barty's magical mumble rap roundup

forclosure

Well-known member
Emo rap. I kinda think this is objecnively terrible but I still quite like it, in large part 'cos it's such a deliberate challenge to rap's norms of masculinity. I wonder if the video is an attempt to speak directly to his intended audience - you can't more emo than incinerated goths. On a more meta-level I love this 'cos it's like no matter how long I listen to rap, just when I've written it off (again) as creatively redundant and boring it completely genration gaps and confuses me. AGAIN.


The big glaring issue i take with emo rap is that its the way in for alot of former emo rhythm guitarists to make rap music but not have to deal with the "rap music culture" at large and just acumulate fans who feel like its the dream meeting of the dumb rock music they liked in their teens with the "cool" trap rap that they like now, i dont like Peep and its impossible for me to take a crew called "gothboiclique" seriously but ill admit that dude had the ear for melodies, was attractive in that gangly im sensitive,queer and socialist way that wouldve been hard to maintain once he turned 30 aswell as somehow found a way to make that fusion of sounds sound natural rather than unlistenable off the jump.

Its the new age equivalent of those 30+ "nostalgic emo nights" that people of my age and slightly older dash to in droves to sing old Fall Out Boy songs to look over their teen angst wistfully reminice about the bad old days and just how bad those old days were to quote Jello Biafra. The whole thing is just strange and alienating to me .

Its great for labels in a way cause they only have to deal with one musician rather than the whole "band" aspect of it all so they can just tour them like WWE do their wrestlers and it doesnt cost them as much
 

forclosure

Well-known member
A while ago i heard on a podcast somebody bring up the idea of Lil Peep doing a collabo album with Will Oldham and my eyes almost lept out of my sockets cause that is exactly where all those guys wouldve gone.

One call the mid 00s emo/indie rock staples have been stripmined and sampled and the novelty and nostalgia for 2006 is gone alot of those guys wouldve moved on to making really awful indie folk albums or some awful collabo album with whats his name from the microphones and other legends of "sad" depressing indie music

not a fan of say JuiceWRLD but i can tell hes a rapper first with influences outside of rap than a rock guy looking to make rap music cuase its more "interesting" than guitars or something like that i cant see Wicca Phase ever going on Westwood to freestyle for an hour, not saying they need to do that but theres a specific thinking behind that
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
Future- Ooooh


Pianos become swollen droplets.

A fist smeared in gelatinous blood, draped in magisterial gold chains and grasping between its fingers a glistening, freshly removed heart. Is this the triumphant climax of an Aztec human-sacrifice ritual or a darkly satirical reimagining of a black power fist? The guttural, agonized moans accompanying it suggest it could be either.

Perhaps this is Toxcatl, the Aztec festival of the shaman god Tezcatlipoca which culminates in human sacrifice.

Shamanism certainly seems at play. Hyperventilated throat singing as some form of ancestral channeling.

“Wizard”. “Magic”.

Simon Reynolds in his boxers.
 

luka

Well-known member
i'm just going to recycle some bits from Blissed Out

it all fits

texture > text etc etc

Barthes rather than Virilio would be the apt go-to Frog Theorist


thing is if you want wordy, lyricist-MCs there are plenty of them still out doing the more traditional thing, getting the rave reviews

it's not a zero sum game

this is like a whole new thing - MCs playing with voice rather than with language

actually what i think might fit )in terms of more contemporary theory references) is some "affect theory" a la Lauren Berlant

music as moods, vibes, emotional atmospheres, floating vague psychological states - but nothing so coherent as a worldview or narrative

Who were the original musicians?
 

luka

Well-known member
I just remembered AR Kane. Let's listen to them. I'm not sure I ever really did.
 

luka

Well-known member
I just listened to that and I can 100% see where Simon is coming from. Very interesting and neglected avenue of conversation, while I was drunk and laughing bout Barty seeing him in his underwear
 

blissblogger

Well-known member
that's actually one of my not so favorite AR Kane tunes but yeah they are a prime example of what i would have glommed Barthes et al onto - the EP Up Home, the album 69... the early track "Haunted"

it was about the guitar textures rather than voices.... the voices in all that kind of music (AR Kane, My Bloody valentine, Loop, etc) tended to be these pale wispy barely-there presences that were buried deep in the layers of the mix, there was this sonic overload and there was a kind of homology between the way the voice is submerged in the music and how the listener was meant to "go under"

a hostile to that kind of thing critic complained of "texturitis" - in reference to shoegaze and Cocteau Twins / 4AD... heavily-effected guitars where just the sound of them rather than what were doing was the thing that caught your ear

although there was melodic and harmonic things going on also, it wasn't just someone wazzing off through a bunch of guitar pedals

that said, although the voices were buried and the words semi-audible, it wasn't like the text was completely drowned out, in fact often the lyrics were really interesting and certainly tended to fit the erotics of sound (themes of surrender, loss, drift, a fey melancholia, lost in a daydream etc)... as did the vocal style itself
 

luka

Well-known member
Had you heard them before? They're a idiosyncratic fixation of Simons. No one else has ever heard of them. Did you like it?
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
i know i keep banging on about it, but if you want to hear the music as i do listen to the vocals in the same way you'd listen to this:

 

blissblogger

Well-known member
actually now i think about it, the mumble rap and the murmured, half-buried vocals in AR Kane and MBV etc do kind of fit.... and the fey, androgynous sexuality

AR Kane's debut album was #1 in the indie charts, so very much not something that no one else had heard of!

But at Melody Maker we did push them very heavily - i think they were on the front cover twice.

they have kind of been forgotten though it's true, apart from a little core of true believers, unlike My Bloody Valentine who have grown into this Velvet Underground-like rite of passage listening thing, spawned hundreds and hundreds of imitators.

Black British and from the East End... i think originally but certainly that's where they were living when i went out to their house. Might even have been Stratford, certainly it was somewhere that it felt like quite an odyssey to get there.
 

luka

Well-known member
i'm just going to recycle some bits from Blissed Out

it all fits

texture > text etc etc

Barthes rather than Virilio would be the apt go-to Frog Theorist


thing is if you want wordy, lyricist-MCs there are plenty of them still out doing the more traditional thing, getting the rave reviews

it's not a zero sum game

this is like a whole new thing - MCs playing with voice rather than with language

actually what i think might fit )in terms of more contemporary theory references) is some "affect theory" a la Lauren Berlant

music as moods, vibes, emotional atmospheres, floating vague psychological states - but nothing so coherent as a worldview or narrative

This is the AR Kane angle
 

luka

Well-known member
I think whAt he is saying is the words you are using to talk about this stuff are exactly the same words he used to talk about ar kane. I think that's what he's saying.
 

sadmanbarty

Well-known member
This coming out the green goblins mouth :crylarf::crylarf:

craner sitting there on the park bench dressed like anthony hopkins at the end of silence of the lambs. "hello there young man. have a worther's original with me and tell me about you hip hop music you like"

dirty old nonce.
 
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