bassbeyondreason

Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
Soulja Boy was just the mainstream breakout of the whole crank-track craze, but he was maybe the first big rapper to publicly and vocally disrespect his elders.



There's little difference between the response to him and the response to the snap explosion of a couple of years earlier (D4L, Dem Franchize Boyz), all that "ringtone rap" stuff.
 

bassbeyondreason

Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
Have you developed a bee in your bonnet about this book bass beyond reason?
Nah I'm just having fun with it. It's a good book and I'm glad it exists (partly so I can cite it in uni essays now tbh), don't agree with it all but you're not meant to are you? I doubt even Kit agrees with it all, it's great, mad pamphleteer, 17th century Ranter shit. Now he needs to get arrested for preaching naked outside the NTS Offices.
 

luka

Well-known member
No, I don't think we're meant to agree with it. Just noticed a few snarky comments and wondered if there was a juicy backstory behind it. I didn't know you were a schoolteacher.
 

IdleRich

IdleRich
shy probably not the right word. modest, maybe. my wife isn't shy but also loathes bringing attention to herself.
Definitely a distinction exists for sure. I can be truly shy at times though, and not at others - I find that a little strange, but it's probably for the other thread.
 

luka

Well-known member
I think "vocal psychedelia" is a good concept that has much broader applications, and also I think Neon Screams is going to inspire a new wave of unlistenable Boomkat nerd records with OTT vocal processing and I might make one.
That's already happened hasn't it all that 100 geks etc all those weird Internet music people Kieran Reynolds is into
 

luka

Well-known member
Famous Midwest icon, musician and thought-leader Minneapolis Mvuent made this point in his now classic review
If I had to pick to something to quibble with, I would say that there's a case to be made that vocal psychedelia is much older than Neon Screams lets on. Autotune (etc.) itself may be new-ish technology, but the broad area of magic in which its best practitioners operate was discovered long before the 2010s. Even when electronic music was at its most primitive, people were creating otherworldly "voicescapes" (to use a revelatory phrase from the book), and they never stopped in the interim. In 1944, Halim El-Dabh recorded a street exorcism in Cairo and used electronic effects to intensify the chilling qualities of its singing in a (mostly lost) work called "The Expression of Zaar". Or take Karlheinz Stockhausen's 1956 masterpiece "Gesang der Jünglinge". One response to its premier, which Stockhausen read to Adorno live on air afterward, said it was "as if some radiation contaminated survivors of an atom bomb attack [were] trying to sing". This comment may have inspired Stockhausen's colleague Herbert Eimert; the composer, who grew up during the Edwardian era, delivered one of the most harrowing works of vocal transformation ever with the atom bomb-themed "Epitaph für Aikichi Kuboyama" in 1962. Even if you stick with pop music, you have tracks like Stacey Q - "Two of Hearts (A Capella)", in which the artist's voice shapeshifts into various wordless miragelike textures, including a haunting echo continuum resembling something out of Selected Ambient Works Vol. II. The list could go on and on. Mackintosh would probably want to point out that none these examples sound anything like the artists he's talking about. But nonetheless, they are instances of people using whatever technology was available to lend the human voice a superhuman expressiveness. The 20th century imagination wasn't all about tin can robots–the "posthuman" future has been gradually bubbling up to reach the surface of culture for a very long time.

 

Corpsey.

Well-known member
That's already happened hasn't it all that 100 geks etc all those weird Internet music people Kieran Reynolds is into
theres a bit of that but I think that stuff can be traced more directly back to 'scene kids' from around 2010


use of autotune really gave this one a freakish quality for me at the time
 
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