REVIEW - Neon Screams
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Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again |
review by Oliver Haynes
“Declare glory and glorious jihad on all the jaded journalists writing stillborn obituaries to their distant youths; an insurgency lurks in the shadows” implores Kit Mackintosh in one of many fragments of pyromaniacal prose littered throughout Neon Screams. The aforementioned insurgency is musical, but it applies to his writing as well. Neon Screams is a deeply weird book that denounces both the mainstream music press, and the renegade bloggers of the 2000s.
An aggressive rejection of Mark Fisher and Simon Reynolds’ ideas of ‘future cancellation’, Neon Screams’ argues that autotune is a technology that has enabled new styles of music which sound like they’ve come from the future. Vybz Kartel, Migos, Future, 67 and other artists have pioneered genres which employ “vocal psychedelia”, an auto-tune-induced delirium which melts together flesh and technology in the listener’s mind. Mackintosh’s contention is that this sound was unimaginable before the early 2000s, in the same way Jungle was unthinkable before it was there.
The chapters on Drill and Mumble Rap are illuminating. Drill’s history is traced to a fusion of a nihilistic attitude from Chicago and musical styles from London. Mumble rappers’ Lean consumption is linked to the genre’s sticky, hazy sounds which mirror the drug’s physical consistency as well as its effects.
Sentences like “to enjoy frag rap is to induce your own electronic epilepsy – to succumb to rhythmic sound seizures” are common. It feels overstated, but the book closes its own loops, letting you know that it all could be bollocks, but that it’s more rewarding to let go and experience sounds this way.
Like the music it theorises Neon Screams is fragmented. The incendiary manifesto is split between 6 types of prose, each reinforcing the argument. Mackintosh makes the case for new music and new music writing which defies all convention.
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Oliver Haynes is a student and freelance journalist covering politics and culture. His work has appeared in The Guardian, Open Democracy, Tribune Magazine.
Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again
is available now on Repeater Books
is available now on Repeater Books