Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

  It’s Like a Whole Different World

  Depending on the day, my own personal favourite distillation of the Migos aesthetic isn’t actually a group project by the trio, but a side album Quavo did with Travis Scott called Huncho Jack. When you flick through the YouTube comments underneath tracks from the album, they’re all just bemoaning the fact that it’s so underrated, and it’s true, the album was the victim of a poorly planned release date. Huncho Jack came out right at the end of 2017 — at a point when audiences were suffering from Migos-overkill (the trio released tons of music that year). Its release also coincided with the inevitable backlash among hipsters who weren’t happy about Migos’ commercial success — a “how dare one of the most dramatic paradigm shifts in rap history happen right in the mainstream for all to see and not in this obscure regional scene I’ve spent five years blogging about!”-type situation.

  Nonetheless Huncho Jack is fantastic. It’s got some of the most urgent and arresting raps of Quavo’s career in there, it’s got all this alien Auto-Tune rippling, all these ultra-enchanting soundscapes and then there are the vocal reverbs…

  On the face of it, adding tons of reverb to Auto-Tuned vocals seems like a simple trick, but the sound you get from it is absolutely stunning. There’d been a bit of it on Migos tracks before, but on Huncho Jack it becomes sublime. Reverb transforms Auto-Tune from the slightly tacky gimmick it often was at the turn of the 2010s into something celestial and magisterial. It makes vocals shimmer and pulsate with disembodied seraphic radiance; they become awe-inspiring and genuinely heavenly.

  Whole Lotta Neon

  Playboi Carti is the artist who, more than any other, has most consistently released tracks that wed the outermost edges of frag rap and mumble rap. He first came to prominence with the release of his 2017 self-titled mixtape, which was notable at the time for taking Migos’ rhythmic aesthetic and making it completely diffuse. There were tracks on it like “No. 9” and “Lookin”, which were pretty much all ad lib and no proper main vocals, a kind of rabbling rhythmic ambiance. But on this tape, there was a magic in the instrumentals that wasn’t quite matched with the dry, naturalistic tone of his voice; he hadn’t truly found his sound yet.

  That changed when Carti discovered his “baby voice” and began to use Auto-Tune on tracks like “Uh Uh” with Chief Keef, and “Wake Up” with Young Jordan. Then, in 2019, a whole lot of Playboi Carti tracks were unleashed prematurely onto the world as leaks. Of course, it must have been annoying — maybe even devastating — for Carti himself, but this non-sequitur, ephemeral form of dissemination matched the music perfectly; the medium completely fit the message. Fragments of unfinished songs and half-formed ideas just emerged in the ether. You’d get these fleeting montages of audible madness arrive by surprise. Some tracks were almost like musical deep fakes, as producers coupled Carti a capellas with self-made instrumentals and passing them off as genuine Carti tracks. The Whole Lotta Red Leaks as they’re known trained you to turn off your mind, relax and float downstream; it wasn’t dying, it was surrendering yourself to the meandering, inconsequential logic of dreams.

  These leaks are part of a whole bunch of tracks that take mumble rap’s avant-garde vocal timbres and fractures them through frag rap’s fragmented (anti-) flows. You’ve got Travis Scott and Young Thug’s “Yeah Yeah”, Future’s “Oxy”, Lil Gotit bits and pieces like “Uzi Anthem”, “Instead”, “Bet Up”, etc. With tracks like these, artists have invented a whole new music that just can’t be classed as rap anymore — you’d have a really tough time trying to justify why you’d consider them as part of the same genre as older music by Lil Wayne or Waka Flocka Flame, for example (let alone the Sugarhill Gang). This newer music is just too different from what preceded it to be considered part of the same sonic lineage. You’ve got all these layers of vocal abstraction with these types of tracks- — digital processing, peculiar delivery, rhythmic cantonisation, melody — each of which forcefully tears this new music further and further from the sonic sensibilities of older rap. It’s time to acknowledge something new has been born here. It’s time to retire rap.

  THE DECLINE OF UK DANCE MUSIC

  A London Sumtin

  For almost two decades, from the early 90s to the late 2000s, a relay of London-centred street genres emerged in the UK — most notably hardcore, jungle, UK garage and grime — that took inspiration from dance music, dancehall and American hip-hop but combined and mutated these styles in unrelentingly inspired ways. The heartland of this music was east London, and in many ways the sonic sensibilities of these genres stemmed from the area’s demography at the time. Prior to gentrification the East End had been populated by large Caribbean communities living alongside white, working-class Cockneys. As successive generations grew up together in the same streets and in the same schools, they listened to the same Black sounds (reggae, ragga, rap, etc.) broadcast through pirate radio and played by DJs at raves, and the music they went on to collectively produce throughout the 90s and 2000s seemed to point to a truly post-racial future for Britain.

  By the late 2000s however, the whole subcultural infrastructure of UK street music collapsed. The Internet eclipsed pirate radio while the London Metropolitan Police’s risk assessment form 696 encouraged racial profiling in clubs, dissuading promoters from booking DJs and performers in styles of music that drew majority Black audiences — especially a teenage male Black audience, as with grime.

  These blows to London music were further exacerbated by demographic shifts taking place in the city. The number of white working class dwindled as east London became steadily gentrified. Meanwhile, between 2001 and 2011, Britain’s African population doubled, outnumbering those of Caribbean descent for the first time in recent history. Although still identifying as Black — and experiencing similar levels of prejudice and harassment — these Black Britons of African descent had a significantly different cultural background from the descendants of the Caribbean immigrants of the 1950s and 1960s (what’s often called the Windrush Generation). The more recent wave of African immigrants was steeped in different musical influences, and related to traditions that had little to do with Jamaica’s soundsystem culture of roots reggae and dancehall.

  All of these changes — the decline of pirate radio, the crackdown on clubs and live performances, the eroding centrality of Jamaican culture, the gentrification of east London — transformed the very nature of UK street music as a decades-long coalition of dance music clubbers, rap fans, and bashment enthusiasts imploded. Artists like Stylo G and Gappy Ranks started making British bashment. There were artists like Giggs making road rap, a UK take on hip-hop. Then you had deep tech, a British style of house music that lacked the usual Jamaican and rap influences that had previously given UK dance music its own unique flavour. Deep tech essentially sounded like a whole genre based around moodier, more digitally pristine variations of Mayday’s “Wiggin”, a Detroit techno track from two decades earlier.

  Grime represented a pivot point in the history of UK urban music; a transitional genre between one lineage (the Jamaican sourced narrative of bleep-and-bass, jungle, UK garage) and what would replace it. Emerging in the first half of the 2000s, many of grime’s most prominent figures were of African heritage. Though still loosely in the post-rave tradition, grime’s foregrounding of MCing and lyrics was a massive break with that tradition, and as such grime anticipated the switch towards rap’s value system that would totally rewrite the rules of UK urban music in the 2010s.

  As grime artists saw economic opportunities in pursuing the UK’s student market in the late 2000s, the genre became increasingly divorced from the streets and (no coincidence) it became a fundamentally static musical form. The difference between a grime track from 2021 and one from 2003 is minimal, manifesting itself mostly in production quality and digital gloss; on the level of beats, sounds, and MC flows, there is nothing like the advances you would once have routinely expected to occur within a UK street sound over the course of eighteen years
.

  ROAD RAP

  The Rise of the Roads

  As grime drifted away from its original demographic, a new London street sound emerged to take its place: road rap. The cultural centre of gravity shifted from grime’s east London heartlands to south London inner-city areas like Brixton and Peckham. For the first time in two decades, a UK urban sound had emerged that had little input from white kids and was a complete break with dance culture.

  YouTube displaced pirate radio as the DIY medium of choice, with road rap performers uploading amateurish videos online. The videos tended to feature gaggles of teenagers clustered outside council estates (the British equivalent of housing projects) and rapping over American hip-hop-style instrumentals, usually much slower and more doomy than the beats in grime. The music no longer needed to satisfy dancing listeners because it wasn’t being played at raves; audiences were hearing it on their phones and online.

  The emergence of road rap can be traced back as far as the heyday of first-phase grime. The collective PDC released their album Pray Days Change in 2004. Although few noticed at the time, it was a portent of major changes to come. For starters, they hailed from Brixton, anticipating the way that the inner-city zones of south-west and south-east London would become the hub of British urban music, as opposed to the East End. The group was also explicitly gang affiliated: PDC, a multipurpose acronym that can refer to Pussy Drugs Cash or Poverty Driven Children, among other things, was a prominent Brixton gang at that time.

  Throughout the 90s, British jungle and garage MCs had limited themselves to a narrow set of topics; rudeboy roleplay, bigging up the DJ, soundclash boasts, the exaltation of girls and ganja. Even the violence in grime, which sometimes spilled out into real life, tended to be cartoonish, suggestive more of Wu-Tang-style comicbook slapstick than the gory trauma of real-world conflict. But road rap’s low-key, gritty realism spoke to its explicit connections to gang rivalry and street crime. This informed every aspect of the music from the lyrics to the video locations and even the genre’s name; “road” is the British equivalent of the American slang “street”, it denotes inner-city, criminal living.

  Listening to Pray Days Change today, its appeal largely resides in the endearing enthusiasm and inspired amateurishness of the MCs rather than the music itself, for the most part a clumsy imitation of US hip-hop. There’s something charming — particularly when seen through the warm lens of nostalgia — about the album’s feigned American accents and use of hip-hop slang. But as road rap took shape as a genre, the Americanised delivery gave way to naturalistic British accents, phrasing and idioms; Youngsta’s vocals on his 2009 track “Crystal Meth” are matter of fact and delivered in a distinctly south London accent.

  Just as road rappers’ delivery became less derivative of US hip-hop, their slang too became increasingly parochial. Jamaican patois has far deeper roots in London than imported American slang; it’s something that kids have picked up growing up around Jamaican immigrants and from everyday listening to dancehall and pirate radio sounds like jungle where the MCs mix up patois slang with Cockney idioms. This kind of language started to seep back into road rap around the turn of the 2010s. Sneakbo’s haunting “Ride Out” is full of patois terms like “paigon” (traitor) and “bun” (burn).

  As road rap de-Americanised and grew ever more naturalistic, artists gradually stripped away any sense of performance altogether. Giggs, road rap’s biggest star, typified this with his flat, gruff cadences on track’s like 2007’s “Talkin Da Hardest” and 2010s “Look What the Cat Dragged In”. Throughout the track, Giggs refers to himself by his alternative moniker Hollowman. Although inspired by a type of ammunition (hollow-tip bullets, which flatten on impact, mushrooming through the body to cause greater internal injuries), the name also perfectly describes his mode of delivery and his affectless persona: he sounds hollow, dead inside, rendered nihilistic and unfeeling by life on London streets.

  Though of Caribbean descent himself, Giggs grew up in Peckham, an area of south-east London with a high proportion of inhabitants of African ancestry. There’s an argument to be made that Giggs popularised a style of delivery that in a sense accommodated for an increasingly Africanised London. Up until road rap, British MCs — especially those involved not in the homegrown hip-hop scene but instead the post-rave tradition of jungle and UK garage — had drawn far more from Jamaican dancehall than they had from US rap. MCing in the UK grew directly out of the Jamaican soundsystem tradition. Until the 2010s it was not uncommon for British rappers to directly mimic Jamaican-style patois patter in tracks like Blackstar and Top Cat’s jungle classic “Champion DJ” and Riko Dan’s boisterous “Head Back”. Even when UK MCs weren’t directly emulating dancehall though, they still preserved the genre’s penchant for characterful vocal delivery that projected forcefully outwards at the audience and commanded the stage (whether literally at a dance or rave, or figuratively, jostling for attention on a pirate radio show). Demon’s maniacal performance on his grime anthem “Gangsta Toyz”, for instance, recalls the oral fury of Jamaican ragga tracks like Sizzla’s “Cop Killa”. As a result, grime MCs were far more in line with the soundclash warrior titans of Jamaica than they were with the relatively cool-headed American rappers, who drew you into the space of their increasingly cinematic productions.

  Adopting American rap’s generally less hyper and more low-key delivery, road rap’s naturalism illustrates the shift within UK urban music away from the sci-fi aesthetics of UK electronic dance of the 90s. Dimzy’s 2010 road rap track “Darkside” captures this transition. Instrumentally it seems to nod to 90s rave’s dwindling hold over the collective memory with its cheeky sampling of the cosmic diva “I’ve got the power” vocals from Snap’s 1990 hit “The Power”. But counteracting the intergalactic grandeur evoked in the sample, Dimzy pretty much mumbles his verses — he sounds resolutely earthbound, grounded in his surroundings; the grey, stained pavements and low-rise apartment blocks of Brixton Hill.

  While the MCing was less Jamaican influenced, road rappers did routinely use dancehall beats such as Daseca’s apocalyptic “Boxing Day Riddim” (as heard in crudely compressed form on tracks like Young RV and K Man’s “Cruddy on the Streets”) and NotNice’s “England Town” (similarly distorted on R.O.S’s “Mashtown Hood”). Sneaky and Chrissy’s “Hold Yuhh” versions Gyptian’s romantic dancehall track “Hold You”, adding amateurish rapping to the sentimental, bubblegum instrumental. The video has a school media project quality about it. Its montages of kids from their local area giddily excited about appearing in a music promo takes on a poignant aspect given the track’s association with Brixton’s GAS gang, a splinter group from PDC — you can’t help but view the innocence on display in light of the human tragedy of gang life and the likelihood that some of these young lives will end on those same streets.

  One of the things that characterises British — especially London — street music is an internal tension in the music that comes from producers trying to reconcile the different rhythmic sensibilities in American hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall. These are mergers that only happen in the UK, even though nearly all the elements come from outside the country. Jungle’s rhythmic template evolved from producers chopping up hip-hop breakbeats in a way that mimicked dancehall’s angular snare emphasis — in the process leaving behind American rap’s loping, hypnotic treadmill grooves for far more unstable, and thrilling, rhythmscapes. You can hear the process at play in UK garage tracks: U.S.L’s “Making Love (Dub Mix)” features a dancehall-indebted drum pattern that’s full of Timbaland-style fidgety ticks, and it’s there in grime also: Jon E Cash and 2 Real’s “Champagne Hoes” is dancehall reimagined using the languid 808s of Southern rap. A similar tense merger of US and Jamaican impulses can be heard in road rap tracks like Carns Hill’s instrumental for Young Teflon’s 2010 tune “Trapping”, where hip-hop’s traditional backbeat is interrupted by stumbling, off-kilter dancehall riddims.

  This collision of Jamaican rhythms a
nd Lex Luger-like arrangements ironically led to road rap’s first distinctly British sound, with the emergence of producers like Pinero Beats and Skippz Productions and with tracks like BT’s “Freestyle” — a classic example of the way the UK repeatedly comes up with local hybrids grafted from materials hailing from thousands of miles away.

  As the title broadcasts, “Trapping” reflected the growing influence of trap on road rap and as the former became increasingly ambient in the middle of the 2010s, so too did British street music. It was out of this newfound amorphousness that UK drill emerged.

  CARNS HILL’S PROTO-DRILL

  Waves and Vapor

  The phenomenology of the entire zeitgeist is being dematerialised as our lives become increasingly computerised. Sonic solipsism now reigns supreme; it’s the futurism of lucid dreams.

  At the turn of the 2010s there were genres like vaporwave and cloud rap, Internet sounds intent on reflecting the unreality of online life. They were ambient and intangible, radiating the same insomnia-inducing blue hue as a computer screen in a dark room. As their names implied, these genres were gaseous, not gritted. They were fluid, not firm. Sonic physical signifiers were filtered out of soundscapes and so all that remained were impalpable audio interfaces that were as dematerialised as the operating system of your iPad.