luka

Well-known member
The Apotheosis of Sadmanbarty. When the dust has settled on this thread Sufi will officially rename him Gladmanbarty.
 

luka

Well-known member
It's been a tough week for our boy wonder. Blissblogger has added his weight to the Migos apostates by calling them "lightweight and derivative" lending support to anti-migos hardliners crowl, corpse, Web E-Chat, third and many more. In fact everyone on the board is united against him, everyone that is, apart from me, and for structural, engineering reasons, I am obliged to stay scrupulously neutral.
 

luka

Well-known member
This is the thread for barty to do what all men must do, to win his arguments. These are the tasks life puts in our path. This is how we become truly great.

A prophet is not merely a man who sees his vision, he must then transmit his vision so that others may partake of it. This is how we form cults, this is how we build compounds.
 

luka

Well-known member
Barty has been unusually lucky in having two very powerful adversaries in third and crowl who have presented him with cogent, well evidenced, brilliantly perceptive critiques which barty will be obliged to assimilate before he can overcome them. This is a rare blessing.
 

other_life

bioconfused
i'm not really sure how else to substantiate that. other than Tastemakers (robin internet club) were super excited about them were very very excited about them in 2013 but now their influence feels so generalised that maybe the taste has soured?
they were the future for all of a year
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
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.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
'6) Don’t Like It Bias: You can dislike something while still acknowledging it is innovative.

This, of course, is my bias. And the issue with this is that I could acknowedge Migos are innovative and not really care. So I'm going to need to know why I should care, unless I like Migos.

In support, I believe there's been a lot of innovation in rap music over the past decade, including Migos's - it's about the elasticity of rapping now, how you can rap in different cadences and voices, how you can sing (with or without autotune), how you can grunt and mumble, can be INARTICULATE... Perhaps this relates to what you're talking about, in that call-and-response as Todd Edwards-esque cut-ups is a partial DECONSTRUCTION of rap.

Edit: this reminds me of the obvious point I finally picked up in the Moskow thread - that rap music is no longer made to be performed, and therefore the vocals are infinitely malleable. To annoy luka, I'm going to suggest a parallel with the Beatles disappearing from the stage into the studio.

'After lauding their 2016 single ‘Bad and Boujee’ as “the best song ever” during his acceptance speech for Atlanta‘s triumph in the Best Television Comedy category, [Donald] Glover went a step further in the post-awards press conference by eulogising the Atlanta trap trio as “the Beatles of this generation.”
 
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luka

Well-known member
Big round of applause for Barty obviously but also like DECONSTRUCTION of rap. That feels very apt.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
And does this deconstruction represent a liberation, or a sort of - castration and destruction of a potent cultural form by the infinite malleability of whatever can be sold to the mainstream?

In other words, this liberation of form seems to come with, or at least thrive on, the jettisoning of 'content'.

I suppose this is a generational issue. Somewhere I heard the other day someone talking about how the current generation of kids is growing up with these social platforms which we are inclined to think are 'theirs' - but these platforms have of course been designed by people in their 20s and 30s. On one level the creativity that you see on snapchat or youtube is a sign of vitality, but from another POV its sort of enslavement, generating clicks and profit for the elders.

EDIT: Perhaps I should pandora's box this cos I don't want this to become another discussion about capitalism...
 
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luka

Well-known member
Corpse im in the pub but to keep the conversation moving can you talk about what you hate about migos?
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
What I hate above all is that 'skrrt!' noise that they and other rappers do now.

I didn't mind it the first time but then they did it fifty million times.

It's a tic noise, and Migos at times seem to me to comprise almost nothing but tics.

Maybe after all its the endless ad-libs.
 

Corpsey

bandz ahoy
Maybe Barty has actually put his finger on exactly what I find so batshit irritating about them?

The atomisation. As if you're watching TV and some ADHD addled youth is endlessly flicking between channels.
 

baboon2004

Darned cockwombles.
i know little about Migos - but I used to hate what I heard and be absolutely mystified at the appeal. then heard 'Bad and Boujee' really loud in the gym, of all places, and it finally made sense. Sounded like a finely tuned machine, an environment more than it's music.

on the cognitive biases, i would imagine that dissensus is much less susceptible to the obscurity bias than most places

(8) Corden bias - is not technically possible that anyone future can have done carpool karaoke with James Corden
 
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