Mavado was using autotune in 2007, so far as I can remember.
Neon Screams!
- Thread starter sufi
- Start date
-
- Tags
- blessing of the ayatollah fear ears the soul get your kit off goldsmiths shag-a-thon kit got the bag kitsch mackintosh mack daddy mackintosh plus medusa's bally mick cackintosh moronic political conclusions mugged off mumble writer new cross cultural mafia patron of the arts penmanship radio 4 book of the week sean connery pronouncing the title shotta squat rackintosh the politics of book reviews the whitest man who ever lived vybz and nobel white nerds a wailing
Mavado was using autotune in 2007, so far as I can remember.
tbf @luka says its some of the worst music in the world and he's Kit's surrogate dad.
One should have an index, what is this primitive pre-medieval (even!) nonsense?
although tbf I think bvartintosh's s first introduction to all music was UK funky.
It just struck me when listening to this.
Very Tim Finney.
Last edited:
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Funky House is great though, let's not falsely slander Funky House for any reason.
Edit: Just finished it a minute ago. And I guess the most damning thing I could say is... Well, this could've really been better served as a blog than a book.
Edit: Just finished it a minute ago. And I guess the most damning thing I could say is... Well, this could've really been better served as a blog than a book.
Last edited:
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
I wouldn't lie and pretend I'm not envious, both in never actually getting my shit together to be in this position and the neurotic reflex of "It'd be better if you did it THIS way...". I just also think/wish it could be fleshed out more as it reads more like a pamphlet/decree made into a format for old people?
Look, I would gladly lob this book at dozens of others that I know are not initiates to the proposals Neon Screams is making. I've done so in fact personally and I won't be doing that in general because I want to support this book and it's author. But a lot of it echoes into a problem I know a lot of younger music enthusiasts have with this style of writing from Simon in that these sort of decrees of description and alliteration, while fun? Don't give the music weight if they do not produce the same result in the listener's mind. It becomes a self-rewarding act that people reject and ignore, when it should be in service of these subjects instead.
I'm also concerned because it doesn't do much for younger people who like Barty are already on board. Third's not wrong in saying Playboi Carti & Quavo and such are rapidly becoming elder figures as they have more and more stylistic children in various directions (though I wouldn't necessarily call them 'old news' or be as dismissive). To talk about them as having rewritten the paths based on this proposal is accurate but... it's also the equivalent of talking about jungle as an immediate force in 2000 or something. In the interview with Simon he's acknowledged that a lot of this is falling just a few years behind the zeitgeist by the nature of book creation but then how do you rectify current day music enthusiasts who might eyeroll at hearing about how Future did this or that a decade ago?
Also I gripe a bunch in that he just wants to qualify it as wholly broken away from rap as a genre. It reminds me of post-rap being used as a qualifier for cloud rap to justify why you couldn't compare Lil B to Rakim or whatever because maybe I'm the luddite? But I can contextualize everything he's insisting is wholly broken away from rap back into rap really easily. And that contradictory nature irks me slightly because well, I care a lot about the rap fields he's covering, and I guess I'm griping with how he's choosing to represent them.
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Also NGL the intensely British narrative being struck here has me irked because most of the music covered here is American in at least origin. Like there isn't even an attempt to connect Kartel to 'futuristic' Atlanta despite the fact that most of the pioneers of mumble/frag or whatever are from a West Indian background.
Benny Bunter
Well-known member
How could the book not talk about Future/Young Thug/Carti/Migos when its about the innovations over the last decade or so? He's not talking about them as being an 'immediate force'.
And the book ends with trap dancehall, arguably at its height right now, and mentions some currently emerging possible trends briefly at the end, ie Jamaican Drill, so its not really that out of date.
And the book ends with trap dancehall, arguably at its height right now, and mentions some currently emerging possible trends briefly at the end, ie Jamaican Drill, so its not really that out of date.
No but this is the problem with futurism when its not grounded in the imaginary as such. Part of the interest for me (at least with Reynolds writing) is that he had to qualify in the 2nd and third revisions of Energy Flash that he was wrong, that he lashed out because the continuum as such failed its promise of future.
I don't have the 2013 edition of E Flash book to hand because of an hd crash and I'm not paying for my epub again to reference the relevant passages, but when I'm back in England I might if this discussion is still relevant.
The problem as such isn't that he is using Reynolds' framework and in that sense Muggs beef is infantile. But that he hasn't developed his own way of post-reynoldsian writing. It gets to a point where you think this completely slavishly follows Simon's writing style to a T, which, I must admit, made me laugh out loud. Quote introduces chapter, loads of jet fuelled alliterations and puns which demand that I feel the same way about this music but don't tell me how I should engage with the subject otherwise, then a historical vignette, then back to the speed bender, then a segue into the next big thing. It's not all bad. But I'm not going to write criticisms of it in The Wire or wherever because hey I'm not a critic and also because I support his project. I'm just left nonplussed to who the audience will be in the longterm.
Last edited:
With Reynolds this was initially refreshing because of how stale most music writing is. But when I first read energy Flash, I wanted to pick it up and fling it at Reynolds for dissing warp electronica, even though I feel he had a point at the time and have increasingly become more sympathetic over the years.
But it's in this very antagonism right, that he was trying to convince his own dance music audience that they were wrong. Is Neon Screams meant to convince the likes of Muggs, Sherburne and Chal Ravens that they are wrong? In which case yeah by all means. But it's not going to be read by Stelfox in that way is it?
But it's in this very antagonism right, that he was trying to convince his own dance music audience that they were wrong. Is Neon Screams meant to convince the likes of Muggs, Sherburne and Chal Ravens that they are wrong? In which case yeah by all means. But it's not going to be read by Stelfox in that way is it?
Writing books is always ineluctably a dialogue - this was Finnegans Wake great insight.
Anyway, I'm off to read Edelman and maybe ruthlessly scorch Paglia in 2 years time, but from the perspective of absolute scientific dictatorship. No liberal hysteria here, oh no!
Anyway, I'm off to read Edelman and maybe ruthlessly scorch Paglia in 2 years time, but from the perspective of absolute scientific dictatorship. No liberal hysteria here, oh no!
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
No that's not the issue and that's not what I want him to do. But to your point, he leaves the rap hanging like a dead nerve whereas he at least indicates the futures and paths of Dancehall. Dancehall ultimately needs more critical attention and investment considering it's getting increasingly devalued in the global musical economy compared to Latin American music and African music; rap is always going to be fine. BUT There's no invocation of contemporaneous acts to Carti like Uzi, Yachty or Trippie Redd beyond perfunctory efforts because... why? Why is cloud rap invoked at all when only one artist here (Carti) is remotely influenced by that? Invoking Memphis rap feels similarly done purposelessly.
There's a major distrust of refinement in favor of the perception of rawness, and I don't think that experimentation is inherently tied to the latter. Especially when one of the main go to's for the book is Huncho Jack, which is basically a supergroup vanity project by two rappers who were incredibly successful and revisiting what they'd already established together.
CrowleyHead
Well-known member
Again however, I don't want to undermine and diminish the thing. But it's flaws nag at me because it's going to be the empirical text on these subjects for a while, possibly forever! I don't want it to be limited to the book's or Kit/Bart's limits.
Well he undermined that point in the Chief Keef Migos wars here I feel. And ofc in terms of instrumental and production rawness, detroit rap is miles ahead, but again, it's too 'rappedy rap' for him. Which seems incomprehensible to me as a general framework.
I don't feel the acid house parallel works quite here. that review @luka linked yesterday criticised Ben Watson for severing the umbilical cord between house and disco. But, again, one has to ask which era of disco. Because embrionic disco as much as it was anti-rockist, was still about sophistication. So in a very crude sense Ben Watson has a point. It was in this sense acid was a breakthrough, because disco is about songcraft and melody, not discordant interplay.
What you would have to argue then is that Young Thug is entirely not self-referential to the past, that he is totally deconstructive and renders hip-pop irrelevant as such, which is clearly not the case. There is a clear line from Lil Wayne and Swizz Beats to Thug. One has to say where the rapture is because it's hardly as if Wayne was 'rappedy rap'
Or put it another way: was the likes of New Orleans bounce rap a la 2 Blakk rappedy rap or not?
Was Lil John or Crime Mobb rappedy rap?
Cos noone could convincingly argue that Lil Jon prioritised rhythmic dexterity MC craft, etc. Very simple call and response.
I don't feel the acid house parallel works quite here. that review @luka linked yesterday criticised Ben Watson for severing the umbilical cord between house and disco. But, again, one has to ask which era of disco. Because embrionic disco as much as it was anti-rockist, was still about sophistication. So in a very crude sense Ben Watson has a point. It was in this sense acid was a breakthrough, because disco is about songcraft and melody, not discordant interplay.
What you would have to argue then is that Young Thug is entirely not self-referential to the past, that he is totally deconstructive and renders hip-pop irrelevant as such, which is clearly not the case. There is a clear line from Lil Wayne and Swizz Beats to Thug. One has to say where the rapture is because it's hardly as if Wayne was 'rappedy rap'
Or put it another way: was the likes of New Orleans bounce rap a la 2 Blakk rappedy rap or not?
Was Lil John or Crime Mobb rappedy rap?
Cos noone could convincingly argue that Lil Jon prioritised rhythmic dexterity MC craft, etc. Very simple call and response.
Last edited:
bassbeyondreason
Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
His next book needs to completely contradict this one, full dialectical self-negation or fuck off.
bassbeyondreason
Chtonic Fatigue Syndrome
Fully agree with third that there's no real "break" to this music, it's all in long traditions. Mystikal, Pampidoo etc.
Agreed. He must avoid the perilous fate of what happened to blissblogger where he became the ur-text for rave. We give this book a 5 out of 5 stars (A*) (outstanding) on this condition alone. Reviews as such are bourgeois. There will be no reviews on this thread, only dialogue. Barty is now the synthesiser, and we are his patch cables.
Yes. Mystikal was pushing at the limits of traditional NY rap in '95!