The era of vocal psychedelia

Fuck your parents' future.

The tone, the impulse and the interpellation –both disruptive and purposeful– seem typical of an “Angry Young Man”.

They would correspond to a manifesto:

(we only know his alias) emphatically defines a generational gap from his book

, published in Spanish by Caja negra at the end of last year.

A white native of South London and only 24 years old, in the midst of a pandemic, he decided to subvert the current diagnosis of Pop in order to outline a new cultural vanguard, always focused on popular music and in tune with the brand new 21st century.

To begin with, the accomplice will be the reader.

Then his enemies: none other than his own godparents.

The book-manifesto will then open with a capital meme: “They told you that the future had ended… they lied to you”.

Who are “they”, the “false prophets”?

Two of the most prominent British critics of popular culture in recent decades,

Respectively, the foreword writer (who celebrates the enthusiastic theorizing of his successor) and the co-founder of the publisher –Repeater– that originally published

will be two years ago.

Isn't that called "biting the hand that feeds you"?

It happens that Mackintosh was motivated to rectify both the Reynoldsian hypothesis that the addiction to the past continued to stagnate pop (

, 2011), and the nostalgia for the lost futures that could be resumed, which spread the pages of

(2013) .

), one of the last books that Mark Fisher bequeathed to us before committing suicide in 2017. Fisher's phrases about cultural stagnation such as “slow cancellation of the future” have angered him:

As Reynolds and Fisher whimpered their blues into their fifties, the teenage version of Kit set out to listen to all (as he puts it, “all”) of the recorded music available on the Internet (“his” source: he's a digital native), until he found himself. what would be their new models for the future.

We refer to

genres conceived by black communities and their subcultures (also labeled as "urban music" or "Street sounds" throughout the book).

(“the transatlantic production line,” Kit tells him, quoting sociologist Paul Gilroy casually), and these are music scenes that developed in the 2010s, when trap ceased to be a local phenomenon in the American South to dominate Global Pop (Argentina included, of course).

For this reason, all the genres that he dissects are ultimately the result of increasingly deforming mutations suffered by the prehistoric but seminal Hip Hop and Reggae.

YSYA in GEBA.

He is one of the few Argentine exponents of trap like the one Mackintosh postulates.

Photo: Rolando Andrade Stacuzzi.

Now, just as his digital background is overconfident that Google equates to El Aleph, his inductive method neutralizes the geopolitical privilege of his point of view.

As much as we excuse and celebrate so much youthful smugness when launching generalizations and universal conclusions, it is not always easy to accept the Anglocentrism of the North that leads it to infer the "Music of the 21st century" from microgenres such as Brooklyn Drill or Anglo-Caribbean “Trinibad”, not counting Africa, Latin America (reggaetón, cumbia and their derivatives are conspicuous by their absence) and Asia in the field work.

Having said this, we cannot fail to celebrate the appearance of an analysis that tries to stick to the materiality of music, understood as a sound object, but also a tactile one, with perceptive and cognitive consequences for those who listen and dance.

Kit does not dodge the bulge as is customary in academia and certain music journalism, which only focus on the lyrics (the stubborn concept that a song is a sung poem), or distract themselves by going out into the sociohistorical context, when they do not feed that cult to the personality (the more freaky, the better) that today multiplies documentaries and biopics on screens.

Hence

requires us to advance in its

: Every example Mackintosh offers, pushing rhetoric to the limit, riding synesthesias and analogies, needs to be checked.

The invitation to the reader to abandon himself to the acoustic and bodily experience is constant.

let's give in

The psychedelia of the voice

Digi-phone-delia.

I composed this neologism in order to synthesize the

.

He defines it as a "macrogenre" of the music he chooses.

Far from the prohibition of Auto-tune that Charly García called for after hearing Duki sing,

consecrates this audio processor as "the most important sonic technology of the modern era".

Created to hide tuning errors, as a "speaking" device, it was after the success of Believe (1999) twittered by Cher, that it began to be used as a "robotic effect".

From Cher's gesture to the climax of DigiFonoDelia –represented by the song "Codeine" or Playboi Carti's entire album

, for example– any intention of correction, or cyborg makeup, oriented towards vocalization is lost.

The objective in the most extreme trap when abusing

Expressionism?

Edvard Munch's Howl painted in moving neon.

That is why Mackintosh places so much emphasis on opposing the idea that applying state-of-the-art technology in popular music implies resulting in a gray, icy, dehumanized, mechanical sound.

Mackintosh calls that ideology Metal Machine Music, in homage to Lou Reed's longest, loudest, most experimental album (and quoting Kraftwerk in passing).

He envisions a “biotechnological aesthetic” of tomorrow, where instead of plastic and metal hard drives,

.

As we approach the era of what William Burroughs called the "soft machine".

Voices processed via Auto-tune sound like they never could have before.

Indeed, the grain of the voice in the digital age is the work of exploration and exploitation of the unheard of, especially in the hands of avant garde pop producers.

Mackintosh's prose does not skimp on adjectives and metaphors to translate this phonetics of unprecedented textures: he writes that Big Voice in "Chedda" (2018) sounds like breathing thermonuclear fire or, at the height of descriptive precision of timbre, compares the transparency of Vybz Kartel's digital falsetto in "Gaza Commandments" (2009) with that of a cuticle.

And here begins to carve the need to subvert the conception of the future that began to circulate in the postwar period of the 20th century.

(Who could live without their Smartphone, turned into a fetish and an irreplaceable pet?).

Consequently, the imaginary of Star Trek, Star Wars, The Jetsons, Terminator, Kraftwerk, Gary Numan, Blade Runner, etc.

where anthropomorphic robots coexist with humans, it must be replaced when technology became so close, even intimate.

We could say that the last group to thoroughly parody that old science fiction ideology is Daft Punk.

Mackintosh insists on detecting “slime” textures (the gelatinous, viscous, slippery and sticky), sensory antonyms of that “chrome world” that Spinetta once poetized.

"The artists manage to make (Auto-tune) acquire sound qualities that evoke tissues and bodily secretions," he concludes, not without insinuating, pages later, that something in that effect of the voice summons the sinister of our interiority, the most alien thing that we carry within, the “extreme”.

He celebrates the “electrified hyper-emotion” that trap and dancehall infect us, because it is a “sonic RPC” that rescues soul from the clutches of the cliché.

It refers to the African-American musical genre, of course, but it also alludes to the Soul, why not: does it not imply a false awareness of our "interiority" to believe that the voice before Auto-tune expressed itself directly?

Weren't the mediations of microphones and amplification foreclosed?

Did we forget that our analogue grandmothers hated hearing each other on the phone because they didn't recognize each other?

instead of simulating a reflection, far from any nostalgia for a non-technological prehistory of the “primal scream”.

For this reason, in

we will never read that Auto-Tune improves and/or automates a tuning.

Quite to the contrary, the idea is that it can even rehumanize a vocal performance by deforming it.

To the point of super-humanizing it (Vybz Kartel raps like Zarathustra) or sub-humanizing it (Jamaican Tommy Lee Sparta reduced to Goblin), and finally, post-humanizing it: “Artists digitally augment their voices and indirectly themselves, so who become supermen and oozemen and goblins and ghosts.”

, and in that sense, the autotuned trap already anticipates them here and now.

Psychedelia was always techno.

Abusively techno.

As if democratizing Arthur Rimbaud's visionary program (“the long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses”), Hendrix overreached with the wah wah and other pedals in the 1960s, while two decades later, Phuture de-professionalized its use. of the Roland 303 bass, in order to demand that buzzing sound typical of Acid House.

The goal is updated with the Auto-tune: "Recalibrate the conscience", as we read in

.

Sound effects and certain psychotropics (which can even be consumed in certain trap scenes to desensitize) come together in the same synaptic engineering.

Farewell to 20th century Hip Hop

"It's time to retire rap."

The sentence with which the chapter dedicated to the Trap closes reminds us that Mackintosh has just claimed the digitized phonetic object pages ago (one can no longer speak merely of “voice”), above the message and, above all, beyond the articulated language .

He dwells a little on Mumble Rap (“Babbing Rap”), with Future at the helm, and the same on Frag Rap (“Fragmentary Rap”), represented by the trio Migos.

The leader of the latter –Quavo– formed the duet Huncho Jack together with

The point is that the critic exposes his

, that is, the ingredients that have defined rap until now.

For the rest, he reviews in his own way the evolution and exhaustion of the genre that revolutionized pop in the '80s forever: first, Grandmaster Flash, who certified that rhyme puts a full stop at each bar;

later, the great Rakim, who dissolved the score with internal rhythms to the verses, and at the end, Rakim, with his conversational style.

So many rhymes and so many internal rhythms ended up saturating the raps: “the artists sounded congested and constipated”, he symptomatizes.

Nor did the hybrid melody and rap that came from the American South at the turn of this century fix anything.

Nothing until Future arrived, proposing

, provoking a blurry grumble.

A “slime” language, writes Mackintosh.

The Migos, for their part, fragment the flow, branding themselves as stutters or mantra-words, where call and response, ad libs (those interjections, exclamations or single words that Michael Jackson was fond of) and resonance chambers dominate. of the three voices in a choral plan: it seems that they are digitally updating doo wop.

Mackintosh bets on that “dadaist insurgency” in the trap.

What more opposed to his aesthetic than a Kendrick Lamar, for example?

Epitome of the well-thinking, resilient rapper, in solidarity with the fight of his race, sincere, ecumenical and politically correct.

Winner of a Pulitzer, Lamar seems to embody a black Dylan, Springsteen and Bono at the same time.

He assumes himself as a preacher, no matter how self-ironic (his enjoyable 2022 album is called

) and self-critical as he appears (on one track he apologizes for his sexism; on another, he condemns the cancellation; he can make fun of his colleagues' aspirations for fame and money, and finally there are a few words for the LGBTQ community).

He's the ideal rapper, geared toward what Mackintosh disparagingly dubbed the "student white market."

The appearance of his book-manifesto should be quite an event in Argentina, where the tics of Rap Lamar redound and are vindicated.

here the “message”, the “musicality”, the correction agenda and the athletics of payada (the freestyle duels sponsored by Red Bull, Trueno, Wos) are exalted too much.

As an aggravating circumstance, trap is judged with rock values, which finally produces that the rappers become late nephews of the Illya Kuryaki.

Meanwhile, in view of some experiments that are launching new North American scenes such as Club Rap (a trap to rock on the dance floor), where Bandmanrill stands out more than anything, or Rage (Ame, Yung Kayo), In this decade, vocal psychedelia, “hieroglyphic stuttering”, the decomposition of syntax and what analog parents consider noise continue on their way.

So if everything continues like this, the future that Kit glimpsed continues to be fulfilled.