i was going to do a thing saying:
1) around the turn of the millennium rap, the hardcore continuum and dancehall all eschewed acoustic-derived sound pallets and turned to the synthetic sound worlds of souther rap, garage rap and ward 21 to reflect the computer-future presented by the dot com bubble.
2) a similar convergence happened at the dawn of the 2010's with lex luger, daseca/not nice and pinero beats/skippz productions all converging on this tacky orchestral wagnarian rapture. this grit and aggression spoke to the captured the pandemonium and concrete of the zeitgeist (occupy wall street, the london riots, the arab spring, etc.
3) a wave of apathy engulfed music with the failures of the arab spring, austerity, the opiate crisis, etc. radically transformed these musics. 21 savage, johnny cinco, uk drill, chronic law all reflecting this kind of sedate dispondance
4) dematarialisation had loads of impacts. one was a musical formlessness which reflected the intangible nature of graphic interfaces
5) similarly was an increase in sonic and lyrical allusions to apparitions. this reflects the way in which we interact with discorporate sentience on social media.
6) raps rhtyhmic fragmentation is another and it speaks to our collective cognitions being recallibrated by twitter, snapchat, vine, etc. to crave rapid fire snippets of novel information
7) 'the harlequin' as luke put it. the spate of impish, persona-shifting, possessed artists in the us and jamaica. i'd post that reflects the internet's malleable forms of identity (parody accounts, online trolls, deepfakes, bots, etc).
8) the music of the 2010's is part of broader cultural trend to present a more human, infantile and pastoral notion of the future than previous decades. this has come out of our fear of environmental collapse and the burgeoning transhuman age. where technology previously removed the human element in music (drum machines, synthesizers, sequencers, samplers), autotune is about imbuing technology with humanity. the pastoral stuff can be found in mumble rap's folk revivalism and fourth world instrumentals; it's the death of "keeping it real" and the re-situation of rap from "the streets" to pastoral pixie worlds.
9) the 2010's had a slow start, but the last few years have been some of the most future-facing since jungle. 2017 was when mumble rap, imp dancehall and uk drill all peaked and will go down as one of the greatest years in the history of music.
but i though that was all a bit longwinded and would go over too much ground covered elsewhere.
what i will do though is turn this into something like my london list thread or the sex thread. i'll be very self-indulgent and post loads of songs i like and adorn them with my profound and whimsical prose.