*Editor's Note - I am going to post this on the main site as well, but I wanted to give it to my faithful blog readers first. Holla!
Music Is The Answer?
The Bug looks out over the yards...“The role of the artist in Capitalism can be compared with that of the tour-guide: interpreter of experience for consumption on the most elite level, agent of recuperation for society’s most exquisite longings and deepest resentments – and even a tour guide may be sincere.”
- Hakim Bey, ‘For And Against Interpretation’
- Hakim Bey, ‘For And Against Interpretation’
Where is the line between music that inspires you, and music that gives you only vicarious pleasure and experience?
Arguably, all art has been commodified to the extent that if the cultural material it presents is supposedly ‘authentic’, it is also exclusive and unattainable. It’s all about selling lifestyles – and though you can affiliate yourself with 50 Cent, you cannot live the ‘real’ gangster life which he depicts, because it is manifestly not real. You can wish for it, act it out, but there is no place on earth which truly looks like his videos, or the worlds he describes in his rhymes. This is about as far from Chuck D’s definition of hip-hop as: ‘…the black CNN’ as you can get.
The reality, of course, is that – despite his claims of ‘realness’ - Curtis James Jackson III does not live this life either. The moment he became a platinum-selling rap star, he ceased to be any kind of gangster (if indeed he was one in the first place). Why then do we accept his invalid claims to ‘realness’ and authenticity? Are we, the consumers of hip-hop, content to be chauffeured around his imaginary ghetto, and pay for the privilege? Why are we happy to do this, when the real ghettos are physically present in our cities? How many people who vicariously enjoy Fiddy’s cartoon gangsta imagery actually live in a ghetto? How many of those that don’t would dare venture into one?
50 Cent’s a soft target – manifestly ridiculous. But the point stands – entertainment has become affiliation, branding: nothing more. And yet, on the fringes of the multi-million dollar industry that music has become, there are practitioners who can still give you a dose of the real. Something other than the portfolio of accepted subcultures that orbit the mainstream like moons; each one a subtly-shaded simulacrum of the capitalist ideal.
Kobra Audio Labs, AKA Mark Scanlan is a reclusive Scottish hip-hop producer who is about as far from the money-coloured, shiny plastic reality of 50 Cent’s world as you can get. His last album, ‘Sunshine, Shadows and Luck’ was a bleak, instrumental trawl through broken-down boom-bap – irradiated samples degrading and atrophying as they played out their half-life. Ineffably melancholy, his productions echoed the stripped down nihilism of early Wu-Tang, wearing their broken beats, pops and clicks like badges of honour.
With his new LP, ‘Tones, Drones and Broken Bones’ Scanlan moves into more futuristic territory. Like fellow Scottish hip-hoppers Eaters and Penpushers, he has abandoned soundscapes that depict a degraded, broken present in favour of beats and sounds that construct a wonky, multi-cultural, imminent future. Although Scanlan claims the album was borne of his fascination with My Bloody Valentine and Public Enemy, this mixture of influences is transcended, warped and mutated. Sitars and cymbals ride electronic washes of sound on ‘Rag and Bone Beat’, while Eaters vocalist Laughing Gear pays tribute to artists such as Grant Morrison, David Lynch and Alan Moore on ‘Dumb Heroes’.
Each of Laughing Gear and Scanlan’s ‘dumb heroes’ are artists who presented, if not an imminent future, then a present warped beyond the real: and as Laughing Gear states, “For now, I talk through them.” They are his tour guides, yes – but they are merely temporary ciphers; interpreters of the imminent future. They stake no claim on absolutes of prediction or representation.
What do these influences have in common? None of the artists mentioned or echoed are overly concerned with experiential authenticity: they are too busy tracing possible scenarios arising from the present to depict a faked-up ‘now’ for us to buy into. They promise abstract possibility, as oppose to sharply delineated reality. In doing so, they offer us the potential to create our own futures in the present moment. The album in general, but this track in particular is a gauntlet thrown down to the listener.
Sonically, K.A.L. explores similarly futuristic landscape as Basic Channel, Pole and The Bug – sometimes understated and restrained; frequently bursting into moments of beautiful dissonance and harshness (such as on the Harlequinade–assisted ‘Black-hearted Bastards’). This is music that is more machine than man – never troubling to limit itself to defunct notions of black / white, or urban / electronic.
It is a fusion: a digital gumbo of shoegaze, dub, hip-hop and electronica that twists and changes with each chord sequence. It offers no lived experience, no definitive conclusions – only “… an idea of bleak probability,” (to quote the Penpushers). This is infinitely preferable to any kind of formulaic, commercialised realism.
To take another example, The Bug’s new album ‘London Zoo’ is also a powerful fuck-you to the mainstream. Beloved by the dubstep community for the massive singles ‘Skeng’ and ‘Posion Dart’, Kevin Martin has made no concessions to the scene. Indeed, he has been plying his futurescaped interpretation of ragga / dancehall since long before dubstep was a buzzword or even a scene. Collecting the huge dancefloor singles together into an album for Ninja Tune, he has leant them a meaning which transcends their undeniable, speaker-destroying bombast. The unifying theme of the album is anger – anger at the mainstream, anger at genre conventionality and same-ness. The album is a celebration of difference; a collection of songs from defiant outsiders who are nonetheless legendary in their fields.
Reggae stalwart Tippa Irie vents righteous fire on ‘Angry’, and in much the same vein, Kode 9 collaborator Spaceape wrecks the mic delivering the vitriolic ‘Fuckaz’. Both vocalists abandon their customary philosophical, contemplative styles in favour of rabid, double-time fury: railing against the bland, wilful ignorance of mainstream society.
All the ‘blood and fire’ lyrics are difficult to place in a traditional political context. They have no specific target but the world at large; at injustice, apathy and ignorance among the liberal, the conservative and the revolutionary. Theirs is the ire of conscious reggae cauterized from the framework of Rastafarian ideals: refined and boiled down into a pure and powerful venom, a ‘Poison Dart’ blown at the cultural jugular with dizzying speed.
The Bug’s beats sidestep the sleek, often simplistic lines of 2-step and dubstep, forcing an evolution of the body-shaking immediacy of ragga into a spare, rattling, apocalyptic shudder. Paranoia and distrust oozes from every kick and sub, evoking a ravaged land that is both a prediction and a warning.
This is the music of an immanentized apocalypse; of broken cities and angry mobs. If taken literally, it is a celebratory call for the End of Days, and change through violence and action. By comparison, Flowdan’s terrifyingly simple rhymes on the lead single ‘Skeng’ seem almost playful: mirroring the inevitable, laidback calm with which inner-city youth mimic the arms-race of the American ghettoes depicted by US rappers, and at home by the London grime set.
When placed alongside tracks like the Ricky Ranking-assisted ‘Judgement,’ ‘Skeng’ becomes satirical – depicting not the figure of the cartoon gangster, but the bleak shadow he casts across the urban wastelands. A signpost to a dire future, ‘London Zoo’ is the bleakest, most exciting album since the debut of Rage Against The Machine, and the only album to touch it lyrically in terms of ire and ferocious intelligence.
Jon Phonics, meanwhile, is a producer enmeshed into the London hip-hop scene, producing beats for the likes of Melanin 9 and the Triple Darkness crew. Taken as a snapshot of the health of that scene, Phonics’ mixtape ‘Half Past Calm’ both delights and disappoints. With a lighter touch than Chemo, whose ominous, Wu-Tang-influenced beats shone so darkly on Triple Darkness’ ‘Anathema’ LP, Phonics’ beats are an easier listen, but don’t always manage to carry the same weight. Half of the mixtape is inspiring, showing that the dark, hyper-kinetic flow of conspiracy-literate headz like the Triple Darkness crew can sit just as well over jazz-inflected, laidback grooves as it does over dark and grimy boom-bap.
The other half of ‘Half Past Calm’ falls prey to a kind of rose-tinted eroticism of the hip-hop lifestyle. The constant bigging-up of the self by emcees like T-Bear and Mr Drastick does nothing but sell hip-hop as an aspirant lifestyle to the listener. This is the dangerous path that American emcees are already so far down. By mythologizing their lifestyles, they have become creatures of myth: tour guides to imagined, romanticised dystopias that never existed and never will exist. If they continue down this road, all UK hip-hop stands to gain is its’ own 50 Cents – fantasy figures made up of clichés and sentimentalised ultraviolence.
None of this detracts from the beats Jon Phonics has created – they are almost exclusively slick, melodic and guaranteed to get your head nodding. The looped pianos on ‘Black Tragedy’ are intoxicating, while the pops and clicks of ‘Alternate Take’ are subtly integrated to the rhythm of the rhymes. But the choice of the emcees seems to offer a bizarre contrast between the scholarly metaphysics of Nine Planets and Phoenix Da Icefire, and the tactless boasting of Verb T and Mr Drastick.
As a listener, perhaps I’m in the minority here. When emcees drop science, I can use it to inspire, inform and criticise my own creative efforts. But I have no wish to buy into a lifestyle, or to be affiliated with any kind of image. My craving is for music that breaks down the walls between the future and the present, or between the present and the hidden past. Music that illuminates, rather than music which falsifies as it depicts. It’s a delicate difference in definition, but one that seems more vital every day.
Why sell a lie? Why buy one, however earnest? You will no doubt meet the future empty-handed; thinking you were ahead of the curve, abandoning your illusions too late.
Nobody can tell you how to live, and nobody can live on your behalf.
Arguably, all art has been commodified to the extent that if the cultural material it presents is supposedly ‘authentic’, it is also exclusive and unattainable. It’s all about selling lifestyles – and though you can affiliate yourself with 50 Cent, you cannot live the ‘real’ gangster life which he depicts, because it is manifestly not real. You can wish for it, act it out, but there is no place on earth which truly looks like his videos, or the worlds he describes in his rhymes. This is about as far from Chuck D’s definition of hip-hop as: ‘…the black CNN’ as you can get.
The reality, of course, is that – despite his claims of ‘realness’ - Curtis James Jackson III does not live this life either. The moment he became a platinum-selling rap star, he ceased to be any kind of gangster (if indeed he was one in the first place). Why then do we accept his invalid claims to ‘realness’ and authenticity? Are we, the consumers of hip-hop, content to be chauffeured around his imaginary ghetto, and pay for the privilege? Why are we happy to do this, when the real ghettos are physically present in our cities? How many people who vicariously enjoy Fiddy’s cartoon gangsta imagery actually live in a ghetto? How many of those that don’t would dare venture into one?
50 Cent’s a soft target – manifestly ridiculous. But the point stands – entertainment has become affiliation, branding: nothing more. And yet, on the fringes of the multi-million dollar industry that music has become, there are practitioners who can still give you a dose of the real. Something other than the portfolio of accepted subcultures that orbit the mainstream like moons; each one a subtly-shaded simulacrum of the capitalist ideal.
Kobra Audio Labs, AKA Mark Scanlan is a reclusive Scottish hip-hop producer who is about as far from the money-coloured, shiny plastic reality of 50 Cent’s world as you can get. His last album, ‘Sunshine, Shadows and Luck’ was a bleak, instrumental trawl through broken-down boom-bap – irradiated samples degrading and atrophying as they played out their half-life. Ineffably melancholy, his productions echoed the stripped down nihilism of early Wu-Tang, wearing their broken beats, pops and clicks like badges of honour.With his new LP, ‘Tones, Drones and Broken Bones’ Scanlan moves into more futuristic territory. Like fellow Scottish hip-hoppers Eaters and Penpushers, he has abandoned soundscapes that depict a degraded, broken present in favour of beats and sounds that construct a wonky, multi-cultural, imminent future. Although Scanlan claims the album was borne of his fascination with My Bloody Valentine and Public Enemy, this mixture of influences is transcended, warped and mutated. Sitars and cymbals ride electronic washes of sound on ‘Rag and Bone Beat’, while Eaters vocalist Laughing Gear pays tribute to artists such as Grant Morrison, David Lynch and Alan Moore on ‘Dumb Heroes’.
Each of Laughing Gear and Scanlan’s ‘dumb heroes’ are artists who presented, if not an imminent future, then a present warped beyond the real: and as Laughing Gear states, “For now, I talk through them.” They are his tour guides, yes – but they are merely temporary ciphers; interpreters of the imminent future. They stake no claim on absolutes of prediction or representation.
What do these influences have in common? None of the artists mentioned or echoed are overly concerned with experiential authenticity: they are too busy tracing possible scenarios arising from the present to depict a faked-up ‘now’ for us to buy into. They promise abstract possibility, as oppose to sharply delineated reality. In doing so, they offer us the potential to create our own futures in the present moment. The album in general, but this track in particular is a gauntlet thrown down to the listener.
Sonically, K.A.L. explores similarly futuristic landscape as Basic Channel, Pole and The Bug – sometimes understated and restrained; frequently bursting into moments of beautiful dissonance and harshness (such as on the Harlequinade–assisted ‘Black-hearted Bastards’). This is music that is more machine than man – never troubling to limit itself to defunct notions of black / white, or urban / electronic.
It is a fusion: a digital gumbo of shoegaze, dub, hip-hop and electronica that twists and changes with each chord sequence. It offers no lived experience, no definitive conclusions – only “… an idea of bleak probability,” (to quote the Penpushers). This is infinitely preferable to any kind of formulaic, commercialised realism.
To take another example, The Bug’s new album ‘London Zoo’ is also a powerful fuck-you to the mainstream. Beloved by the dubstep community for the massive singles ‘Skeng’ and ‘Posion Dart’, Kevin Martin has made no concessions to the scene. Indeed, he has been plying his futurescaped interpretation of ragga / dancehall since long before dubstep was a buzzword or even a scene. Collecting the huge dancefloor singles together into an album for Ninja Tune, he has leant them a meaning which transcends their undeniable, speaker-destroying bombast. The unifying theme of the album is anger – anger at the mainstream, anger at genre conventionality and same-ness. The album is a celebration of difference; a collection of songs from defiant outsiders who are nonetheless legendary in their fields.Reggae stalwart Tippa Irie vents righteous fire on ‘Angry’, and in much the same vein, Kode 9 collaborator Spaceape wrecks the mic delivering the vitriolic ‘Fuckaz’. Both vocalists abandon their customary philosophical, contemplative styles in favour of rabid, double-time fury: railing against the bland, wilful ignorance of mainstream society.
All the ‘blood and fire’ lyrics are difficult to place in a traditional political context. They have no specific target but the world at large; at injustice, apathy and ignorance among the liberal, the conservative and the revolutionary. Theirs is the ire of conscious reggae cauterized from the framework of Rastafarian ideals: refined and boiled down into a pure and powerful venom, a ‘Poison Dart’ blown at the cultural jugular with dizzying speed.
The Bug’s beats sidestep the sleek, often simplistic lines of 2-step and dubstep, forcing an evolution of the body-shaking immediacy of ragga into a spare, rattling, apocalyptic shudder. Paranoia and distrust oozes from every kick and sub, evoking a ravaged land that is both a prediction and a warning.
This is the music of an immanentized apocalypse; of broken cities and angry mobs. If taken literally, it is a celebratory call for the End of Days, and change through violence and action. By comparison, Flowdan’s terrifyingly simple rhymes on the lead single ‘Skeng’ seem almost playful: mirroring the inevitable, laidback calm with which inner-city youth mimic the arms-race of the American ghettoes depicted by US rappers, and at home by the London grime set.
When placed alongside tracks like the Ricky Ranking-assisted ‘Judgement,’ ‘Skeng’ becomes satirical – depicting not the figure of the cartoon gangster, but the bleak shadow he casts across the urban wastelands. A signpost to a dire future, ‘London Zoo’ is the bleakest, most exciting album since the debut of Rage Against The Machine, and the only album to touch it lyrically in terms of ire and ferocious intelligence.
Jon Phonics, meanwhile, is a producer enmeshed into the London hip-hop scene, producing beats for the likes of Melanin 9 and the Triple Darkness crew. Taken as a snapshot of the health of that scene, Phonics’ mixtape ‘Half Past Calm’ both delights and disappoints. With a lighter touch than Chemo, whose ominous, Wu-Tang-influenced beats shone so darkly on Triple Darkness’ ‘Anathema’ LP, Phonics’ beats are an easier listen, but don’t always manage to carry the same weight. Half of the mixtape is inspiring, showing that the dark, hyper-kinetic flow of conspiracy-literate headz like the Triple Darkness crew can sit just as well over jazz-inflected, laidback grooves as it does over dark and grimy boom-bap.The other half of ‘Half Past Calm’ falls prey to a kind of rose-tinted eroticism of the hip-hop lifestyle. The constant bigging-up of the self by emcees like T-Bear and Mr Drastick does nothing but sell hip-hop as an aspirant lifestyle to the listener. This is the dangerous path that American emcees are already so far down. By mythologizing their lifestyles, they have become creatures of myth: tour guides to imagined, romanticised dystopias that never existed and never will exist. If they continue down this road, all UK hip-hop stands to gain is its’ own 50 Cents – fantasy figures made up of clichés and sentimentalised ultraviolence.
None of this detracts from the beats Jon Phonics has created – they are almost exclusively slick, melodic and guaranteed to get your head nodding. The looped pianos on ‘Black Tragedy’ are intoxicating, while the pops and clicks of ‘Alternate Take’ are subtly integrated to the rhythm of the rhymes. But the choice of the emcees seems to offer a bizarre contrast between the scholarly metaphysics of Nine Planets and Phoenix Da Icefire, and the tactless boasting of Verb T and Mr Drastick.
As a listener, perhaps I’m in the minority here. When emcees drop science, I can use it to inspire, inform and criticise my own creative efforts. But I have no wish to buy into a lifestyle, or to be affiliated with any kind of image. My craving is for music that breaks down the walls between the future and the present, or between the present and the hidden past. Music that illuminates, rather than music which falsifies as it depicts. It’s a delicate difference in definition, but one that seems more vital every day.
Why sell a lie? Why buy one, however earnest? You will no doubt meet the future empty-handed; thinking you were ahead of the curve, abandoning your illusions too late.
Nobody can tell you how to live, and nobody can live on your behalf.
“Don’t believe the hype.” – Public Enemy.
By Texture, 2008.
Kobra Audio Labs - 'Tones, Drones & Broken Bones' is released digitally in early July, limited edition CDs also available.
www.kobra-audio.co.uk
ALSO:
Kobra Audio Labs Album Minimix (available FREE)
The Bug - 'London Zoo' is released on July 9, on Ninja Tune.
www.ninjatune.net
Jon Phonics - 'Half Past Calm' is out now on Ill Smith Productions.
www.myspace.com/jonphonics
1 comment:
Your blog keeps getting better and better! Your older articles are not as good as newer ones you have a lot more creativity and originality now keep it up!
Post a Comment