BeatGen Series: BeatGenealogy

At the turn of the 20th century, the technological revolution in music was shifting in favor of the populous. With the advent of sound recording technology, music was no longer restricted to the concert halls, but being given directly to the people, by the people and for the people, allowing them to dictate new music trends, which would birth popular music. Of course it wasn’t long before an industry sprung up around recorded music. Shortly after that it was decided, having the public deem music popular wasn’t enough.  Instead the industry itself should play a role in that determination, and thus pop music was born.

The goal of pop music as a genre was to reach the broadest possible audience.  As such it built it self on a formula of – short and sweet, targeting young audiences.  Over the years it has assimilated almost every influence imaginable, from whatever music actually becomes popular, simplifying it and then selling it back to the public under the pop brand.  It works both ways as well. In any genre the key to crossover success is to adhere to pop forms. In this regard, pop music is the classical of our time, the litmus test by which most music is judged.

Like the classical music of the last century, however, pop music today finds itself at odds and indeed threatened by the pressures advances in technology are putting on it. By technology here of course it can be interpreted as the rise of the MP3 and download culture¹, but in many regards it goes even deeper than that. The very essence of what is music, is today being challenged by technology. Music no longer strictly conforms to the forms of the past, and despite pop music’s efforts to embrace those changes too, they are so foreign it hasn’t come as naturally as other appropriations.  One of the reasons for this is that the very language of music, that universal language, is changing.

The etymology of the pop musical language still traces back to its classical predecessor. In form, pop is still based on the twelve tones of the western scale, melodies created from those, harmonies built upon them and rhythmic patterns within accepted time signatures. There haven’t been many formidable challenges to these foundations.  Even the rise of atonality, or bluesy jazz riffs were contextualized into the paradigm. Yet, in recent times it would seem there has been a front building, ripe for the challenge.

I had a discussion with a friend who characterized this new wave as those who make music based on sounds, rather than the fundamental of western music, notes. Where that friend saw this in a negative light, Matthew Davidson puts it in a context I prefer²:

“We have access to tools that generations of human beings have dreamed about. No longer are we limited by notes on a page – we’ve unlocked all aspects of sound…. The excitement of the ability to control all aspects of audio very precisely, moment to moment and the idea that anything is possible. We’re witnessing, and participating in, the birth of a new art form.”

While the uber umbrella genre electronic music has been working toward this for decades now, it is becoming even more clear, at the end of this first decade in the 21st century, that this new musical front has the potential to perform a complete coup on the concept of music. Within this context BeatGen has a very interesting position, appreciation of which requires some understanding of genealogy.

For all intents and purposes BeatGen is the (ill)legitimate child of two genre’s – electronic music and hip-hop. Where it gets complicated is that hip-hop itself can be understood as a child of electronic music, making BeatGen both child and sibling to hip-hop. Confused? That’s okay, things tend to get complicated when talking about genres, especially electronic music, as it is such a broad stroke (she gets around), with so many children, the family tree begins to look like the one in One Hundred Years of Solitude.

What is worth saying, in relationship to BeatGen however, is that hip-hop, soon after being born from electronic music, like the prodigal son, went its own way. Thirty plus years since that birth, many hip-hop heads don’t even recognize the lineage (to be fair it is not responsible for the birth of hip-hop, but it did play its part). Following the prodigal allegory, it is BeatGen that is making the return to home, except for the fact that BeatGen is not exclusive to hip-hop.  Hip-hop in relation to BeatGen is very similar to electronic music in relations to hip-hop.  Hip-hop wouldn’t exist without electronic music, but post-birth there is little co-dependence.

Since the 1970’s electronic and hip-hop have have charted their own paths.  Both have navigated those paths in, out and around the trends of popular and pop music including affairs with popularity. In its danceable form, electronic music has continuously had major successes on the pop charts, though never in a fashion organized enough to be considered a dominant force. Hip-hop on the other hand, was the dominant trend that took us into the turn of the millennia. It was during this period of hip-hop dominance that BeatGen was coming of age.

Concurrently for both however, avant leanings continued to explore beyond the bounds of form. This is perhaps most evident in electronic music’s IDM (Intelligent Dance Music) subgenre, which, though it has the word ‘dance’ in its acronym, may be better understood as ‘not just dance music’. The pop reduction of electronic music resulted in the majority of it being classified as dance music.  The ‘intelligent’ addendum in IDM represents a separation from that pop reduction. Not constrained by the responsibility of getting the rave going, IDMers were free to experiment with the technological tools available to them like few had done before.

Meanwhile hip-hop was busy reshaping pop. Though the musical shift it was pushing was strong, where hip-hop really succeeded was in redefining the icon. Previously the pop icon was a figurehead sitting on the top of the mountain dressed in musical adornments to make them popular. That dress was tailored by songwriters, producers and musicians well versed in the threading of popular trends. But hip-hop brought the self-made icon in the MC, who boastfully put their own image above the music.

This isn’t to say that there wasn’t musical backing, on the contrary. The rise of the MC was facilitated musically by its nod to the historically popular. Initially success came by abandoning the tradition of obscurity in hip-hop production. As trailblazer Sean Combs³ laid out, the pop formula for hip-hop was to, “Take hits from the 80’s” and recycle them as the mountain to raise the MC to new heights. The rise of sample laws, and with them lawsuits, only encouraged this or, on the other end of the spectrum, abandoning samples all together, which led some hip-hop producers to the same tools being used by their electronic musician counterparts. Of course there wasn’t a complete adoption. In the niches of hip-hop there were numerous producers who continued to explore the realms of sonic possibilities both with and without sample technology, but without the limitations of fitting their music into a pop context.

Most notable amongst these is perhaps the late great James “J. Dilla” Yancey⁴,for many considered a forefather of BeatGen. What Dilla helped spearhead was an opening up of the realms of possibilities in sampling, not from the source but by the manipulation. His signature ‘chop’ technique as a form centers around what you can do with the sample, down to the finest detail. This can be paralleled with another hip-hop hybrid called glitch-hop, which took a similar approach to sample manipulation with the added influence of techniques from electronic music. There were many trendsetters in this, not the least of whom are Daedelus⁵ and ediT,⁶ but the true convergence of sound would happen with the rise of Flying Lotus⁷.  With his debut album Los Angeles⁸, BeatGen had its first manifesto.

Audio

• Delia Derbyshire “Pot au Feu” from the album BBC Radiophonic Music

• Escape Philosophy “Where Abundance Lies” from the album A Towering Achievement of Indescribable Beauty

• Aphex Twin “4″ from the album Richard D. James Album

• DOOM “Lightworks” from the album Born Like This (produced by J. Dilla)

References

¹ Primus Luta “Stating the Obvious: MP3’s are Advertisements” AvantUrb 2 June 2009 <http://avanturb.com/news/?p=347>

² Matthew Davidson “You Are Here” The Stretta Procedure 2 June 2009 <http://stretta.blogspot.com/2009/06/you-are-here.html>

³ “Sean Combs” MusicBrainz <http://musicbrainz.org/artist/41f50540-cedd-4b39-8884-5116b6f0089b.html>

⁴ “J Dilla” MusicBrainz <http://musicbrainz.org/artist/cbcbb22c-3a8d-46af-b4ba-09c98f0d7931.html>

⁵ “Daedelus” MusicBrainz <http://musicbrainz.org/artist/c787a7a5-e143-4ba6-86df-fab2354dcd44.html>

⁶ ”ediT” MusicBrainz <http://musicbrainz.org/artist/1b10928e-d6ee-4a98-ad2a-4b935a12d9f8.html>

⁷ ”Flying Lotus” MusicBrainz <http://musicbrainz.org/artist/fc7376fe-1a6f-4414-b4a7-83f50ed59c92.html>

⁸ ”Los Angeles” MusicBrainz <http://musicbrainz.org/release/90fb53c6-4e9c-4fd6-a7a4-ef5b2a0b61a1.html>

You May Want To Read:

• BeatGen Series: Introduction
• BeatGen Series: First Principles
• A Wizard’s Tale: The Daedelus Interview