A few months ago, Odd Future frontman, sock dealer, and professional internet troll Tyler, the Creator took to Twitter to vent about the sound quality of his forthcoming album Wolf: "THIS WAS MY FIRST TIME MIXING AND IT MADE ME HATE MIXING CAUSE IT CHANGES THE WAY A SONG SOUNDS. I LIKE IT SHITTY AND DISTORTED FUCK SONICS." Later, he told Fader that he "had to" get it mixed properly "because of sonics and some other stupid shit that they explained."
The rant reminded me of an interview I read with electronic musician Terre "DJ Sprinkles" Thaemlitz earlier that week, which expressed a similar sentiment-- albeit in less personal and more thoughtful terms: "Low-quality is where it's at… It's important to place value within the 'low' in order to counter conventional associations between the terms 'good,' 'high quality,' and 'upper class.' I'm not talking about celebrating kitsch, or that kind of petit-bourgeois trivialization of the 'low.' I'm talking about finding other values in the 'low' that cannot find expression within a language developed to express everything in terms of 'low vs. high.' This is ultimately about the identification of other values amidst class struggle."
Thaemlitz was talking about house music, early Chicago house in particular, but the theory can directly be applied to rap as well [1]. SHITTY AND DISTORTED FUCK SONICS are the backbone of hip-hop: four-tracks and dubs and dudes who don't know how to hold their mics and DJs who get their levels wrong and low bit rate samplers. Rap didn't start sounding "good" until about 20 years into its existence and even then the genre's sonic integrity continued to ping-pong from one artist to the next. Dr. Dre raised the bar with The Chronic then RZA let it rot out from the inside with 36 Chambers. Timbaland and the Neptunes elevated the hip-hop mix to accommodate their spacecraft-sleek stutters, while Mannie Fresh and Beats By the Pound made B-movie facsimiles of similar ships crashing.
As we saw with DJ Screw, the mediums of hip-hop trampled fidelity, too. And to a comforting effect. In the 80s and 90s, it was tape hiss from dubs of dubs. In the 00s, it was 96 kbps mp3s ripped to and from Imeem, YouTube, or Myspace-- the circumstances that likely defined Tyler's preference for unmixed or poorly-mixed music.
It's not just a question of sonic fidelity, either. Hip-hop thrived under a "take what you can and make something out of it" ethos. Don't have drums? Take them off your parents records or, later, find a machine that'll do the work for you. Labels won't listen to your demo? Press up your own records or, later, dub a tape. Nobody's giving you a video budget? Tape yourself on a camcorder and send it to local access. In hip-hop, this DIY approach was never as explicitly politicized as it was in punk or indie, it was mostly circumstantial and evolutionary. But that relative obliviousness made it all the more subversive. Hip-hop tore down all class norms without even thinking about it. Singing was beautiful; rappers spoke. "Real" instruments were sophisticated; producers abandoned them. Some of the greatest moments in the genre have been borne out of mistakes or accommodations [2]. The things that the rest of the world saw and heard as ugly became the norm for rap fans.
When recording their oft-overlooked lo-fi rap classic Straight Out the Jungle, Native Tongues founders the Jungle Brothers had become so accustomed to two-turntable-and-a-mic live shows and daisy-chained pause tapes that they refused to record through any high-end gear once they finally did get into a big-kid studio. They plugged their mixer directly into the tape and rocked. "We wanted to vibe, we didn't want machines getting in the way," member Baby Bam told the Preserving the Culture podcast.
Tyler seemingly doesn't have that option today. His crew's rapid ascension from underground darlings to underground darlings with an enormous budget behind them might represent a tipping point for fidelity standards within their particular corner of the hip-hop community. Odd Future got on by playing the lo-fi game well. They wore the influence of undeniable masters like Eminem and the Neptunes and MF Doom quite blatantly, but notably filtered them through limited resources and the sprawling imagination of warped teenaged minds. Even when they fell short of their predecessors in terms of craft, they compensated by twisting everything about these reference points into something messy and personal and distinctive.
Strip them of that corroding effect, and we're left with stuff like "Domo 23", Wolf's hideously bright lead single. In terms of composition and overall demeanor, the track and its respective video aren't all that different from the old days of Odd Future. Tyler bounces around and makes dumb jokes, his friends act wild and crazy in the video. But there's this insufferable plasticine cleanness to both the sound and visuals. Nothing much has changed but the fidelity and yet it's one of the least enjoyable songs of his career [3].
But certainly a record that bleeds like, say, Domo Genesis' Rolling Papers, could never sit on the shelves at Best Buy. Well, it could, but it won't. Because the industry now possesses the force to smooth-out the mistakes that have historically made rap so interesting. This divide is more easily outlined in terms of visual fidelity. It's the difference between a Lil B video and a Trinidad James video. It's the difference between Main Attrakionz and A$AP Rocky.
High-brow and pseudo-high-brow aesthetics have begun to eclipse content in underground rap [4], leaving a trail of hollow pretty things in their path. There's a whole chain of dominos affecting this change, from the over-valued buzz cycle that's dictated by rap-slash-fashion and fashion-slash-rap magazines, to the increased visualization and pace of the rap internet, to fucking Kanye West, to that old-fashioned rap-game class divide that seems to hover perpetually over this column [5]. The long and short of it is that shitty and distorted rap records can't be expected to cut their way through the fray anymore, and uglier rap videos are relegated to the WorldStar slums, where they rack up views but are never are given a chance to cross over. So when the option of not letting machines get in the way of this perceived ugliness arises, artists have no choice but to take it.
Another internet-bred underground rapper, Spaceghostpurrp, recently expressed his own frustrations about the recording of his own well-polished and mostly-ignored 4AD debut from last year, Mysterious Phonk. "It came out sounding watered-down," he recently told MTV Hive. "If I could go back, I’d make it more raw." Purrp's circumstances are a little different than Tyler's though, as he made his name less on his own great mistakes than on his ability to perfectly duplicate those of a bygone era.
Purrp's output seems especially emblematic of modern digital trends. Creative technology has slowed while social and information distribution technology has swelled. Everyone is making music on similar devices and pirated software at this point (the days of scrounging up whatever drum machines that fell off of the back of a truck are behind us). And everyone is studying the same YouTube tutorials to achieve the same tone of high-brow refinement. Whereas artists once worked blindly in their individual bubbles, they're now equipped with the same instruction manuals and a uniform set of tools. Thus, replication and refinement are the mottos of the day, at the expense of all the amazing mistakes that used to come with the act of simply getting in there and figuring it out. Now that it's theoretically as easy to make something that's pretty as it is to make something that's not, how will rap ever be ugly again?
[1] Which makes sense, given that the two genres came out of roughly the same era, subject to many overlapping social circumstances and technological developments.
[2] Two of many enduring rap tropes that were borne of legendary accidents: Milk Dee butchering the "Impeach the President" break to create the now-equally-revered "Top Billin'" drum sequence or Pow Wow from the Soul Sonic Force forgetting his lyrics while recording "Planet Rock" and vamping the surely superior gibberish of "zuh-zuh zuh-zuh zuh" in their place.
[3] To its credit, much of the rest of Wolf is more musical and empirically prettier in terms of composition than much of Tyler's earlier efforts, in a way that should theoretically warrant a greater emphasis on recording quality. The rough mixes might actually sound as superior as Tyler seems to believe, but it's understandable as to why the powers behind the record would've preferred to roll the dice on an actual mix and master job.
[4] It's no coincidence either that all of these acts have emerged from media and/or tech hubs-- Los Angeles, New York, Atlanta, the Bay Area. Places where finding a friend with a Pro Tools rig and a home studio, or a nice DSLR camera and a steady hand, or an aspiring manager tapped into a popular blog are all well within reach. Artists from Memphis or St. Louis or Baltimore are less likely to have the the resources or framework necessary to strive for the level of refinement required for them to even eat at the same table as a Trinidad or a Rocky. That's digital democracy for you.
[5] Just to be clear, this isn't some sort of conscious hip-hop head's cry for integrity of subject matter or whatever. When I say content I just mean songs that rest on something tangible-- songs that are catchy, songs that are effective, songs that have ideas, songs that make you feel things, songs that you will not purge in under 10 minutes even as you reblog a screencap from the video.
