Neon Screams: How Drill, Trap and Bashment Made Music New Again by Kit Mackintosh

Author:Kit Mackintosh [Mackintosh, Kit]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: music, History & Criticism, Philosophy & Social Aspects, Social Science, popular culture
ISBN: 9781913462475
Google: 0cb8DwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Watkins Media Limited
Published: 2021-08-10T23:22:45.230970+00:00

CONCLUSION

FUTURE MANIA

Music simulates the future. It war-games it. All those sci-fi sounds it produces, all of the vivid and visceral audio imagery it conjures, are premonitions and prophecies of the world that awaits us. You can be a cynic and say this is all bullshit (and you may well be right), but music becomes so much more rewarding if you don’t. So fuck it, have some fun. Suspend your disbelief for a bit and allow these musical delusions to run amok.

No other popular art form is still charging forward into the future like music is. It seems to be the only medium still envisioning novel Tomorrows. Like a Voyager satellite, music is this lone, isolated technology ploughing through the outer cosmos of our collective dreamspace.

There used to be a time when science fiction movies were these undeniable cultural touchstones — 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, Blade Runner, Terminator, The Matrix — and they provided a framework for the future music of their day. Everything from Sun Ra to Detroit techno was lifting from these films and from other popular media like them. The generation who created jungle, for example, had grown up on Star Trek and Star Wars, so ideas like “warp drive” and “hyper drive” were there in their conceptual bloodstream, helping them make sense (consciously or otherwise) of the lightspeed beats they were hearing.

But that era’s over now. Sci-fi is no longer producing these kinds of omnipresent cultural monuments. It’s not giving a definitive form to the futurism of our collective imagination and that’s actually quite exciting: it makes future music that much more mysterious. In the last fifteen years, new noises have been uncovered by musicians that we have no set way of interpreting or wrapping our imaginations around. Sounds have been created that make no sense; they have no correlates in the wider culture so they just seem to be completely alien to our ears.

Our futures have become hazy, fluid, malleable and at times contradictory as the mediums through which we get our future fix have become fractured and scattershot. Tracks subconsciously extrapolate entire tomorrows from a whole range of diffuse and disparate sources. There’s climate change, there’s the ghostly intangibility of digital existence, there’s post-truth, there’s the kind of tech-savvy superstition you get with ISIS and QAnon (who use cutting-edge technology to peddle all sorts of Dark Ages delusions about Satan worshippers and the like) and then there’s the radical morphosis you get in video game avatar creation and deep fakes and those apps that transform and refashion your face in all sorts of demented ways… All this stuff is being subliminally fed into our new understanding of this peculiar and uncanny idea of the decades, centuries and millennia ahead.

Music in the last decade or so has taken all of these hovering futurist threads and woven them together into a glorious new sonic tapestry depicting unprecedented utopias and dystopias. There’s a whole sonic mythology hinted at in new music, in which mankind dematerialises and

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