I was just starting a two-week break from Dissensus when Luke emailed me to say he’s started this thread, so it’s only fair I answer it.
Before reading the actual thing, here are few cognitive biases that I’d rather you lot get out the way first:
1) Anti-Barti Bias: I’m arrogant, I’ve dismissed people’s tastes, insulted people, etc. So understandably there are users who are very keen to say that every single thing I write on here is wrong. I could say “1+1=2” and I’d still have gallons of human shit flung at me in the form of straw man arguments and ad hominem insults.
2) Argument from Authority: Some are probably skeptical of the fact that there millions of rap nerds on the internet and there are people who’ve made careers being in the know about these things and yet some nobody on Dissensus has picked up on something they haven’t.
3) Obscurity Bias: This one’s two-pronged. Firstly, you have people who spend a lot of time and effort discovering very obscure rap looking out for new trends, so it takes the piss that something so innovative happened right in the mainstream. Secondly, there are people who like music to be underground, anti-capitalist, etc. and so aren’t so receptive to the idea that this big pop group have innovated something.
4) 90’s Bias: This is the mean that Dissensus always reverts to. ‘Everything’s shit now, no good music’s been made since 2004’.
5) “Barty says Bias”: Luke is bound to pretend I said something I didn’t. Don’t take the bait. If he says ‘Barty says Migos owe nothing to Keef’ or ‘Barty has never heard a Das EFX’ assume that I didn’t say those things.
6) Don’t Like It Bias: You can dislike something while still acknowledging it is innovative.
7) Craner’s Dad Bias: Craner’s dad thought jungle was rubbish because Tony Williams played fast on ‘Four & More’. It’s a silly mentality. Don’t do the same thing here.
Anyway, like all pioneering music you’re going to have a central innovation then you’re going to have some more peripheral things that are novel, distinctive or add panache that contribute to the wider aesthetic even if they’re not as innovative in-and-of themselves. So for example jungle’s only really unprecedented quality was the drum patterns. Breakbeats had been done before, they’d been played at similar tempos in hardcore, the bass sounds were similar to electro and dancehall, the synth pads were borrowed from deep house, the samples were inherently derivative, etc. However when all mixed together in a jungle context their usage felt new.
The same is true of Migos. Their central innovation is the fragmentation and cantonisation of flows. I’ve described it before as the Todd Edwars-ification of rap. You could also describe it like wack-a-mole, strobe lighting or, as Corpse brilliantly and accurately put it, ‘fat kids poking you with sticks’.
Of course it owes to call-and-response flows, but to say they’re the same is very Craner’s dadish. Call and response is motivic reciprocation in which rhythmic idea is completed and reflected back at itself, which isn’t what Migos are doing. They exemplify a style based on interception and interruption. The ad-libs will come on off-beats giving this feeling of ricocheting and suspense. One way I like to think of them is like verbal jungle, with rap bits being the ghost notes and the ad-libs being the proper snare hits.
It speaks to just how paradigm shifty this is when you think that the word ‘flow’ (which has been used for decades to analyse rap) has been made redundant. ‘Flow’ is about the rhythmic lexicon of contiguity. Migos are its antithesis.
Like jungle, there are some other qualities that are nice touches and definitely contribute to it’s uniqueness, even if on paper they’re not unprecedented or not solely the property of Migos. They include autotune, gregorian reverb on the vocals, triplets, Quavo’s “murmurs from a Martian crypt” backing vocals, phonetic Dada, some great instrumentals, etc. Even if some of these things on their own aren’t anything to write home about, when they coalesce they can be greater than the sum of their parts.