Gritos de Neón. Cómo el Drill, el Trap y el Bashment hicieron que la música sea novedosa otra vez.

by Kit Mackintosh

«Gritos de neón hace foco allí donde las innovaciones musicales resultaron más desconcertantes en los últimos años: la música urbana negra. Si en el siglo XX la música dance se sentía como si las máquinas hubieran tomado el control, los avances en tecnología de sonido digital han ampliado de modo radical la capacidad para la expresión humana. En el siglo XXI emerge la voz como zona privilegiada de la aventura artística. Con el Auto-Tune todos pueden prolongar los límites de sus voces y llevarlas hacia formas de belleza extraña, como un crisol alquímico en el que los performers –y los oyentes– se convierten en ángeles y monstruos.» Del prólogo de Simon Reynolds

Gritos de neón es un manifiesto, un grito de guerra para el nuevo futurismo musical que se anuncia ya en géneros como el trap, variantes contemporáneas del dancehall, el drill o el bashment. ¿Se cansaron de leer a los críticos musicales de siempre repetir que la innovación se terminó? Kit Mackintosh representa a una nueva generación dispuesta a percibir en la experimentación del presente los sonidos del mañana. Tomando como punto de partida el uso no convencional del Auto-Tune para explorar cualidades vocales hasta ahora desconocidas, Mackintosh establece una nueva vanguardia sónica integrada por artistas como Playboi Carti, Travis Scott, Future, Young Thug, Migos y Vybz Kartel.

Estamos frente a un cambio de paradigma. Antes la innovación surgía del avance de los sintetizadores, los samplers y las cajas de ritmo: todo aquello que excluía los rasgos humanos de un paisaje acústico cada vez más maquínico. Pero el Auto-Tune empujó la voz al frente de la actual revolución sonora y ha hecho de la personalidad de los performers su aspecto primordial. Nuestra humanidad ha sido reincorporada al proceso de composición. Podemos seguir llamando a esta nueva música rap, pero la verdad es que no es un nombre adecuado. La música que se crea hoy implica un quiebre con el pasado, tal como lo fue el hip-hop respecto del funk, el house respecto del disco o el rock del blues. Esta original psicodelia vocal constituye un macrogénero en sí mismo, que ya ha producido una cantidad de subestilos y variaciones cuyo rasgo común es un torbellino de voces posthumanas. Déjense intoxicar por sus fluidos alucinatorios multicolores y sus artificios holográficos. El futuro ya no suena ni frío ni robótico. Escuchen esas entonaciones vulnerables y gelatinosas, deformadas tras una niebla de Xanax y codeína. El porvenir de la música será biotecnológico y alienígena, la banda sonora de nuestra propia mutación

Genres: Music

168 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2022

Reviews

[Steve Erickson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Kit Mackintosh brings an exciting style to music criticism. Inspired by science fiction, he writes about the "vocal psychedelia" Autotune has made possible in a manner that fits them. His book makes a case for genres that have often been dismissed or even demonized. But it falls into a familiar pattern of white men observing music associated with violence and drugs from a distance. Mackintosh's taste is extremely macho - the book never expresses enthusiasm for any music by women and/or LGBTQ people. A chapter on hyperpop would fit the concept of vocal psychedelia, but the genre is largely made by middle-class white people, so it lands outside this book's sense of cool and danger. In fact, Mackintosh dismisses the androgyny implicit in pitched-up Autotuned vocals, which trans and non-binary hyperpop artists have used to question the idea of a natural voice, as old hat in favor of post-humanism. Mackintosh writes about dancehall, a genre I have little interest in, enticingly enough that I checked out several of his favorite artists. But for a book that's so focused on the future, it's blinkered in a rather old-fashioned way.

[Orhan · Rating 5 out of 5]

wholeheartedly recommended racey (and partisan, in the best of ways!) polemic for most angloamerican indie/dance music journalist refuseniks. There are historical points to quibble with here, but that's irrelevant when this is utterly infernal and doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things. Kit's charm here is to have zoned into the unbridled enthusiasm and the jihad-like zeal of the musical convert. Yes, the influence of Simon Reynolds is clear as day here. Yes, one could say he engages in Reynolds-like alliteration too heavily without necessarily being shaped by the context that Reynolds was. But all good developments in writing and music creation come out of imitation, and getting things wrong, rarely out of a preplanned need to be 'original' (that most bourgeois of traps.) This is why I feel the review in the Wire Magazine was coarse and undignified (a discourse Kit wasn't even part of, he must have been 13 at the time, for fuck's sake!) valid criticisms notwithstanding, said criticisms are utterly useless if made in bad faith if only to take part within a clusterfuck of dance music journalists who have finally smelt the coffee and realised that there is nothing of any substance remaining to put pen to paper. The genre silos have formed, everything is codified, routinised, a prison of enforced jollity and pleasure. Dance music is having its classic dad rock moment, and it's just as cringe as the original one. Certainly if read in terms of the gradiants of the hardcore continuum, this piece of writing might be an oversell, but if one is able to divorce ones thought patterns from thinking in terms of a highly localised subculture specific to an era of East London as the vanguard of modernism, there are a lot of nuggets to take from this book, even if the developments do not seem so radical to you, the fact that someone, somewhere is finding them radical is very much promising for the future of music and music writing.

Edited this review on 1/01/2022 as I wrote the original in a 10 minute haze whilst packing up to go back to England, thanks to Luke Erasmus Davis for pulling me up on it!

[Sole]

Me gustó leer un ensayo musical que apele a la sinestesia para describir la música y me parece interesante el análisis de época que hace, pero más allá de que entiendo que no se puede hablar de un movimiento sin hacer un recorte, y que admito no saber tanto de música como para defender su presencia con argumentos, me parece un poco bestial la ausencia absoluta de músicas.

[Owen Hatherley · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excited and exciting argument that sonic futurism still very much happens, just in places where older critics aren't looking: the place mainly being the development of auto-tune to create 'post-human' vocal styles. It's amusing that a 'the future in music is happening *now*, oldsters' book is so in hock to a writing style of the past - the debt to Simon Reynolds and Kodwo Eshun is immense, and it even ends, like More Brilliant than the Sun, with an interview where the overheated prose is replaced with calm explication (blog veterans will be especially delighted that the interview is by the great Luke Davis/Heronbone). Importantly, unlike some similar 'the future is not dead!' arguments in music writing over the last ten years, his case is pretty convincing - these really are quite novel, alien sounds and approaches, and you really can hear them as you walk the streets in London. But I'm definitely too old for a lot of the gruellingly macho music Mackintosh describes, and I find the loss of the techno-utopianism in earlier rave culture in favour of all this shanking and superheroics to be a bit sad. To not understand the kids' music at 40 shows the health of the music I suppose, and in any case, it is ventiloquised here with much style, sympathy and humour.

[Derek Baldwin · Rating 3 out of 5]

A short mishmash of disjointed pieces plus an interview with the author. They come across much better in this section, perhaps because Kit is not straining for some smartarse metaphor to pad out the text. This is harsh, I know, writing about music is very difficult. But compared to Dead Precedents, for example, this is quite poor.

The author makes lots of good points and their suspicion of the internet, but grudging acknowledgement of the reach it gives non-mainstream musicians, is well judged. Linking autotune to transhumanism was interesting: it was my own suspicion about this that closed my ears to a lot of bloody good music. If music can sound as if it was entirely produced synthetically then what is to prevent it from being fully automated and the record labels keeping ALL the revenue?

But I've realised that using the voice as an instrument in its own right, and autotune as just another form of synth, for example, is to push yet another boundary in creative and engaging ways. Of course just about everyone is doing it nowadays.

I liked the sections on UK drill, a genre I really appreciate, but emphasising the turf wars aspects and menace unfortunately plays along with the whole "ban this evil gang music" moral panic. (Has that subsided now, 2022? Dunno.)

I discovered a fair few new artists from the authors enthusiasm, some less of a revelation, many I'll never listen to again, but some bangers too.

Another reviewer has criticised Kit's omission of great swathes of autotuned delicacies, no 100 gecs, no Charli XCX, no Rina Sawayama. Since the focus is on Black music, and the debt owed to Jamaican culture, this is understandable, but there is a wider study to be written.

Who knows, maybe Kit could be perfect? Now that first book demons are exorcised there's every possibility that the next book will be much better, and I will look out for it. Maybe a revised and expanded version of Neon Scream? Great title by the way, capturing the synaesthesic feel of the music being surveyed.

In my heart I think this is a 2.5 star book, rounded down to 2, but I've rounded up this time because I love Future and Migos too 😉.

[D · Rating 4 out of 5]

Una búsqueda brillante por la escena musical contemporánea, la reacción perfecta a la teoría fisheriana sobre la lenta cancelación del futuro (aunque el prólogo de Simon Reynolds permita reconciliar ambas lecturas). Me quedo con su argumentación apasionada, si bien noto una cierta ausencia de un análisis específicamente sociohistórico que sí estaba presente en MF.
Mackintosh inventa y organiza una terminología brillante para la nueva década: psicodelia vocal, música metalmecánica, democratización del futuro, fin del rap, intimidad digital posthumana... Era urgente que existiera un texto como este.

[Markus · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm happy with this book, tho not entirely. Let me explain: it comes from a place of knowledge (which is especially rare when it comes to bashment/dancehall in music journalism) and a great deal of enthusiasm. From that, the author is able to tap into repeater's household futurism discourse and make a great point about it being stuck and showing a great alternative.
On the negative side, the author often seems to get lost in his own verbosity and rarely uses any artists other than the most popular ones in their genre as examples.
These weaknesses can be overlooked in the book's commendable effort as a moldbreaker and first step of a young author.

[Ilia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Devoured this. Mackintosh's enthusiasm for the music he's describing is palpable in his prose, and the flights of fancy he employs are enjoyably outlandish. It's a book of two halves – the first a rapturous manifesto for this new music and the possibilities of auto-tune, the second going over the same ground with a more historical and documentarian approach. I honestly find the majority of the music discussed pretty off-putting, but as Mackintosh suggests in the interview at the end, that's just shows that his thesis is correct and it really is future-music so extreme that older generations aren't able to come to terms with it. If nothing else, his rhetorical efforts have convinced me to keep trying. A great writer and an exciting new talent.

[Tom F · Rating 4 out of 5]

More interested in what this book does well than what it could have done differently. As a considered and enthusiastic appreciation of very contemporary ‘rap’ and street music styles it satisfied what I was looking for, but it also (especially in the third section, an interview with the author) contextualises this work with a skeptical look at why other less inherently radical developments in pop and underground music have been given so much more critical airtime across the period since the inception of ‘vocal psychedelia’ (from Burial, through Yeezus, on to african diasporic dance styles like gqom and batida). Mackintosh’s british perspective is also well-placed to offset the cultural predominance of american offshoots of this sound like mumble rap and to marshal the flow of cultural influence that connects london, the caribbean and the american east coast, particularly when it comes to drill and its subgenres. Plus it gives you the itch to go spiralling through youtube — would be great if it had a playlist or three as an appendix, but at least the Quietus published something similar with Mackintosh here.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best image I can think of for this book is a multicolored flame bursting into brief existence, etching every contour that its light can find, defining the NOW in the NOW, and in vanishing, dissipating, blinking out, it leaves the audience with many more questions than they had when it was dark.

The book is driven by an all-encompassing compassion rather than scholarly rigor or journalistic drive. Mackintosh has been genuinely baffled and shaken by the music he describes, especially because he is hearing something as “new” in an era where the “musical cognoscenti” have agreed that music as a cultural activity has halted when it comes to “innovation.” One can almost see this as a direct response to Simon Reynold’s (author of the foreword and mentor of the author) Retromania. That book investigated the birth and transformation of musical genres from around the 60s onwards, emphasizing that there is always a dual movement both toward an imagined future and an unreachable past. Mackintosh rebels against this by championing “Futuremania” in the form of Vocal Psychedelia, a global movement of hip-hop, grime, and dancehall artists focused on the timbral qualities of their deliveries. He is not declaring a new genre so much as pointing out a point of divergence for Rap as a musical style. “Rap is dead” according to Mackintosh, and the living heirs of its tradition are the mutant gangsters spilling themselves over ethereal beats.

The book has 3 sections: the sounds, the history, and an interview with the author. I liked all three, but the chronology was the most interesting section to me. The sound section was effectively poetic and definitely built upon the tracks that were described. Its very enjoyable to read this book with youtube open in front of you so that you can listen when he compares two artists from the same genre, two genres from the same era, or two songs from the same artist but from different eras. The text never acts as though it does not need the music to exist any images point toward the music or the artist who produced it, never back to the author who wrote them, which is a testament to the passionate interest that Mackintosh has for this movement.

But other than passion, this book only serves as a starting point. It throws out a lot of ideas without much elaboration and is more content with rebellion as opposed to setting down its own principles. Not really a complaint because i don’t think this is meant to be comprehensive. It was written to show attention to a musical style that had mostly received derision from music writers at large up to this point. I just think that there is so much you COULD do here, like an even more in-depth look into the development of these styles and their connections to the past, namely to Dub music, which is mentioned only briefly. Regardless, really great book and truly infectious if you allow it to be

[Marco Baroni · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book by young British author Kit Mackintosh, serves as a significant wake-up call for individuals like myself, middle-aged music enthusiasts who think that the evolution of auto-tune in music has taken a downturn since Cher's "Believe."

Mackintosh delves passionately into the realm of new urban genres such as trap, UK drill, and modern Jamaican dancehall, exhibiting a fervor reminiscent of Julian Cope's dedication to krautrock and Simon Reynolds' exploration of British dance music. The prose often teeters on the edge of extravagance, as Mackintosh himself acknowledges. As he apply states, if writing about music is like dancing to architecture, then “the dance better be f*cking good on its own terms.” Nevertheless, he can also adopt a didactic tone in his mission. The book is thoughtfully organized into three parts: an initial section passionately advocating for the new music, a second providing music advice for each genre under consideration, and a final interview with the author, where he articulates his stance in more straightforward terms.

At the core of Mackintosh's argument lies the belief that the innovative application of auto-tune in modern urban genres has not homogenized music but, in fact, birthed a new form of vocal psychedelia. Here, the human voice seamlessly melds with synthetic effects in increasingly bizarre ways. If futurist nineties music, such as jungle and drum'n'bass, envisioned a world dominated by cold, metallic robots, the auto-tuned voice symbolizes the technological future before us, where deep fakes and generative AIs blur the lines between the human and the synthetic.

I made a playlist with the (way too many) songs recommended in the book, as my middle-aged ears still grapple with the question of whether I can genuinely appreciate trap, but I extend my gratitude to Mackintosh for encouraging me to explore this and other genres. I do, however, find it a bit disappointing that he primarily focuses on the hardcore end of the auto-tune spectrum, omitting significant genres like contemporary R&B and reggaeton. Nevertheless, I understand that a 168-page book can only cover so much ground.

[Rey Félix · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si hay algo maravilloso del catálogo de Caja Negra es como parecen dialogar y complementarse los títulos entre sí, en especial por la colección Synesthesia. Y cada uno -cada adición- de ellos editado con suma devoción y urgencia del sentido de publicar libros con crítico sentido de las convergencias precisas de la música y la cultura.
Este texto mutante con el vigor propio de la socarrona y vehemente juventud consumidora de música hasta el hastío, moldeada por estímulos desde su nacimiento, la prosa es una extensión del fluir mental millenial. Asimismo, en este caso, carente de rigor, experimentándolo desde el filtro de lo íntimo.
Lo mejor es disfrutar la lectura captando las sutilezas y referencias que logra Mackintosh sin desviarse por la tangente de si es demasiado líquido o viciado por el gusto propio. La parte final que es la entrevista me parece lo mejor, sintetiza el pensamiento -y nos lleva directo al quid del libro- de Mackintosh, ojo de la página 151 a la 158.

[Bubby1216 · Rating 4 out of 5]

The kind of music writing I find exciting. As interested in its own worth and merits as the groundbreaking music it covers. This isn't a novel it is more like a long form magazine. There's the main coverage of the future music and the various influences that lead (Pb) to it. Then the genre chronologies feel like a separate bonus feature article to reinforce the main passage, and then the interview segment gives us a look into KM's ideas in real time. For anyone that feels they missed the excitement of late 2010s music like me, this book bursts the wonder of that music into the mind like when it was freshly uploaded to SoundCloud. Along with that this introduced me to the modern dancehall scene. I have listened to a lot of Soul Jazz Compilations, so it's nice to see where those ideas go inside of Jamaica.

[Dylan Kaposi · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s a great book and it’s ultimately a polemic. A call-to-arms for sonic futurism, exploring the pioneers of this ‘style’ [used consciously as distinct from genre]. Those who critique his lack of representation misunderstand the scope, focus, and interest of the book – they need only to read the introduction to learn this.

Yes, things could be said about hyper pop etc. but that would be a different book. This work is perfect, achieved what it sets out to achieve, does so masterfully, is eloquently written, and powerfully persuasive.

Modern masterpiece: you do not find music writing like this very readily.

[Pepe Tesoro · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bastante a favor de empezar a revolver las premisas Reynolds/Fisher sobre la retromanía, no sé si exactametente donde lo ve el autor, pero bueno. Luego, me resulta ya muy cansino e insorportable este lenguaje eshuniano de intentar samplear el lenguaje como si fuera música. Escribir sobre música es complejo, pero confundir el medio (intentar hacer música con el lenguaje) claramente no es el camino. Demostrado queda en la entrevista final, que da empaque y sentido a lo que es por lo demás un puzzle de fragmentos y duplicaciones extrañas, batería de referencias. Suele pasar con esta gente, ¿no? Chico, hablad como seres humanos. Se os entiende.

[Ricardo Rodríguez Quintero · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reza el adagio que escribir sobre música es como bailar sobre arquitectura.

Kit Mackintosh acepta el reto y, con giros y saltos que Micaela Ortelli interpreta con pericia en español, profana planos y maquetas, dibuja minaretes con los pies y zócalos con las manos para lograr el malabar y hacernos sentir las músicas que describe con un lenguaje vibrante, ingenioso y, en ocasiones, hasta divertido.

Se entiende y disfruta más en comparación de esta playlist confeccionada por la misma editorial: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6N1...

[Arnau Estrella · Rating 4 out of 5]

Wow! Creo que mi formatín de libro favortio y me ha hecho descubrir música y cosas de la misma cachondisimas, además de volver a reconciliarme con Future, Young Thug, Skepta, Vybz Kartel… (Con Playboi Carti NO)

[Cyano · Rating 4 out of 5]

Muy linda forma de escribir porque la verdad nunca escuché ni una sola de las canciones de las que habla y me dieron ganas de escuchar. Y ya tengo un imaginario creado a partir de cómo lo describe. Logró generar un cambio en mi experiencia de escucha.

[Nate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Excellent! Brilliantly written and shrewdly analyzed.

[Bruur]

class