are video games art?

 

drill music.....

I really fw new york drill recently

something about the way the improvised vocals

interface with the hastily constructed beats

and the way those beats stagger

although haste implies there's not some sort of intentionality

like is jazz hasty when it's improvised etc

but yeah these producers they throw shit together in like two seconds

like ok yeah here you go

I saw a guy on youtube

he was playing piano on like 4x tempo and slowing it down

so he could "speedrun a beat"

which kinda corny but still lol

but yeah I view the instrumentals as improvised in a lot of ways

they're very of a moment at the very least

and the lyricists often just go line by line saying the first thing that comes into their head

"punching in"

i learned about it from the new york times lol,

that it was a sort of informalized industry standard

for contemporary rap vocals

because you can really hear the difference

there's more emotion, stuff is raw, you get rough edges

but those rough edges let you see that like the lyricist is about shit

like when you rehearse saying I shot a guy and I have no remorse

you can probably get pretty good

but when that's the first thing on your mind and you yell it

it's harder to be like "that person is not sincere about having no remorse"

but that's less what I'm interested in

people, especially critics zero in on the lyrics of drill

which is a very college educated literary way to extract value and meaning from the medium

and honestly i'm tired of trying to construct these very concrete understanding of why drill is valuable or why drill is "actually music", I have seen such a small number of written pieces about drill and adjacent music that i actually enjoy that i was nervous about taking on this one at all

but,

what I want to talk about is this call and response quality between the vocalist

and the beat

there's not a strict or formal call and response, but I'm trying to illustrate

the way that these emotion first improvisational constructs interacting

creates cascading rhythmic complexities that draw me to the medium

the lyricist is a sort of secondary beat, being hastily constructed on top of the initial work, almost as fast as some of these beats are made themselves

a sort of singular long leading call followed by a longer response

this thought has been especially present as i have been listening to a lot of "new york drill" which is just a very sort of irregular rhythm. there's often a very slow, steady beat. a super deep kick. sub bass going all over the place on top of that, and then syncopated hi hats that snap and roll like gunfire. There's so much to keep track of here if you're just saying the first thing on your head that you're resorting to your subconscious, you have to be, the way an improviser does. These rappers, vocalists, etc, they come on the beat and you can hear stutters with hi hat rolls that carry into measures where the rolls fall out, it gives it all this very staggering sensation ultimately moored in this very gritty and dark kick

rooting it in that kick i think illustrates a sort of pulsing and extremely violent but often quiet rhythm of life in the drug game described. you have all the day to day shit and then an outburst of sudden and deep violence, the sub kick. not that I'm some expert in this shit, but matching the lyrical content to the beat creates an emotional resonance that i really enjoy

so yeah, that just happened, I'm gonna recommend some songs:

22gz - suburban, pt. 2

pop smoke - flexin'

CHII WVTZ - Go Crazy

pop smoke - MPR

kay flock - is ya ready