Neon Screams

by Kit Mackintosh

Auto-Tunes

  Sonically, the huge leap forward during the Gully vs. Gaza era was Kartel’s embrace of Auto-Tune. Aside from the odd track here or there, no other artist had really adopted the effect as part of a signature sound, but starting in 2007 with tracks like “Nuh Badda Try”, “Weh Dem a Fee Like” and “Empire Army”, Vybz Kartel did just that.

  Straight away his sound was crackling with a pyrotechnic rage and unrestrained energy that was light-years ahead of anything coming out of American rap at the time. Even though during that era Vybz Kartel was only using Auto-Tune on melodic hooks — while keeping his voice natural-sounding during his tabla-tongued verses — it was already clear that he was forging the future.

  In 2008 Kartel came out with more Auto-Tune tracks like “Weh Dat Fah”, “Kill Dem” and “Broad Daylight”, in which he did put his voice through Auto-Tune throughout, not just in the chorus. By 2009 he was really hitting his artistic stride. There were so, so many anthems being released by Kartel at the time and he was experimenting with pushing the boundaries of the effect further and further out. “Gaza Commandments” saw him plug wispy falsettos into Auto-Tune until they became a kind of translucent cuticle-coloured noise. Then you had “Dollar Sign” and “Last Man Standing”, where he was soaring at the very upper limits of his vocal register so that it sounded as if he was being refracted through film tape. And there were other bashment performers adopting Auto-Tune around this time too; Popcaan on “My War”, Blak Ryno on “Whine Up Yuh Body”, Busy Signal’s album Loaded, etc. Vybz Kartel had started a new chapter in the history of bashment.

  AFTER KARTEL

  Darkness Rise

  After Kartel’s incarceration in 2011 there was a cooling-off period for bashment. For the next five years or so the genre didn’t really coalesce around a single new sound. Instead, you’d get the odd promising bit of experimentation here or there.

  Invariably the search for a new direction in dancehall was tied up with finding a new figurehead for the genre to replace Vybz Kartel. As the years went by there were really three artists who between them filled the void left by Vybz. Tommy Lee Sparta was an innovator like Kartel, Popcaan was popular like he was, but it was Alkaline who did the best job of taking up Kartel’s various cultural roles; he was at once a pop star and provocateur (particularly with his faux-tattooed eyeballs) and he pushed the sound of the music to places it hadn’t been before.

  Every now and then during this period you’d get tracks featuring multi-tracked, often pitch-shifted voices layered on top of one another that’d blend together seamlessly thanks to Auto-Tune’s smooth, synthetic timbres (this technique would later become a staple of trap dancehall). There was Gappy Ranks’ ghoulish “Stinking Rich” from 2010, Alkaline’s gremlin-esque “Gyal Bruk Out” from three years later and Venessa Bling’s sublime “Tun Up Di Ting” from a couple of years after that.

  Tommy Lee Sparta’s 2012 monster “Lyrical Bomber” was a particularly impressive twist on this technique. Sparta’s squawks are multi-tracked and pitch-shifted on the track, but most of the other voices are far lower in the mix than his main vocals so that it just sounds as if it’s a single voice that’s frazzling, crackling and cracking like clay in a way you can’t quite put your finger on. (Artists associated with the trap dancehall collective “The 6ix” — Squash, Chronic Law, Daddy1 — would later make this particular trick a central component of their sound.)

  But really the major development taking place during the first half of the 2010s in bashment was a gradual escalation of piercing Auto-Tune timbres. First there were tracks like Popcaan’s “My War”, Merital Family’s “Mi Yard” and then a little later Alkaline’s “Scumbag”, which combined Auto-Tune with these nasally, occasionally brattish, vocal timbres which made performers’ pitch-corrected voices sound like pungis — those reed instruments played by snake charmers. This was perfected by Tommy Lee Sparta, culminating with his discovery of goblin voice in 2016 on tracks like “Felony”, “Darkness Rise” and “Not a Badness”.

  Everything Is Nice

  What you could call “tropical dancehall” — the lighter type of bashment that arose in the latter-half of the 2010s — came from a game of sonic Pong played between Jamaica and global pop in the 2010s. The style was to some extent derived from tropical pop (Drake’s “One Dance”, Rihanna’s “Work”), which in turn had been inspired by bashment in the first place (“Work”, for example, bears more than a passing resemblance to Vybz Kartel’s “Yuh Love” from several years earlier).

  “Everything Nice” was a huge hit for Popcaan in 2014 and over time dancehall as a whole began to coalesce around the softer, smoother, potentially more internationally palatable take on the genre epitomised by it (inspired possibly by a similar softening of Afrobeats instrumentals at the time). Eventually however, this tropical sound was given an avant-garde Jamaican edge by the likes of Alkaline, who infused it with post-Sparta piercing vocal extremity.

  Traditionally bashment had favoured big, brash, bulky and hulking voices — Buju Banton, Bounty Killer, etc. — so this shift to the impish was a real reset for the genre, but it was one that was taking place in the United States too. Auto-Tune tends to be at its most consistently potent when applied to high, whining voices, so you can see why the likes of Sparta, Alklaine, Rygin King and Rebel Sixx came to dominate dancehall in the Auto-Tuned era and why the likes of Don Toliver and Lil Tjay have risen through rap with similar vocal timbres. It’s very much the sound of now.

  TRAP DANCEHALL AND TRINIBAD

  Trap dancehall’s a shit genre name, emphasising the wrong element of the music entirely. It gives you the impression that it’s basically just a lazy fusion of two established styles rather than something pioneering in its own right. Its 808 booms are great, they do add a heroic muscularity to the music, but really what’s remarkable about the genre are the voices not the drums. If you took the name “trap dancehall” literally then you could find examples of the genre from ages ago; Vybz Kartel’s trap-indebted “Mi Talk with Gunshot” was released all the way back in 2008, a whole ten years before Shab Don kicked off the actual trap dancehall era with his Money Fever Riddim.

  The biggest track to use Money Fever was Squash’s (aka The 6ix Boss) track of the same name, which immediately cemented his clique The 6ix as the leaders of this new trap dancehall sound. While “Money Fever” may have been the most popular track on the riddim, the best to use it by far is Big Voice’s “Chedda”. The track impossibly intensifies dancehall’s post-Sparta vocals so that Big Voice sounds as if his vocal cords have been constructed from the recuperated components of the Death Star; it’s what you could imagine hearing if the aurora borealis could sing. On “Chedda” you can hear the Auto-Tuned fury of late-2000s Kartel, the reverb of Huncho Jack and the cutting edge of Jamaican sonic experimentation all blended together to create something magnificent and splendorous. It set a precedent for trap dancehall; the genre was going to push the vocal psychedelia of the last decade or so of music to ever-greater heights.

  Not only was the genre’s ground-breaking vocadelics apparent straight away in trap dancehall, the more mystical elements found in its arrangements were there right away too. Shab Don’s Money Machine Riddim from early 2019 is built around these glistening chimes, while Chronic Law’s “Feel It” from around the same time is full of cries that sound as if they’re being chanted by a demonic school choir.

  Trap dancehall caused controversy in Jamaica due to the prominence of its international musical influences. Detractors felt that the influx of ideas from American trap were diluting Jamaica’s musical and cultural identity. Bounty Killer made headlines by claiming there was “nothing name trap dancehall… Dancehall a [is] dancehall, trap a trap… [Trap is] the new trend and things have to evolve but you cannot take it and make it dancehall”.

  These kinds of arguments are tricky to make in the context of Jamaican musical history. Arguably the cultural recombination that exists in trap dancehall isn’t any more or less w
hat is found in its musical antecedents. Jamaican ska music and soundsystem culture were both heavily indebted to American rhythm and blues. Toasting was initially inspired by American radio DJs jive talking over the tracks they were broadcasting. Trap dancehall is scorned for adopting trap’s 808 drums, even though reggae arrangements used the electric guitars, basses, claves and organs found in Anglo-American music of the time; it’d be ridiculous to claim that Burning Spear was simply copying Stevie Wonder just for using similar instrumentation.

  In a curious, winding way, through its borrowings from American trap, dancehall in the late 2010s has actually inadvertently reconnected with aspects of its own glorious past. In some ways, trap dancehall is dub for the twenty-first century: underpinned by gargantuan bass, swathed in ghostly reverbs, determinedly pushing technology to its outer limits.

  Yet again the workings of the online hivemind proved to be far more constructive than they were corrosive at the turn of the 2020s. Just as Chicago drill had facilitated British street music returning back to its roots, trap has given Jamaica a template through which it’s created a glorious, unmistakable sound of its own. It’s made the globalised localised, and in the process provided us with the latest in a decades-long line of combinations and mutations that have been produced across the Atlantic — between America, Jamaica and the UK — throughout the ages. And, as always, it’s all so amazing. It reminds you to never give up on this music or the cultures that produce it, there’s always something brewing. Let’s see where the 2020s take us, the new vanguard awaits us.

  INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR

  Luke Davis is a poet and the author of the influential 2000s grime blog Heronbone.

  LUKE DAVIS: Neon Screams seems to be consciously pushing back against the idea that musical innovation has stalled in the twenty-first century, an idea a number of prominent music commentators were writing about at the turn of the 2010s. Would that be fair to say?

  KIT MACKINTOSH: Oh yeah, definitely. 100%.

  The thing is, I know new music’s futuristic. I know it’s pioneering. I know it’s unprecedented. Thanks to the Internet, my teen years were misspent basically consuming the entire history of recorded music. If someone so much as farted into a microphone at any point in the last hundred years, the likelihood is I’ve heard it. I’ve listened to so much from all different eras and places and styles and I’ve never heard anything that sounds remotely like the music coming out now. And it makes sense that I haven’t, it’s music revolving in large part around a technology that hadn’t even been invented when most music was made.

  I’ve seen younger dance music journalists in the past really trying to make a big thing out of genres like deep tech or I guess some new form of tribal-sounding house or whatever. To me it always came across as a kind act of generational denial or embarrassment; they were conscious that they’d missed dance music’s golden age and were desperately trying to talk up the music their generation was creating and consuming into being revolutionary or interesting. Of course I would say this, but this isn’t what’s happening when I talk about vocal psychedelia. It genuinely is a complete paradigm shift. So, I really can’t buy all these theories about retro-stasis or innovation being dead or any of that. I know they’re just not true.

  LD: But if that’s the case, why did these more pessimistic frameworks take hold and become orthodoxy in certain cognoscenti circles?

  KM: Well to be fair to a lot of these writers, while the future didn’t die in the early 2010s, it did seem to hiccup in the first half of the decade. There was a good five- or six-year spasm where things had ground to a halt. UK dance music — which had before produced the most startling sounds of the 90s and early 2000s like jungle and grime — descended into senile dementia. It couldn’t retain any new information so lived in this haze of a half-remembered past. Dubstep was an example of this — Memories of the Future and all that — but deep tech was by far the worst offender. I remember there was even a deep tech track with a hook about “bringing ’88 back”.

  It wasn’t just British dance music though — there wasn’t much future music coming from anywhere. You’d had this wave of exciting stuff in the late 2000s where rap and particularly dancehall were embracing Auto-Tune, but as that subsided you were just left with road rap, Lex Luger-era trap, etc., which may have been fun enough, but there was nothing coming out of those genres that was truly jaw-dropping.

  So that’s one element of this framework. I do also think part of it stems from the age of the people putting forward these ideas of the future being in decline. I’ve got a pet theory that our post-war cultural history has largely been written by baby boomers and as such our narratives about the 1950s till now map very neatly onto how they experienced the world throughout their lifespan. Our ideas of the 1950s and pre-hippy 1960s (when these writers were children) are infantilised; it’s largely depicted as very wholesome and revolving around the nuclear family. Then these cultural commentators became teenagers between the hippy era and punk, so we associate that whole period with rebellion, a cynicism towards authority and discovering sex and drugs. We caricature the 1980s — when these writers were in their twenties and thirties and maybe making their first proper money — in terms of yuppies and consumerism…

  So through this paradigm you could view the notion of retro-stasis in the twenty-first century as a reflection of baby boomers properly reaching middle age and, by extension, a point in their lives when they’re not too enthused about the future ahead of them and they’re a bit wistful and nostalgic about the past behind them. To be a bit cheeky about it, there is a slight air of a curmudgeonly fist-shaking, “things were better in my day” attitude in some of those ideas about the future being over.

  More seriously though, I think the central issue is that these writers were still operating within frameworks they’d come up with in the 90s. That’s really what I’m talking about with the phrase “Metal Machine Music”; it’s a certain stance that (often subconsciously) analyses everything through a lens informed by the more sci-fi-end of hardcore rave and jungle (an aesthetic stance I call “Blade Runner jungle”). That worked amazingly well for a while; you can input loads of stuff into that conceptual machinery — everything from Timbaland to 70s Miles Davis — and come up with some brilliant ideas. But ultimately once you’re in the Auto-Tuned era it becomes more of a hindrance to hearing what’s new and exciting in a track than helpful.

  That’s why I really hammer home this need to move on from a dance music-driven conception of the future revolving around breakthroughs with synths and samplers. It was me really racking my brains and trying to wrap my mind around why a lot of music nerds I’ve been chatting to — the people who, like me, are gleefully pretentious about music and view it as a bit futuristic and a bit sci fi and psychedelic — are so reluctant to get on board with what’s happening now. It was my attempt firstly to understand the mindset of dance music partisans, older ravers and older grime fans (basically the coalition that the music-futurist commentariat are made up of) and from there ask them to set aside that particular paradigm, so that they can comprehend all this mind-blowing new music.

  LD: So what is it about this old paradigm that stops people appreciating new music? Why can’t they enjoy or understand it in the same way they might jungle or grime or Timbaland?

  KM: I don’t want to oversell the importance of theorizing in all of this. When vocal psychedelia started happening, I didn’t need some theoretical framework to enjoy it. I just heard it and was astounded and perplexed and exhilarated by it on a very guttural level in the same way I was when I first heard Miles Davis’ Dark Magus or first started listening to old hardcore rave tape packs or first encountered any other amazing future music. The intel-lectualising came later, really out of the bafflement I had with people still talking about retro-stasis or people still pining after 90s dance music even through wave after wave of groundbreaking vocal psychedelia.

  But to answer your question, I think one major sticking
point is that some people still focus their attention on the instrumentals rather than the voice. So, they’ll be trying to hear the modern-day equivalent of the “hoover synth” or acid house squelch in the backing track when they’re actually more likely to be there in the posthuman vocals.

  I guess another thing that puts people off is the supposed pristineness of modern music production. To be honest I think that’s over-exaggerated. Vybz Kartel and Shawn Storm’s prison-era vocals recordings are very lo-fi for example, as are a lot of those rap leaks. The general unwieldiness of Auto-Tune means that voices are all over the place and unpredictable too. But the emphasis on music being “rough and tough like leather” (to quote Raekwon) I think is a little out of date in the Internet age. Before that kind of dirty, DIY-sounding aesthetic was associated with the underground doing its own thing and circumventing the polished mainstream. But when people try to resuscitate that aesthetic these days, in the age of digital production, it sort of comes across as an extension of the hipster fetish for brown-field development and “upcycling”; a middle-class romanticized enactment of poverty. Things like Burial or Kanye West’s Yeezus tap into that I think.

  Also, that’s become a very internetty aesthetic now. So, these days, rough-sounding stuff is likely to be a product of garish online disposable upload and streaming culture (that endless stream of half-assed or ironic content you get on the Internet), which means these amateurish hallmarks have basically lost any of their old charm or rebellious connotations.

  LD: How does what you refer to as the “industrialised musical imagination” connect to these old frameworks you’re talking about?

  KM: Well, I suppose it’s just another potential blockage for some people to enjoy new music. Maybe if these Auto-Tuned artists were giving themselves the kind of names techno artists did (Cybotron, Model 500) that’d alert more people to the fact that they’re making futuristic cyborg music.