The Return of the Boom Bap – Serie B 2008

The Return of the Boom Bap feature – Published in Serie B Magazine, 2008

This feature is accompanied by a mix, which is available here.

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The return of the boom bap

In 1993 KRS announced the return of the boom bap. It has returned 15 years later, but not quite as the Blastmaster would have expected it. As hip hop changed so did the boom bap, and today it’s found in the beats of a new generation of producers who’ve taken hip hop firmly into the 21st century without forgetting where it all came from.

Boom bap never died

Trace the roots of this new generation and two people generally always show up: Jay Dee and Madlib. These two producers, knowingly or not, laid foundations for a whole new era of hip hop. Not only did their approach to production help usher in a return of the boom bap, that unexplainable feeling that makes you want to bop your head to the beat, it also showed new, untapped possibilities for how hip hop could be.

The new boom bap took hip hop as its foundation and build on it, the manifestation of an often forgotten element that was part of hip hop from day one: progress. Taking hip hop and making it your own. At the turn of the century, a new generation came through and did just that, transforming the beats we thought we knew in the process.

Among the first to emerge in this new generation were producers like Prefuse 73 and Dabrye. Coming from different musical backgrounds, they took in a range of influences and blended them into a new whole, riding a fine line between hip hop and electronic music. Their vision of what hip hop could be clashed with what most people were used to or comfortable with at the time. As a result the music was tagged under a variety of names and ended up finding a rightful home with pioneering electronic labels Warp and Ghostly, further blurring the lines between genres and creating a new space for the boom bap to return.

Much like golden era producers dug in their crates to create the original boom bap, Dabrye, Prefuse and their peers embraced their own electronic influences to bring through their vision of hip hop. And that in turn echoed with a new generation of listeners.

There is no glitch hop

While the Detroit area became a place to look to for new and inspiring productions, with producers like Dabrye, Dilla and Waajeed, each unique but all sharing a common evolving element of hip hop in their productions, L.A gave rise to its own crop of future boom bap purveyors.

On one side of L.A’s hip hop revival stands edIT, a man who burst out of L.A and onto the world in 2004 with a debut album, ‘Crying Over Pros for No Reason’, on yet another influential electronic label, Planet Mu. ‘Crying’ stood out and found success because it sounded, and still does, like nothing else at the time: an instrumental hip hop album put through an electronic grinder and coming out with a sound all its own. The album took the idea of boom bap and fast forwarded it a few decades.

And while the obvious electronic influences in his music led to it being tagged as glitch-hop, it’s quite clear that the album was nothing more than a new, different vision of hip hop. Nearly 5 years on, edIT continues to hone and refine this vision, moving towards futuristic beats aimed squarely at the dancefloor, both as a solo artist and as part of the Glitch Mob.

A collective of L.A and San Francisco producers and DJs, The Glitch Mob blend hip hop and electronic beats in a distinct fashion, breaking elements of various genres to their core components to build heavy duty dancefloor beats.

L.A got the craziest beats right now

On the other side of L.A’s revival stands Flying Lotus, a member of the Coltrane family and probably the best known of L.A’s new beat adventurers. While his early work owed much to Dilla and Madlib’s productions, his sound took on a whole new dimension as he signed to Warp in 2007 showing yet another possibility for a future boom bap, one grounded in a heavy dose of bass reality. But Fly Lo is just the tip of the L.A beat iceberg.

There is Take, a producer who makes forward thinking instrumental hip hop. At times laid-back and melancholic, you can hear the ghosts of Dilla in the drums and electronic pioneers in the arrangements. The boom bap is there, evolved, lying somewhere in between the loose drums and warm basslines.

Then there is Ras G. His beats may seem a lot more ‘classic’ at first, but they are full of new ideas. In a smoky haze between the drums, samples and bass, the boom bap lies in wait, making your head bop to the riddim.

Samiyam, meanwhile, is a producer who relocated to L.A from the same Detroit area as Dabrye. His beats are loose and move at a seemingly slower pace, blending electro and video games influences with unquantized drums, a technique that Dilla made his own but which in Samiyam’s beats, and others, still sounds fresh. He also collaborates with Fly Lo as FlyAmSam, and has just signed an EP to Kode 9’s Hyperdub label, building yet more bridges, geographically and sonically, across this new era of
hip hop.

UK, UK!!

Europe also plays a part in this boom bap revival, especially in the UK where the whole idea of a new hip hop, a new boom bap, is deeply intertwined with electronic music and dub. This is no coincidence considering the lasting influence of rave and sound system culture, as well as the presence of labels like Warp and Mu, which understood long ago the possibilities for the evolution of hip hop and electronic music.

In the south, Danny Breaks got things started in the early 00s on his Alphabet Zoo label. Danny made a name for himself on the jungle and drum n bass scene in the 90s, and at the turn of the century he started releasing a string of EPs that blended his love of drums, hip hop and electronic music. In the process, he found yet another groove for a new boom bap, with his loud and crunchy drums referencing hip hop’s golden age while the bass and melodies were straight out of a rave.

Danny’s label was also home to Harmonic 33, a side project of electronic pioneer Mark Pritchard who dusted off the moniker in 08 for Harmonic 313, which is signed to Warp. In Pritchard’s words, Harmonic 313 focuses on Detroit hip hop, blending it with Detroit techno, a dose of bass science and a love of video games and science fiction among other things. Embracing these influences with a distinct and refined approach, the first Harmonic 313 EP shows yet more possibilities for the new hip hop era, with a sound grounded in the warmth of the past and the possibilities of the future.

Bass science also happens to be a specialty of Loefah, one third of the DMZ collective that has been at the forefront of the dubstep scene. While he operates in a different ‘scene’ and at a different bpm, his beats owe much to classic boom bap era hip hop. It’s impossible not to hear those ghosts in his drums, refined to perfection, and the weight with which they hit you. Rightfully, his music, and that of DMZ, has been praised by the Bomb Squad and influenced their return to the stage this year, with a dub centric take on things.

And then there is Kode 9 and his Hyperdub label, which in the last 12 months has released a string of 12”s that keep blurring the lines between genres. Most interesting though is Kode’s growing link with Flying Lotus and the L.A beat scene, with both sides taking influences from each other and feeding their own respective evolution and output.

Heralding Change

Up north, under the grey skies of Scotland, is where the LuckyMe family operates. A collective of producers with their own vision of what hip hop can be, they made a lot of noise in 07 thanks to a string of releases across labels from three of their members: Rustie, Mike Slott and Hudson Mohawke.

The releases redefined how many thought about hip hop and electronic music by fusing elements of both into a singular, original sound unrestricted by genres, clichés or audience needs. The result is music sometimes made for the dancefloor and sometimes made for the headphones, but always undeniably banging and with an irresistible boom bap to it, hidden in layers of unquantized drums, synths and heavy bass. And seemingly continuing their own vision of a new hip hop, Warp signed Hud Mo for a release in 08.

Picking up where hip hop stops

Names have been used, and continue to be, to somehow separate what these new producers do from what is established and accepted as hip hop. Ultimately though, it all boils back to hip hop. The music and artform has always been about progress, and today what we’re hearing from this new generation is nothing more than a logical sonic evolution of the music.

Boom bap made hip hop exciting for me back in the day. It was, and still is, that thing you couldn’t put your finger on in the beats that made you go ‘damn!’ I waited a while before I found it again, but it’s here, as fresh and exciting as it was the first time around. And it’s time we all welcomed it back.