By Nate Patrin
It’s been a longstanding tradition for older heads to look at new developments in rap as some corrupting force that shakes the genre to the core. Those gripes as applied to fashion (skinny jeans!) or music (Auto-Tune!) mostly just focus on an individual corner of hip-hop, where ducking those trends is a matter of simply switching lanes to a different region or label. The more patient can just wait until cred-less cornballs make sure that dead horse is good and flogged. But there’s one development that’s saturated recent hip-hop regardless of region, commercial profile, or culture, and shows little signs of abating anytime soon: the long rise and continued dominance of downbeat, melancholy production sounds.
This year alone, we’ve had some striking examples: Ab-Soul‘s These Days…, ScHoolboy Q‘s Oxymoron, and Isaiah Rashad‘s Cilvia Demo have followed up TDE cohort Kendrick Lamar‘s brilliantly brooding good kid, m.A.A.d. city with records that largely ride on dour-sounding production; the music feels tense and short of breath even when it bumps. Future‘s Honest moved units with the help of the headliner’s intensely emotive voice, but the beats — especially the handful contributed by Mike WiLL Made It — are glowering enough to make you wonder how many producers are secretly really into industrial music. Most recently, DJ Mustard‘s 10 Summers features one of the hottest producers in the game dialing up everything that makes his style so effective — much of which hinges on injecting L.A. g-funk and Bay Area hyphy influences with a heavy dose of minor-key minimalism, a sound that he’s been owning since “Rack City.”
Naturally, the stuff deeper underground is just as gloomy. One of the most hotly anticipated records this year is a second teaming of rapper Killer Mike and producer/MC El-P as Run the Jewels, whose recent single “Blockbuster Night Pt. 1” maintains the serrated, digital-metal menace of their self-titled 2013 album. New York crew Ratking turned heads by reappropriating A$AP-adjacent Houston, TX-meets-Houston St. bass and cranking up the “Carmina Burana” dramatics. And let’s just nod briefly towards teenage Swedish oddity Yung Lean for synthesizing a secondhand mixture of trap signifiers, both on the mic and behind the boards, into something that’s been tagged with the descriptor “sad boy rap.”
Most of the stuff mentioned in the previous paragraphs is good-to-amazing, especially on its own individual terms; at least a couple of these artists and albums are locks for my year-end top ten. But en masse, as a dominant trend both on the charts and underground, it feels almost energy-sapping. This kind of thing isn’t that new — go back a few years, and you’ll find doomy Southern gothic all over Rick Ross, Wacka Flocka Flame, and Gucci Mane cuts thanks to producers like Lex Luger, Zaytoven, and J.U.S.T.I.C.E. League. The emergence of both Lil B (“I’m God”; “I’m the Devil”; “What You Doin'”) and A$AP Rocky (“Palace”; “Demons”; ‘Wassup”) was abetted by Clams Casino, whose signature style since the turn of the decade has been a spaced-out, ambient swoon that feels almost funereal.
And that’s just the more recent wave of largely digital production that takes cues from EDM and indie electro, only to slow them to a head-swimming crawl. In the sample-heavy ‘90s, everything from the heated, sour soul of UGK on back to the RZA‘s knack for drawing the anxious undercurrents from of vintage R&B had a steady presence in hip-hop’s more hardcore corners.
RZA produced this 1997 Notorious B.I.G. track
So why is this vibe so much harder to escape these days? Chalking it up to the national mood seems reductive — there’s nothing new about what’s happening in Ferguson, Detroit, or the South Side of Chicago when it comes to violence and disenfranchisement. And with those subjects in heavy lyrical rotation 20 to 25 years ago during the first crossover breakthroughs of both gangsta and political hip-hop, there was still a diverse energy to the beats that could amp up the intensity, inspire motivation, or add levity to the whole situation.
Related: DJ Mustard Kills the Hip Hop and Pop Game in 2014
There’s at least one major turning point that turned hip-hop into a widespread Bummer Jam. Kanye‘s reflective, frustrated, and often intensely righteous music from 808s and Heartbreak onwards looms large, and Yeezy’s style has boasted the tendency to seep down in layers to the rest of hip-hop at large. But that mood’s not exclusive to the dramatic stuff: whether it addresses life-or-death situations, conspicuous consumption, autobiographical reminiscence, or just plain rapping for its own sake, the current tide of gloomy production permeates just about everything. Even 2 Chainz, one of the purest punchline rappers to break big in recent years, spent the bulk of last fall’s B.O.A.T.S. II #METIME spitting over what sounded like haunted house music.
Despite all those trends to look at, the reasons why this downer mode of production dominates aren’t easily pinned down. So in the meantime, it’s best for people looking for something more upbeat to hold out hope that a few variations and outliers might break through the cloud cover. Maybe it’ll happen if more artists take the lead of Danny Brown, who thrives on the dark stuff but reveals even more of his personality when he’s got an upfront, shamelessly bright-sounding grime or dubstep sensibility backing him up. (Check out “Attak,” his recent guest spot for Glasgow-based bass music leading light Rustie, if you need a solid template for post-EDM hip-hop that keeps its giddy weirdo head skyward.)
The continuing success of artists outside the typical straight-dude bubble helps, too. Anyone looking for party music that doesn’t feel like a bleary codeine haze is welcome to turn up for Big Freedia‘s sissy-bounce sunshine hit Just Be Free, and with Nicki Minaj‘s “Anaconda” at the forefront recently, it’s refreshing to hear club rap repossessed by a woman with a sense of clever, lighthearted goofiness (and via an old Sir Mix-a-Lot jam from the golden age of hedonistic bass, no less). Once more hits like those start coming, it’ll feel more meaningful when a really good slab of fogged-over, minor-key production emerges as an emotionally moving revelation again — as opposed to wearying business as usual.
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