For the last 8 to 10 months I’ve been thinking about a feature I want to write looking at what I’ve come to think of as a ‘new wave of hip hop boom bap.’ Music and producers that have got me excited about stuff again like I haven’t been in a long time, starting somewhere with Madlib and Dilla and culminating in the last few years with the likes of Dabrye, edIT, Prefuse 73 and more recently a whole slew of new producers and collectives.
Like most things in the last 8 to 10 months though, I’ve sat on my arse and never got round to it. That is until about a month ago when I submitted a rough draft of the feature to Serie B who I’d pitched it to. They liked it and want to run it alongside a bunch of interviews with some of the artists mentioned in the feature. Bonus.
And around the same time I finally got off my back and did all this I started seeing other people talking about the same thing, but with slightly different angles. Which not only makes me feel good because I know I’m not the only one feeling like this, but also because it only makes me more inspired and gives me more food for thought over the whole thing.
First up was Martin Clark aka Blackdown who covered the rise of Wonky in his monthly Pitchfork column. It’s funny cos I saw the link to this the day after I’d finished writing my draft and Martin draws a lot of similar parallels between the same artists I have, especially the Glasgow-Detroit-L.A connection of producers. It’s a great little piece looking at how massive the wonk has become all of a sudden, and looking at it more from a dubstep/garage/grime perspective which is interesting.
The next thing I found was this post/article by Sasha Frere-Jones in the New Yorker. I interviewed edIT a couple of days ago as part of the big feature I’m doing for Serie B and he mentioned it to me, saying that Frere-Jones had coined a new term for the whole wonky/bass/futuristic hip hop tip: ‘lazer bass’. Turns out this post pre-dates Martin’s column by a month too. And what’s more it comes with a whole bunch of mp3s and mixes to download. For his part, Frere-Jones draws a line between producers in L.A, Montreal and Glasgow, with a few overlapping and a fair few mentions of the importance of bass (but weirdly no mention of dubstep or grime). However, what was most interesting for me was the mention of Megasoid, who I didn’t actually know of until speaking to edIT and reading this. What’s even more ironic is that Megasoid turns out to be a new project of Sixtoo, someone I do know about.
So anyways get reading, downloading and head bumping, because if you don’t know about this whole thing yet then you need to know, and if you already know about it then you can always read on for links and to discover new artists, like I did.
As for my take on it all, I’ve coined it ‘the return of the boom bap’, but not the kind of boom bap KRS was talking about. It’s more like a twisted, futuristic version of it, one that takes the original boom bap as a starting point and takes it forward 20 years or so, bringing with it a heavy dose of electronic influences and a love of ridiculous bass. Yet at heart, it still holds the same banging boom bap that made classic hip hop so irresistible.
From Flying Lotus, Take, Ras G, edIT and so many more in L.A to Megasoid and Ghislain Poirier in Montreal, Dabrye and Wajeed in Detroit, the return of the Bomb Squad in New York, Lucky Me collective in Glasgow, Prefuse 73 in Spain/USA, Hyperdub and DMZ in London, Robot Koch in Berlin to Mark Pritchard in Sydney, it’s all linked - by bass, by wonk, by glitch, by an unmistakable ‘je ne sais quoi’ that makes me really excited about hip hop, and music, again.
I’ll be posting up the feature, edIT interview and some other bits in the coming month once it’s all done and ready for print. All these will be printed as part of a special feature in the summer issue of Serie B, and should also be republished in English elsewhere on the web. Oh and I’ll be making a special mix to go with all this too, just cos I ain’t got enough shit to do already.
PS: I’m lazy on the linkage tonight but seriously if you haven’t heard of someone, or anyone, mentioned in this then just google them because it’ll be worth it.
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