The Musical Future Has Not Been Cancelled
A new book considers the musical innovation of trap, drill, and bashment in the last ten years – and the cultural contexts in which they have been taking place.
Credit: Jodie Walton / Unsplash
- Interview by
- Luke Cartledge
‘They told you the future was finished,’ reads the provocative opening of Neon Screams. ‘They lied.’
In his first book, Kit Mackintosh makes a compelling case for the notion that in the development of contemporary trap, drill, and bashment over the past decade, music has surged forward at an exhilarating pace. Tackling the arguments of some of the most influential cultural critics of the twenty-first century head-on, he contends that, for popular music at least, the future has not been ‘cancelled’ at all, with technological innovations (particularly in the use of Auto-Tune) and explicitly futurist artistic visions contributing to a remarkable rate of aesthetic change.
It’s a fiery, exuberant work, written with the kind of kinetic conviction that comes from being utterly possessed by one’s subject matter. It’s also extremely refreshing; as important and incisive as much of the work of critics like Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds has been for the popular understanding of the speed and nature of cultural development (particularly among the British left), a riposte to their accounts of an ever-staler popular culture—stifled by neoliberal disinterest in the arts and compounded by the harsh realities faced by the marginalised communities from which so much artistic innovation has historically sprung—feels somewhat overdue.
However, it’s not just a dismissal of those arguments: it’s a synthesis and subversion of them, and to an extent, the book’s publication by Repeater (co-founded by Fisher) and the inclusion of a foreword by Reynolds (in which he describes the book as an ‘update of Paul Gilroy’s ‘Black Atlantic’’) attest to this. Tribune spoke to Mackintosh to explore the argument he constructed in the book, and find out more about how he arrived at his distinctive perspective.
At what point did drill, trap, and bashment begin to strike you as such innovative musical forces, and how did this lead to your writing of the book?
Well, the book is really talking about the last few years for the most part, with 2016 as the main year zero, although I do have a long stretch at the beginning where I talk about music Vybz Cartel was making in 2009 or 2010. But I think you’ve got two things. I think the first thing I would say with that Cartel stuff, is that it’s the first time I think Auto-Tune is being used in a way that isn’t just a bit of a gimmick or novelty. You know, Cher made the first big Auto-Tune track, and that seemed kind of silly. But with Cartel, suddenly it’s become actually something very potent sonically, and emotionally charged. So that was one thing. And then I think you’ve had a second wave of stuff in the last few years, in Jamaica, America, and the UK, where all these new genres start coming up, most of which are based on what I call vocal psychedelia, which is all about how far you can take the digitally-processed voice.
I suppose a familiar account of musical progress would say that innovations like synthesisers and samplers have been vital to great aesthetic leaps forward – I take it you see Auto-Tune as part of that lineage?
Definitely. It’s interesting because the way people tend to deride Auto-Tune is by saying it’s very homogenising: everyone sounds the same with Auto-Tune. And actually, what we’ve learned is that it’s the complete opposite. It’s hyper-individualistic, and it kind of brings out people’s individuality. You get a whole multitude of different synth sounds and over decades people can innovate whole new things to do with the synth, and you get the same thing with Auto-Tune. And of course, then we also have a thing of people combining the Auto-Tuned voice with other effects as well – harmony engines, all sorts of shit.
A lot of the accounts to which Neon Screams is responding ground their analysis of cultural development in a certain understanding of changing social conditions; a narrative of neoliberal policies making it more difficult for marginalised, working-class artists to flourish as they cut away the welfare state, arts education provision, and the like, with popular culture becoming more homogenous and reactionary as a result.
How do you think this kind of historical-materialist account relates to the music you describe in Neon Screams?
It’s very interesting. You could hear a lot of the exciting stuff in the Caribbean as emblematic of this global democratisation of digital modernisation – the fact that people have access to computers and smartphones all around the world, maybe in a way that they wouldn’t have had before. You can hear that these hypermodern, hyper-technological artists from places like Trinidad or Jamaica, and you see where they film some of their videos, and they’re in these kind of really destitute conditions. And I don’t think it’s put on – I don’t think it’s kind of shot ‘on location’. It’s where people live and grow up. So I think that’s part of it.
The drill I talk about in the book is this incredibly bleak music. It’s probably a bit of a clichéd argument to make, and I’d say too much of the music journalism around it is focused on how it’s all kind of about austerity and crime, cutting the youth centres and all that – but nonetheless, I think that is an unavoidable part of that music. You do have this incredibly bleak situation. Here in the UK, we’ve had that for a long time now, and drill very much feeds off of that.
That’s interesting. In a recent interview with Novara Media, Jeremy Gilbert argues that the music that has most profoundly impacted social movements has tended to be instilled with some degree of hope.
There’s perhaps not a great deal of this in, say, drill – how would you respond to that idea with the music from Neon Screams in mind?
The politics of a lot of this music is, again, very bleak. So the drill thing comes across as incredibly nihilistic, amoral, and immoral, a lot of the time. One thing I talked about in the book is the imagery of drill: it kind of looks like ISIS, with balaclavas, machetes, hordes of young men roaming kind of in this kind of faux-urban-warfare scenario. And there are references to Boko Haram and ISIS in the lyrics; as a political aesthetic, it refers to some of the most heinous people on the planet.
In Jamaica, you’ve got Vybz Cartel. There’s the much longer tradition in Jamaica of political music; obviously, you had reggae, which was hyper-political, and it’s almost in a state that in the same way that some people might feel obliged to do a love song or a dance song or whatever else, in Jamaica you’ve got to have at least one track about social injustice. And so it’s almost a clichéd thing. But Vybz Cartel verged on the political a lot of the time; like, ‘Something Ah Go Happen’ to is all about police brutality and poverty and that kind of stuff. And when he got arrested, part of his defence was to claim this was a political imprisonment – he wrote a book called The Voice of the Jamaican Ghetto and Photoshopped himself on the cover as Malcolm X.
But even then, the kind of politics implied by Vybz Cartel, it’s very cult-of-personality, quite militaristic, kind of quasi-fascist. So in terms of any kind of hopeful political message coming out of this music, no, it does seem to be darker. And with the American stuff, it’s just about taking loads of drugs and being very apathetic. What’s happened in the UK a lot is you have something new and innovative that tends to come from marginalised communities, and that gets gentrified over time. Grime is a very good example of this: as it gets gentrified [in the mid-2010s] it starts to entangle itself into student politics. And you could see as time goes by drill, it’s getting gentrified, it might start trying to do things to appeal more to a student market, and then that will eventually manifest itself as a kind of political thing.
You argue that between the mid-2000s and the mid-2010s—between the golden age of grime and the rise of UK drill—British music had a ‘ten-year slump’. Tell us about that period – and any exceptions to the rule as you see it.
What you had in the ’90s was British music being hyper-innovative with things like jungle, and you had American rap, which was less innovative but quite street-level and very cool. And I think you’ve basically had that dynamic inverted. UK drill is probably the least innovative music I talk about in the book, but it’s probably far more tied to kind of a traditional notion of street cool than the stuff in Jamaica or America, which has now become a bit more futuristic, more sci-fi, more flamboyant, more druggy.
But in the 2000s you had this UK dance music lineage, which includes grime, based on pirate radio and specialist record shops. That collapsed, but now it’s been replaced by the internet – YouTube for pirate radio, Discogs for the shops. And then there’s the police. There was Form 696, police legislation that made promoters identify what kind of audiences they were appealing to, and that made it hard to put on a club night for young black men. And so you see a move away from dance music [in those communities] because of that.
For a while, there was road rap, which for the most part was a bit of an unsuccessful aping of American rap. But what’s happened with UK drill is a lot of the elements that have always made UK music interesting—particularly the rhythms—have been re-injected. There’s a jungle or grime quality to it, with these sophisticated drum patterns.
A lot of the stuff in the book, like many of the artists making it, is quite masculine, and there aren’t many female voices in there. Were you aware of that absence when writing it – and do you just think that’s where these scenes are in terms of their gender dynamics?
If I was to say that’s just a reflection of things that are there, that’s kind of deflecting culpability off myself. Firstly, I think Lisa Hyper is great, and Starface. But it’s a very tricky question. I think a lot of this music is kind of hyper-masculine and has a problem with letting female artists surface, just maybe because you’ve disproportionately fewer women who make this music or who champion this music – but I suppose I’ve become a part of that cycle.
To come back full circle, what value do you still find in the work of the people that Neon Screams fairly obviously argues against—Fisher, Reynolds et al—and is it more a case of recognising the limitations or edges of their work rather than dismissing it entirely?
First of all, Reynolds is probably my biggest influence. So I’m not slagging him off, and likewise, with Mark Fisher, what I’ve read has been really fucking great. As writers, I think they’re brilliant, and their ideas are great. But that particular end of their thinking about this kind of cancellation of the future… I think there are useful things about it, like I do think they’ve accurately identified and documented the decline of a specific type of futurism – the sampler-driven dance music and post-rave futurism that they were writing about in the ’90s. I do think that we’ve long since been at the end of the road for that, since grime really, and I do think they accurately identify a bit of a slump in the early 2010s. But they underplayed or perhaps weren’t aware of what people like Vybz Cartel were doing at that time.
But the other thing I value is the ideological commitment to going, ‘No, things have to be futuristic, have to be innovative, have to keep moving forward.’ I like that. Don’t settle for pastiche or stasis. I love that idea, that music keeps churning over and changing every two, three years.