luka

Well-known member
What are any of us asking for? It might have something to do with economics. It might not. Woebot thinks all innovation is capitalist. That everything good that has ever happened in recorded music we owe to Margaret Thatcher. There's different positions.

Up until recently we've been very happy with our Thatcherite music haven't we? Capitalism has supplied the goods. So what's changed (has anything changed?)
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
our expectations are different. except for barty's. all he's obsessed with is drums. but because of his islamophobia he can't surrender to tablas.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
cross pollination of genres

knee jerk thought: any musical practice that would describe itself in those terms, and possibly even anything that could be described in those terms, would be stillborn from the off

it's not exactly a vibey, get-your-pulse-racing word, "cross-pollinate"
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like in early grime a lot of it was pub banter. it was unique london. there is nothing uniquely london about drill apart from the accents. so actually i can't agree with barty on that either. actually maybe the london of geezers simply.. doesn't exist anymore.

Actually what bugs me about barty and even danny l's take on drill is how superficially it is just based on a commodity they can just own. beyond some echoes of jungle its nihilism isn't talked about. for someone who is more race conscious than most of you this makes me kind of hold back. what am i supposed to say it? musically i get it. so what about the rapping and flows? it's not all a dilettante style thing is it? like don't get me wrong im not against the thematic content, it's more that why would i say i enjoy that?
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
there's two kinds of multiculturalism in music

there's the from-above, "take a pinch of this, take a pinch of that, mix 'em together, make a movin' flavour" approach (that's a Paul Weller lyric, possibly mangled in memory), where it's an artist's decision that they want to be cosmopolitan and syncretic. so anything from Ryuichi Sakomoto's Neo Geo approach to Paul Simon going to Bahia and working with drum squadrons, to i dunno, a much more recent example of this (Gang Gang Dance? Future Brown? the Artetetra label in Italy)... these can be well done and enjoyable to listen to, but they are never culturally generative, they never get past being the musical equivalent of fusion cuisine

and there's the more slowly hatching, semi-accidental hybrids that come about through the long-term proximity of populations - usually in a city - who are attracted to aspects of each other, learn from each other, and actually have forms of solidarity that go beyond the merely musical... they coexist in the same lifeworld

... these kind of gradual processes actually generate new forms, new tribes... lasting and fertile changes

the first (from above, eclectic) is a temporary agglomeration of carefully chosen influences, in any given record... or confined to a single artist's body of work

the second (street-level, shoved up against each other) is organic, as much a social event as it is a musical one ...

i think one of the problems is that the internet overwhelmingly fosters the former kind of fusion... it isolates and desocializes music-making to some extent, and gives people a whole world of things to pilfer and pastiche... and even worse, now it's offering the pasts of all these different cultures
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
and there's the more slowly hatching, semi-accidental hybrids that come about through the long-term proximity of populations - usually in a city - who are attracted to aspects of each other, learn from each other, and actually have forms of solidarity that go beyond to the merely musical... they coexist in the same lifeworld

Well that perfectly answers corpsey's question about why asian music has never really been integrated into the nuum. there's too much tension between turks and south asians, arabs and turks etc. fights in school, tensions when we first moved here, etc etc. like it's not like UK afrobeats where you can have a pan-asian identity because for all intents and purposes asian in the UK only refers to south asian, hence BBC Asian network. anyway i have to keep quiet about this stuff because it's not in line with the liberal id pol consensus.
 
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blissblogger

Well-known member
"is it because I is black?"

i blame Ali G also - he helped to discredit the black-identifying white person syndrome, mock it out of existence

what strikes me when i think about e.g. the British Sixties, or postpunk, is the sort of unselfconscious confidence - verging on gall - that white musicians had. they just adopted black style as if is was the most natural thing in the world, and as if they had an absolute right to do that. they didn't have inhibiting concepts like appropriation in their heads. they saw this music - the best music around - and they just got up and played it, they sang "black"

but because they misrecognised it to some extent, or inevitably couldn't the bridge the chasm between their own experience and the lifeworld that spawned the music they loved - no matter how fiercely they loved it, respectedit , studied it - they inadvertently created something different-enough that it brought something new into the world
 
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luka

Well-known member
Right, sure, this is dissensus received opinion but what does Barty mean given that 2) is usually what people mean by multicultural (when applied to music) not Paul Simon goes to apherteid South Africa.
 

luka

Well-known member
It means young people of all backgrounds finding common ground in black music, and not just any black music, but specifically the black music of America and of Jamacia. The other islands are an irrelevance. Africa has never got a look in.
 

luka

Well-known member
like in early grime a lot of it was pub banter. it was unique london. there is nothing uniquely london about drill apart from the accents. so actually i can't agree with barty on that either. actually maybe the london of geezers simply.. doesn't exist anymore.

Actually what bugs me about barty and even danny l's take on drill is how superficially it is just based on a commodity they can just own. beyond some echoes of jungle its nihilism isn't talked about. for someone who is more race conscious than most of you this makes me kind of hold back. what am i supposed to say it? musically i get it. so what about the rapping and flows? it's not all a dilettante style thing is it? like don't get me wrong im not against the thematic content, it's more that why would i say i enjoy that?

I think this may well be the case. Outside of Arsenal fans in Islington play acting I think the geezer is dead in London (but alive and well in Kent and Essex)
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
like in early grime a lot of it was pub banter. it was unique london. there is nothing uniquely london about drill apart from the accents. so actually i can't agree with barty on that either. actually maybe the london of geezers simply.. doesn't exist anymore.

Actually what bugs me about barty and even danny l's take on drill is how superficially it is just based on a commodity they can just own. beyond some echoes of jungle its nihilism isn't talked about. for someone who is more race conscious than most of you this makes me kind of hold back. what am i supposed to say it? musically i get it. so what about the rapping and flows? it's not all a dilettante style thing is it? like don't get me wrong im not against the thematic content, it's more that why would i say i enjoy that?

Tbh, I wouldn't call myself a drill listener so maybe I shouldn't be passing comment. I am a dilettante in relation to it, and that's really down to age as much as race. I can't have the immersive experience of it that someone much younger would but I wouldn' want that anyway. Pairt of this does relate to what I was saying above - I find drill much harder to penetrate and understand than US rap and that's maybe that is as it should be. But it's odd - why should a music of a city I've lived in all my life be so much harder to get?

Re. depictions of violence - the stuff I've enjoyed most has been Loski's but that's for stylistic flair as much as anything. I feel like you can hear the dancehall lineage in his stuff. I enjoy the violence no more and no less than in US rap, though i can accept that mood dominates more in drill. It is the music to some degree. Maybe things like "Gun Lean" are a move beyond that. The dance craze song is a classic rap move.
 
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luka

Well-known member
Even as recently as road rap you had K Koke, you had Benny Banks, Pakman, Dru Blu, and Potter Payper more recently even than that...
 

luka

Well-known member
I’m actually arguing the opposite.

Dancehall, afrobeats, afroswing, ‘tropical’ pop and even bits of rap all sound the same. It is this homogenised global music. I was in Greece when I first heard dua lipa and other similar pop and thought it was some Greek edm, it bore no distinct cultural identity.

I’m arguing for everyone to retreat back into their isolated cultural foxholes and create their own distinctive aesthetics again. Only them can they be blended and fused once.

The most innovative music of the 2010’s was also the most inwardly focussed culturally. That wasn’t the case in previous decades.

Afrobeats is monocultural (not entirely given the different countries involved, but for the sake of argument) whereas drill isn't. Drill is a meeting place for two communities who have had a traditionally antagonistic relationship. Albeit they're coming together to literally kill each other rather than to party.
 
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Trillhouse

Well-known member
William Gibson wrote something about how today's culture actively prevents the weird subcultures evolving 'cos everything is so interconnected. You need silos to grow something as weird as skinheads, and that's now as dead as the dodo.

Hopefully not to derail this fascinating thread.. just to counter this Gibson quote, which there is definitely truth to but doesn't hold out completely. There are plenty of weird subcultures fostered by the interconnectivity of the internet, take Incels for example. Unfortunately it's the dark underbelly stuff that's being fostered in silos and bubbling up. It's the stuff that's forced to stay hidden, but is still finding numbers and forming communities, movements. Everything else is so keen on getting attention, likes, plays, follows etc it falls headlong into Gibson's trap. I can't think of a situation that would force a musical genre (of any worth) to incubate in private along similar lines to other internet subcultures.

For a long time I've thought that surely the next big revolutions in music will have to start coming from nations where serious repression actually still exists. Where the spirit of rebellion would actually mean something. Maybe some Chinese kids will come out with some weird politically motivated rebel music, but it seems more likely it'll just be some awkward cultural appropriation involving bad trap music.
 
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thirdform

pass the sick bucket
again the problem is not *the depiction of violence* it's just how spectacle it is. something that is just there. boring. nothing to get excited about. passionless. bland. standard. nothing to get gased about. it's not about merkage.

That's what i find really conservative about the genre. Was talking to a girl the other month and she's some leftist intellectual and she was telling me how it would ruin her career if she wrote about it. from then onwards i decided to only leave my house for shopping.
 

thirdform

pass the sick bucket
like drill might want to get big but only for the artists to make money. otherwise itself it is an insulated culture. that's why i can't get barty being into it. surely if the lack of multiculturalism is a yardstick here he shouldn't be into it? surely he's participating in the multiculturalism he castigates? but funnily enough grime literally thought it would be big. which is the irony of this all.

Drill is a bit like kazakh folk music in some respects and not in others. i ccan listen to it in a detached way but it triggers no response from me.
 
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