Corpsey

bandz ahoy
It's not so much the action (standard issue for rap) as the language

It's not disguised by slang, it's described in almost technical language - like an excerpt from 'Crash'

Could be purely accidental/rhythmic of course but it underlines the brutality/coldness of the action
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
It's not so much the action (standard issue for rap) as the language

It's not disguised by slang, it's described in almost technical language - like an excerpt from 'Crash'

Could be purely accidental/rhythmic of course but it underlines the brutality/coldness of the action

i text luke the other day saying how a knife attack is so much more intimate than a shooting. that's why violence is so much more luscious in drill and us rap. really get into the nitty gritty of it. stab in the neck. twist it.

that being said "slapping off" is a great description of shooting. the listener empathises not with the victim and their wounds, but with the shooter instead. the force of the gun slapping at you.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
I dunno if 'luscious' is the tasteful word to use there, unless you're talking about the physicality of it.

In a way it actually codes as less intimate, emotionally, because you have to be incredibly emotionally detached to stab someone to death and not feel bad about it...
 

DannyL

Wild Horses
The balaclava in drill - obviously about disguising identity, and of course the slang is all code, but

So is the STYLE. The style obscures individuality (at least to the outsider), whereas grime emphasised individuality.

It obscures punchlines, wit, education, etc.

Individuals subsumed to crews and postcodes.

I think this is also a "success thing". With grime there was always that crossover hope, Dizzie, Wiley as popstar. This stuff fundamentally doesn't have those kind of metrics measuring it, let alone something as anachronistic as record company involvement. Seems pretty remarkable when you think of it that way. Music made totally without commercial constraints.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
You could be right - I always think of 'Destruction VIP' as the archetypal grime tune (probably cos it was one of the first ones I heard), where every MC has a dramatically different style and voice.

There's no Bruzas in drill, to my knowledge.
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
It's never occurred to me before (and it's obvious) that grime and garage MCs developed their style for live performance, whereas drillers main stage is youtube, hence less need for histrionics, funny accents, shouting.

that's a bit like how the invention of the microphone allowed for crooning - more intimate style of singing - a break with early musical theater where you had to project to the back of the hall, and popular song's vocal styling was like a lowbrow version of opera - then you started to get the Bing Crosbys and Sinatra with a more relaxed vocal presence, less stagey

a lot of pop music today works on the same thing of whispery breathy voices e.g. Billie Eilish - the conjuring of incredible intimacy, using vocal production so the soft voice is much bigger in the mix - in a live setting hard to do, would be drowned out by the music

a lot of drillers's audience would be listening through earbuds too i should imagine
 

version

Well-known member
There's a nice little David Byrne lecture on this stuff, the impact of architecture, microphones and whatnot on the development of music.

 

CrowleyHead

Well-known member
Idiosyncratic voices that are that dramatic seem destined for one-hit wonder status because so many of the drill MCs were all about avoiding detection, slipping in and out. It's why BT & Rendo didn't get as far as Skengdo & AM because they're loud and up front as opposed to the flat and laid out approach.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
I love poky. I remember playing d kamp to Luke when he first converted to drill and he thought it sounded backwards.

I’m surprised you’d like it though crowl. It’s so tied up in second generation Africans taking the puss of their parents. Banter music.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
20 minutes I was halfway through starting a thread about 21st futurism being inadvertent. Baseline and drill artists calling themselves code names (t2, v9, c1) without opting for other futurist signifiers.

Comparing how zapp would call their vocal treatments robotic to how autotune isn’t posited as similarly futurist these days.

This was my reply to that post corpse
 

other_life

bioconfused
finally listened to this and absolutely love the forward momentum and continuity of the slow attack pianos, i feel like a fair bit of the drill i've heard uses them in a kind of one chord at a time, spacial way. but this is like, a very rich piano arp suspended above this slinking drum line that coils inward only to lunge forward again. the quick upward glide of the bass is that lunge. continual tension and no release, a plateau. should probably zone in on specific lyrics to touch on that aspect, bc ofc i'm not familiar w what they're really talking ab but the generalised language, the code, of any of this stuff gives occult gravity to what's being said, it's meant to have that multiplicity and that very multiplicity gives the outsider the opportunity to infer what's going on by analogy (thug's "i'm not a fish eye, fool you, bitch this a peep hole", his whole thing is this really i spent years with it), see Rap Invocation thread
 

other_life

bioconfused
continuum rhythms as dialectic, as upward and irregular spirals. really want to get on the moscow angle, brexit is mentioned as well ("but we're not leaving"), maybe linked to the cartoonish paranoia by our own imperialists about russia. red army general.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i had a complete breakthrough with this an hour ago.

it's crystalline. it's the sharpness of it. like the absolute precision of your cognition when acid starts kicking in.
 
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