Following on from the "my kind of rap" post with its coda about Auto-Tune and ad libs.
Here's something that's been puzzling me for a while...
Q: Why have female rappers not embraced Auto-Tune to anything like the same degree as their male counterparts? They tend to have naturalistic sounding voices.
(possible) A #1 - Because the pop associations of pitch-correction - melodizing the rapping, turning it into something between rapping and singing - are something to avoid for "real MC" cred reasons?
(possible) A #2 - Or is that the androgynizing effect A-Tune has on gruff male voices is not equivalently transgressive when applied to a woman’s voice?
Below some further thoughts on this - originally an unfinished blogpost from 2018
Migos, "MotorSport"
The ethereal effete wafting of the backing track has an almost systems music quality to it: that chiming tuned-percussion pulse, the flutters of strings.
There's the contrast between the floaty, angelic, half not-there-ness of especially Quavo and Offset, and the super-potent, marauding, phallic-woman cameos by Cardi and Nicki. Which are so overpowering, so in your face, they topple the mood of the song. Such that listening, sometimes I will actually skip the two female tour de forces, cut straight from Offset to Takeoff, to preserve the dreamy ambience.
Playboi Carti - No Time
Vocal-texturally (as well as backing track texturally) this reminds me of Orphan Fairytale's hypnagogic instrumentals or the fluttering, twittering vocal counter-melodies that Liz Fraser does in back of her main vocal on Bluebell Knoll / Heaven Or Las Vegas era Cocteaus.
I hallucinate the line as "I draw my penis out"
And then the baby voice and foetus voice stuff - completely regressive, emasculated, dreampop-chillwave melting-of-self.
The virtuous dominated the end o' year lists (but then they always have played well with that constituency - remember Arrested Development)
The decadent, though, had - if not the best tunes - the best swoons. A monopoly on jouissance.
For me all other metrics fell away - importance, innovation, resonance, significance etc - and I fell back on, fell into, bliss - as the inarguable - a category I started out with in many ways as a writer
Although it is innovative and original, and possibly not devoid of significance or resonance, the Migos sound above all distinguishes itself through the flooding insistence of jouissance.
And it is about jouissance - this is its subject, its subjectivity in fact - how many times do things flood or drip in these lyrics? These are selves that are melting and brimming and bubbling and overflowing.
Culture the first has higher heights - "T-Shirt" and "Slippery" but Culture II is the one I've listened to many times more. It goes further into jouissance, deeper into a deliquescing subjectivity.
I started out liking the bangers most - "Narcos" and "Auto Pilot".
Great beat and the production takes the terraced voicescape thing even further - main rap, ad libs, wordless backing ripple of Gregorian gurgles and droning moans and then that mysterious incantation intoning deep in the cavernous background - a sample? I could almost believe it's from Popol Vuh.
But then the initially overly subdued-sounding second side bloomed for me and I realised that the second half of the second side - traditionally where a double album starts to run thin and run out of steam - was the most creative, unusual and different stretch of the album.
From "MotorSport" through "Top Down On Da Nawf", via "Moving Too Fast", "Work Hard", "Notice Me", "Made Men" (skipping the misconceived "Too Much Playa", and the inessential album coda / finale / reprise)
"MotorSport" is an example of how far Migos have come from their own earlier mixtape incarnations. Before, the hyped-up jabber - sinewy and shouty - emphasized how hard they work for their success. Now, from "Slippery" onwards, their feel is imperturbable nonchalance, gliding serenity, basking in glory.
That spring-heeled buoyancy was captured perfectly by writer Jordan Rothlein when he described hearing his own Auto-Tuned voice through headphones: “I immediately felt superhuman. The best comparison is walking through an airport and stepping onto one of those conveyor-belt walkways, where suddenly you’re walking twice as fast as everyone else with the same amount of effort.” Which is why on “MotorSport”, Quavo raps “I feel like I can fly”, while Offset goes further, declaring, “No human being, I’m immortal”.
Migos, "Moving Too Fast"
Serenity creased with melancholy - "My heart is so numb /I cannot cry /I don't got feelings"
Migos "Work Hard"
Except they don't sound like they're working at all - and that to me is so much more interesting, unusual - this almost effete rapture - what Stubbs and I would once have called "the ghostly unbody"(in reference to the likes of A.R. Kane)
Migos, "Notice Me"
Migos, "Made Men"
Very musical track, that
Migos, "Top Down on Da NAWF"
"I'm home... I can never get lost"
Again, cruising-in-the-car serenity creased here and there with pain and sorrow
In the intro, that sample -is it the little girl from Poltergeist trapped in the TV saying "please help me"?
And then the cracks in the armored fortress-self - "for some reason I can't cry-cry"
But the words are saying the opposite of the music - or rather the music (and the vocalisation style - fey melancholia) is undercutting and contradicting the lyrics
The lyrics are like a residual element, a hollowed-out signifier of rap-as-was
But the truth of the music is the woozy gaseous vocal texture - the listless wistfulness
These vocals have more to do with PM Dawn or A.R. Kane
The discontinuity between the two elements - lyrics and vocal grain / affect / mode - can get pretty jarring
This serene elegaic mood of instant nostalgia is set up and then it ends with the mood-dissonant line "she got my kids on her face"
Yet as hard-hearted and cold-souled as the lyrics seem, the fluidity of the vocal interplay and its ecstatic texturizing speaks to something else: a vulnerability to bliss. Quavo and Offset and Takeoff seemed entranced by themselves, lost in an auto-erotic swirl, draped in a jouissance that seems to seep out of their bodies as mist of Auto-Tuned droplets, a self-swaddling canopy of shivers and moans, fluttery-shivery wafts....
Quavo, so phonetically proximate to “quiver”, is the perfect name for the Migos MC who is the most ecstatically merged with Auto-Tune technology, to the point where he’s a virtually a cyborg, inseparable from his vocal prosthesis.
The lyrics are the usual alpha male, warrior male, gangsta, hardest working me in the rap biz stuff - but the vocals are saying "I surrender"
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Not a blissy one but hark at that fractured, halting structure, the way the ad libs are almost as prominent as the main rap. The effect is almost like a trap equivalent to roundelay or canon singing.
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Twelve months of Migos over-saturation were bookended by this (the purring glow-moan back-lighting "this is how it's sposed to be" is like a fluorescent marker pen)
And then that was it... nothing else really of note from the Migos camp, solo or the main group (Culture III, idiotically deemed a return to form by some after the supposed squib of Culture II, is utterly barren, from the pointless sampling of "Papa Was A Rollin' Stone" on the opener onwards)
Still, in hindsight, their sound remains one of the most original, unexpected sounds of the past decade.
Without every going into the zone of tediously testing the listener, striving to be frenziedly challenging or difficult - staying within the ear-erogenous zone.
The sheer pleasure-principled orientation of the music hides how out-there it can be - there are moments in "Auto Pilot", "Top Down on Da NAWF", "Bosses Don't Speak" - shivers and shudders and dilated moans - that seem to be cut from the same cloth as Tim Buckley's "Starsailor". A song I once described as being like the 'space' of orgasm expanded into an environment, a maze you can walk through.
That's what the Migos backing gurgles - or Playboi Carti at his heights - or the entirety of Young Thug's vocal in almost anything - or Lil Yachty on "The Ride" - or Future at his most groggy and reptilian - that's what it sounds like: coming, endlessly stretched out.
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Going back to how this started - virtue versus decadence - the electric lure of the dissolute, of dissipation and the reprobate...
Migos could be contrasted with another Atlanta-based artist whose latest mistresspiece is far more feted
The latter is - like all her previous ones - an essay about Afro-Futurism (with a tick list of progressive stances). It's woven almost entirely from what was once genuinely futurist in its day but is now a stifling tradition. Rendered in insipid melodies and a rather small voice.
Migos, Carti, Thug, Future - these simply are Afro-Futurist without having to declare themselves as such (although Future kinda nods at this with his "Future Hendrix" talk). This is a new thing that is out there in the world, on the radio, on YouTube, streamers.
The sentiments are the opposite of progressive - in fact, they are psychologically and socially regressive - but they are also hallucinatory, psychotic, hyperreal - the leaking id of the Simulacrum - and symptomatically revealing of the contemporary moment.
The lyrics are like some terminal hyper-decadent state of gangsta-thug-playa-izm - beyond even rap in its hair metal phase of the 2000s - just fleeting fragments of triumph, flaunting, disdain, glory, etc - barely any continuity from line to line.
Compelling on that level - but what's really fascinating is the disjuncture between the lyrics and the "message" of the music itself.
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“Writing aloud is not expressive; it leaves expression to the pheno-text, to the regular code of communication; it belongs to the geno-text, to significance; it is carried not by dramatic inflections, subtle stresses, sympathetic accents, but by the grain of the voice, which is an erotic mixture of timbre and language, and can therefore also be, along with diction, the substance of an art: the art of guiding one’s body….
"Due allowance being made for the sounds of the language, writing aloud is not phonological but phonetic; its aim is not the clarity of messages, the theater of emotions; what it searches for (in a perspective of bliss) are the pulsional incidents, the language lined with flesh, a text where we can hear the grain of the throat, the patina of consonants, the voluptuousness of vowels, a whole carnal stereophony: the articulation of the body, of the tongue, not that of meaning, of language.
"A certain art of singing can give an idea of this vocal writing; but since melody is dead, we may find it more easily today at the cinema. In fact, it suffices that the cinema capture the sound of speech close up… and make us hear in their materiality, their sensuality, the breath, the gutturals, the fleshiness of the lips, a whole presence of the human muzzle (that the voice, that writing, be as fresh, supple, lubricated, delicately granular and vibrant as an animal’s muzzle), to succeed in shifting the signified a great distance and in throwing, so to speak, the anonymous body of the actor into my ear: it granulates, it crackles, it caresses, it grates, it cuts, it comes: that is bliss”
Roland Barthes, The Pleasures of the Text
Auto-Tune, Melodyne, Harmony Engine etc complicate the idea of "the grain of the voice", Barthes's "carnal stereophony" and "language lined with flesh"- but I feel this passage still captures what's going on with this music and its reversal of priorities.
