap came with a whole new framework centred on technologically augmented vocal psychedelia. It’s not an exaggeration to say that mumble rap saved a generation from innovative decline by inspiring artists all across the world. Without mumble rap, future music might have died.
FRAG RAP
The Rise and Decline of Flow
From hip-hop’s inception up until the new millennium, rappers gravitated towards increasing levels of rhythmic continuity in their bars. Old rap tracks like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” had an almost limerick-like rhythmic construction with rhymes used as audible full stops at the end of each musical bar, demarking one line from the next.
But by the mid-80s, thanks to rappers like Rakim, things were getting more sophisticated. Artists were now inserting internal rhythms within lines so that their bars were far more fluid and didn’t stick so strictly to the underlying musical architecture. You were now getting raps like “But now I learn to earn ‘cause I’m righteous/I feel great, so maybe I might just/Search for a 9 to 5, if I strive/Then maybe I’ll stay alive” (from Eric B. and Rakim’s “Paid in Full”). By the 90s, this internal rhyming style had been so exquisitely perfected that rappers now spat with these seamlessly conversational, naturalistic flows like those on Raekwon’s “Verbal Intercourse”.
Unfortunately, though, as is so often the case, these innovations entered into their own kind of florid decadence by the decade’s end. You’d get whole verses that were just clotted with these clunky, nonsensical couplets, eventually giving rise the “spiritual, lyrical, miracle, individual” caricature of rappers showing off with superfluously intricate multi-syllabic internal rhymes. It’s ironic really; the very technique that had facilitated “flow” had degenerated to the point where artists now just sounded congested and constipated.
This fall from grace may well explain the waning heyday of New York and Los Angeles as the dominant geographical centres of hip-hop at the turn of the millennium. Certainly by the early 2000s, Southern rap was beginning to displace its East and West Coast counterparts both in terms of commercial success and in terms of being at hip-hop’s cutting edge. This music coming out of the Dirty South forged new paths for rap to pursue that weren’t reliant on further distillations of flow.
One emerging hallmark of the new Southern rap was its increased emphasis on melody, as heard in Nelly’s schoolyard song-sounding tracks like “Country Grammar”. Then, when rappers started to turn on to Auto-Tune’s possibilities, melody became democratised as MCs were suddenly able to sing on tracks even if they were actually unable to hold a note. Rap and RnB increasingly converged during the 2010s, as the former became steadily tuneful while RnB singers became more rhythmically dynamic. With today’s feature-crowded collaborations, sometimes it’s hard to tell who’s the singer and who’s the rapper. RnB artists Ty Dolla $ign and Torey Lanez, for instance, arguably place more emphasis on rhythm in the verses of their collaboration “Drop Top in the Rain” than melodious rappers like Fetty Wap or Lil Baby do in their own tracks. There’s been a complete inversion of the respective function and feel of RnB vis-à-vis rap.
Another way that Southern hip-hop distanced itself from the internal rhyme oversaturation that blighted turn-of-millennium hip-hop was by actually embracing rhythmic fragmentation and leaving behind the rhythmic contiguity that characterised flowing, unbroken vocals. Southern rap had a long tradition of call and response rapping that became nationally popular in the early 2000s with the style known as crunk. Tracks such as Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz’ “Get Low” flew in the face of East Coat rap’s traditional veneration of vocal virtuosity and crisp enunciation (think Jay-Z) with its deliberately clunky rhymes and hoarse growly timbre.
Another Southern innovation was the foregrounding of ad-libs (short verbal punctuations) which can be traced back to the late 90s and would eventually become the signature feature of Atlanta rappers such as Lil Jon and Jeezy. Juvenile’s 1998 track “Ha” is an inspired early excursion for the ad lib approach. In it, he repeatedly interjects “ha” throughout his verses, throwing the listener off the timing of the track, to the point where it almost sounds like the kind of mixed-metre rhythm you find in esoteric post-bop jazz. They way Juvenile tramples over your sense of temporality in the track is almost stomach-churning.
Do It for the Culture
Migos were really the first rappers to make fragmentation and ad libs and turn them into a form of rhythmic psychedelia. Their 2016 track “Cocoon” was their true artistic breakthrough. They’d done fragmented rapping tracks before — “Versace”, “M&M’s”, etc. — but like Young Thug’s early output, these tracks were just a bit infantile and annoying, and Quavo (along with those producing/engineering him) hadn’t yet discovered how to do his cosmic god vocal processing. But on “Cocoon” it’d all been figured out. You had Quavo’s colossal Auto-Tune, you got these weightless, vaporised piano keys, a big dazed bass and crooked, grasshopper-limbed drum patterns. The instrumentation told you exactly where their music was headed; it was the soundtrack to transcendence.
On “Cocoon”, and in Migos’ music moving forward, ad libs no longer contributed to a settling sense of rhythmic resolution by being plopped neatly at the beginning or end of bars as they had been in rap previously. Migos were tossing them around all over the place. You’d get multiple ad libs in a single bar, often back-to-back, and they’d leave you in upended suspension by yanking you off from off beats. In its way Migos’ style was bit like “dropping bombs” in jazz drumming, where drummers would just chuck in random spontaneous snare and kick drum strikes to liven things up a bit. Nothing was linear in “Cocoon”; it was just this William S. Burroughs cut-up of sputtering and stalling syllables.
Nine months after frag rap’s conceptual insemination on “Cocoon”, Migos gave birth to Culture. The album was full of tracks that further developed and distilled their sound. You had things like “T-Shirt”, where you’d get all these grandiose, Gregorian Auto-Tuned backing vocals oozing through your ears.
Or you’d hear Quavo and Offset’s verses on “All Ass”, pushing frag rap’s fractal rhythmaesthetics out further into the future until their bars became these dynamic, darting shuriken-shards splicing through your mind from every single angle imaginable.
If there are any precedents for what Migos do with the voice, they are to be found not in the history of hip-hop so much as in the polyphonic garage tracks made by New Jersey producer Todd Edwards, whose vocal cut-up style of 90s house music became formatively influential on the UK garage scene. Compare Migos’s “What the Price” from Culture with Edwards tunes like “Saved My Life” and “Never Far from You (Todd’s Original)”. Migos use their distinct vocal rhythms to create a web of interlaced melodic hooks, in much the same way that Edwards created what he called a “sample choir” out of vocal snippets arrayed across different octaves on the sampling keyboard. If you speed up “What the Price” (easy to do through YouTube’s playback settings) so that it’s closer to house music tempo, the proximity between Migos and Todd Edwards becomes clear. Quavo and Takeoff interweave lead vocals, backing vocals and ad libs with melodic motifs that swoop in and out of one another, making room for the next bit of melody to be completed by a different voice. It’s song as jigsaw: each melodic splinter is a puzzle piece and the picture is only completed when all the voices are heard together as a whole.
There is actually a technical, and absurdl
y Germanic, term for when a single melody is expressed via a relay of instruments like this — klangfarbenmelodie — and something similar rhythmically can be found in the history of Black and “urban” music (klangfarbenrhythmus if you will). If you listen to James Brown’s “Mother Popcorn” or Dem 2’s “Da Keep”, you’ll hear a single groove created by a cooperating array of different instruments and sounds within the arrangement; it’s that idea of the whole band being part of a drum kit. Migos have carried on this tradition, reimagining it for the twenty-first century as multiple Auto-Tuned flashes all coalesce to create a single, complex bit of rhythmic acrobatics.
On “Slippery” (another track on Culture) and “Motor-Sport” (released after the album), more traditional rappers feature alongside Migos. With “MotorSport” this juxtaposition is just jarring; Nicki Minaj and Cardi B sound completely inane and antiquated when placed alongside the likes of Quavo at the height of his powers. But on “Slippery” the two styles — the old and the new — actually work really well together.
“Slippery” features Gucci Mane so that you’ve got, by proxy, one generation of Atlanta rap going head-to-head with another, and you really get to hear the contrast between the two. On just a dry technical level the difference is pretty straightforward. Situated between Quavo’s signature stuttering cyborg chorus and Takeoff’s sparing sniper-fire final verse, Gucci Mane’s contribution is far more contiguous than the trio’s. Each line builds on the preceding one, with the gathering momentum of the lyrical narrative and vocal performance climaxing with a kiss-off of a last line, it’s completely at odds with Migos’ oral whack-a-mole.
But what’s fascinating is that the two rhythmic sensibilities exhibited on “Slippery” generate completely contradictory emotional impacts as well. The track’s sinuous instrumental lives up the expression “ear worm”, it really does slither and squirm its way inside your mind and its completely recontextualised depending on who’s rapping over it. Quavo’s bits bring out something cold, clinical and dissociative in the backing track. There’s a blocky geometry to the way his voice moves that’s at odds with the curvaceousness of the instrumental — it’s an eerie, apparitional anti-magnetism made sinister and near-schizophrenic by his gasping, morbidly foreshortened ad libs. By contrast, Gucci Mane’s verse turns the track into a languid, lean-laced fuck for the twenty-first century, over which he effortlessly drapes and dollops his syrupy charisma. On lines like “I’m so slimy, grimy, shysty but still shining”, his voice moves smooth like sloth, locking into lethargic drum syncopations with an assured grace rather than ninja flipping over them like the Migos members do.
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