bassline on this radio rap tune is pure junglizm circa 94-95

cf

yet another song i heard on Power 106

which is the station in this town for street rap -- i.e. commercial but X-rated / minimal / hardcore...

the most aurally striking stuff you can find on the FM dial

cold and dry and hard and stark

Tyga... "Beez in the Trap"


in some senses it's just the barest extension of  the rap i liked so much in the early 2000s (dirty south, crunk, ludacris, ruff ryders etc etc) that then turned into trap

but with a High Definition upgraded quality to the production - more space and glisten... the drums at once emaciated yet with a dimension to them that feels like a quantum leap

it's like if crunk/dirty south was a movie, and this new sound is the movie digitally converted to 3D

 a lot of it, including many tracks i've not been able to identify   (because the djs neveR say what the tune or artist is), has echoes of Northern bleep or jungle

so that again adds to that slight doubt feeling of "is this really new?" because if it's not exactly a reiteration, neither is it much more than an incremental intensification of a long established template

(and for sure, the lyrical content, being utterly retrograde, adds to a sense of stuck-ness, arrested development...  a culture ever more narrowly focused on the nexus between sex and money)

still

it does have, at least, that aura of NOW about it

(cf EDM or Cataracs-style radio/club  dancepop)

you listen and you think, "it's 2012"

maybe a 2012 that hasn't advanced on 2002 as much as one would have expected, in 2002

but still contemporary

beyond lies the wub - in-depth piece on the history of dubstep and emergence of EDM by Joseph L. Flatley at The Verge --  w/ quotes from me, Martin Clark, Joe Nice and many more

 a quote from me:

 "I just went to the Hard Festival over the weekend. The thing I liked about it was that this was music that had absolutely no sense of the past being better. In house culture, or even dubstep in Britain, there's a lot of referencing of roots reggae, or the early days of house, or the early days of jungle. In dance culture, the purist stuff, there's sort of this in-built reverence to the past. And what I liked about the EDM vibe, there's none of that: it's just like 'now, now, NOW.' And if you happen to know about music you could hear things that harken back to [earlier dance music], but that really doesn't seem to be what the kids are into. I sensed [a vibe of] 'this is our music, this is our generation.'"

a quote from Flatley:

"Despite the circuitous route the genre took, the controversy and the metamorphoses, the promise of dubstep is still a bassline wobble implying something that feels absolutely true: The past is over.

All that matters now is what we do going forward.

So let’s go."