Hi everyone,
I’m winding up Microplastics this year.
Since launching this newsletter, I’ve become less involved and attached to the journalistic beat of music writing (you may have noticed).
Rattling around in my archive was an essay that Resident Advisor had commissioned, but didn’t publish, as part of their start-of-the-decade coverage in 2020. (Long story.)
It was about the dwindling of hits, the startling lack of lighter-lighting anthems, in club music.
It’s more than six years old, so you may regard it as a bit untimely. But, actually, has that much changed in the meantime?
Because it feels like I’ve been reading the same “culture-is-over” essay for the past few years, the latest of which is this (good) one by the Yale Review’s Audrey Wollen.
Gabriel Szatan recently wrote a tune-specific version for Resident Advisor, and the thrust of his arguments feel right—we cannot metabolise this much stuff.
One of the effects relevant to the essay below is a lack of a status quo as a foil against endless novelty. If we accept the idea that hits are distinctive because they make a splash, then the state of culture is less a person cannonballing into the pool than a school of fish swimming busily underneath, leaving the surface undisturbed.
Anyway, back to me. I’m currently working on two magazine stories that will come out in the autumn. But with my job and parenting and whatnot something had to give: this newsletter.
I’ll keep this thing hobbling along for updates and another edition of “Last Night A Writer Saved My Life,” but my newsletter, a venerable hit factory in its brief moment, is now on the wane.
How do you bring a roomful of people together? If you’re a peace envoy, cult leader or DJ, you’ll have a better idea than most. The last group, however, has had a handy shortcut to persuasion: big tunes. It’s easy to pinpoint the factors that allow them to arise—lots of big DJs rinsing it, ubiquity on mixes—but what makes them stick? One thing they seem to have in common is some strikingly novel feature. It might have an infernal drum roll, a snake-charmer synth lead, this timeless sample, or someone saying, “We just used to, like… “
Whatever form it takes, you know a hit when it hits. It seems to powerlift the whole room. Or does it charge it with electricity? If it’s hard to describe their effects without slipping into overwrought language, that’s because some of these dance floor anthems seem to express things that would be too cheesy, too earnest, too much to feel appropriate for anything other than the moments in which they turn whole crowds into positively emotional wrecks. Others got big not through an inherently populist appeal but by cultivating a mystery that people wanted to get to the bottom of, or just immerse themselves in.
Lately, though, the hits haven’t been landing. Or, when they do, their impact isn’t felt as widely. Late last year, I found myself wondering why big tunes hadn’t been circulating with the same fervor as before. At the last round of summer festivals, the track that several different DJs normally drop in the space of a weekend didn’t really materialise. One of last year’s biggest tunes was a remix of another big tune from 2017. There were a lot of excellent tracks that many people loved, but it’s difficult to think of something in 2019 that everyone got behind, that every DJ played, that we were all dumbstruck by.
While it’s hard to pinpoint why, exactly, it’s easy to read the runes. The political centre ground, to take one example, has never looked less appealing. The unity candidate gets on everyone’s nerves as much as the person to their left or right. We are a lot more fanatical, too—strong opinions about one thing usually follow strong objections to something else. We seem less inclined to say, “This’ll do,” and more insistent about “THIS!” Our freedom to choose, and the algorithms that create that illusory possibility, turns the consensus view into a vanishing point.
Since the middle of last year, VTSS, the Polish techno DJ, has been playing out a new track called “Atlantyda.” What’s remarkable about it—aside from its dramatic interplay of power-drill bassline and final-boss lead—is that for months you could only hear it if you saw her play it in person, or were one of the 45,000 people following her on Instagram. “Atlantyda” was shared repeatedly on her Instagram stories. On one of her story highlights, you can see several clips of her dropping this Instagram dubplate as filmed by clubbers who’d tagged her in their stories, which she had reposted.
DJs reposting clips such as these on their Instagram stories after a gig became commonplace in 2019. Notable here is how that reposting catalysed the popularity of this one track, reposted over and over by VTSS and her fans for months before its release in November. The total YouTube and SoundCloud streams for it are modest, only a little over 190,000 at the time of writing. But “Atlantyda,” boosted by some audience participation, has been inescapable in one corner of the internet, which we could call Techno Instagram. “Atlantyda,” a track that emerged from a microclimate of popularity, might represent a possible future for voguish bangers—adored within that scene, nearly invisible to everyone else.
It’s not just our selective immersion with online platforms that will limit the impact of big tunes. Club music’s avant-garde has also accelerated what Chal Ravens identified in The Wire last year as “the demise of the steady kick drum,” displaced by reggaeton, gqom, batida, kuduro and countless other jerky, destabilising rhythms. (Much of this music has come from collectives comprised of women, queer artists and BIPOC artists, a fact which is often integral to the material.) That has led to a big squeeze on the house-adjacent, midtempo zone that most anthems of the ‘10s occupied—the most recent examples that come to mind are Objekt’s “Theme From Q,” DJ Koze’s “Pick Up” and Peggy Gou’s “It Makes You Forget (Itgehane).”
As more headlining DJs experiment outside of a cruising tempo of, say, 127 BPM, the bandwidth for a new “Inspector Norse” gets slimmer by the year. Now, it’s becoming more common at festivals to come across DJs who play fast, slow, or switch easily between both. If you imagine a stage with four DJs on the bill, it is far likelier than ten years ago that each will play at a different tempo and with different records. The constricted space for house and techno amid the influx of so many other club-music styles echoes pop music’s conversion to “Pop 2.0,” a term coined by the critic John Caramanica to describe pop not as a single kingdom but a multiverse that includes trap, reggaeton and K-pop.
Selector culture is also reducing the floorspace for big tunes. The term, whose origins are found in Jamaican soundsystem culture, essentially describes DJs who emphasise music selection over technical skill. In practice, that divide might look like spending weeks sifting for Thai funk and Tanzanian singeli through 13 Discogs tabs, three YouTube wormholes and a Soulseek account versus, say, working towards 10,000 hours of practice mixing techno on three decks. To this realm’s most zealous disciples, big tunes—or anything that sounds like one—are the mark of a chancer in a milieu that respects obscurity as effort and treats record shopping like a craft.
There will always be pushback against the elitism that implies—Young Marco, though a DJ in the selector mould, has staked out his right to drop Wham!’s “Last Christmas” in mid-July. But the vast pool of music at our fingertips has made famous classics or established canons less visible, and deference to them less inherently appealing. (The related upswing of reissues, listening bars and ambient music has also instilled a principle of subtlety that’s nudged the needle further away from floorfillers.) Selector culture has even affected established house-and-techno DJs. Joy O, for example, released a Dekmantel compilation in 2017 that seemed to consolidate a shift in his thinking. Where once he might’ve thought nothing of dropping “Ellipsis” in a set, it’s now unusual to hear him play anything recognisable.
Tech platforms are not only breeding sleeper hits like VTSS’s “Atlantyda,” but whole scenes as well. In a lot of cases, they’re hiding in plain sight. The UK drill producer Emil Proffit, talking in 2018, asked himself how he’d managed to miss a whole genre of music – that is, UK drill – in London, where he’s from: “It was because of my age.” What kept him from being wise to it, more specifically, was that he is not a 14-year-old who is very online. The place to get informed about the style, a deadpan, slang-rich mutation of Chicago drill, is YouTube, where you’ll find music videos, reaction videos, explainer videos and Snapchat clips—a rich supply of music, drama, commentary and in-jokes that keeps an entire community of fans hooked.
UK drill is at once hermetically sealed from the mainstream and racing towards it. Its most popular videos regularly exceed ten million views, and two of its breakout stars, Headie One and Russ, scored top-ten hits last year (even as the police continue to censor and jail artists). Floating Points remixed a Headie One track, “Back To Basics,” from one of the scene’s few full-lengths, Music X Road. As an insurgent style creeping into the charts as well as DJ sets, UK drill might be uniquely positioned in 2020 to offer an anthem for both.
Innovative scenes can still arise IRL. But their growth is increasingly mediated by tech platforms. Gqom producers in Durban use WhatsApp to swap tunes. A new genre of hip-hop came from SoundCloud. YouTube has given UK rappers a global platform. TikTok is reshaping the pop-song format. These walled gardens are facilitating some of club music’s most vital scenes, though the world-swallowing domination that minimal or dubstep once enjoyed is now almost impossible to imagine (the former was so ubiquitous that it inspired a rare thing in dance music: a diss track). There is just too much to choose from, and the thrill of discovery is a satisfying reward for being picky.
If dance music is undergoing its own 2.0 upgrade, then big tunes will likely emerge from a more closely fought contest of musical ideas, the victors of which will rarely be clear-cut. Or maybe we’re just in flux. In a best tracks roundup 11 years ago, Resident Advisor noted that it was “almost impossible to label 2009 as the year of anything.” One year later, we saw “the glorious return of the anthem.” Where did they come from? James Blake, Girl Unit, Ramadanman, the first flush of what we now call post-dubstep and UK bass.
We might yet get a fresh wave of big tunes this year, but the most consequential of them will come from scenes in the process of becoming. Hits that seem to come out of nowhere will actually have emerged from online hinterlands—whether that be Techno Instagram, The Identification Of Music Group or GRM Daily—that will feel peripheral to everyone except young, clued-up fans (and, occasionally, music journalists). Once it becomes impossible to keep up with everything, the most satisfying alternative is obsession. Will we miss having the same ones?
What I’ve been paying attention to lately.
READING
A lo-fi rebellion against AI – Kyle Chayka [New Yorker]
Rehearsing for humanity’s future on Mars – Elena Saavedra Buckley [Harper’s]
Kaiso Power: Sound Revolution in Trinidad 1970-1980 – Various [Soundway Records]
The Anthology of UnAmerican Folk Music – Marisa Anderson [Thrill Jockey]
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