The post-Dilla era heralds a new chapter in the evolution of left field beats: much of the art form’s innovation is occurring upon an aesthetic platform that is being termed, somewhat problematically, as ‘wonky’. And while Dilla struck equipoise in terms of the human machine balances with those slightly off kilter drum patterns, the aesthetic that he helped materialise has become, somewhat restrictively, a motif and rhetoric frame within which much of the work of forward thinking producers is being contextualised.
Jay Dilla’s free form programming style has inspired producers to disturb the fixity of traditional kick-snare matrices, explore polyphonic and compound times and develop their own enunciations of machinic humanity that made Dilla joints so charismatic.
Now I’m sorry, but hip-hop is hip-hop, a beat is a beat and despite much of the web discourse on the topic, ‘wonky’ alone does not constitute a sub-genre although the term is sonically accurate. It’s easy to think of much experimental hip-hop as a genre exercise and the work of many producers may be deemed Dilla copies, clever to the point of counter intuitiveness or simply interchangeable, but is that really a fair judgement to make just because loose drum programming seems to be the solid ground that innovative beat makers are territorialising?
In an attempt to broaden my definitional horizons, I decided to engage in some analytical listening, hoping to distill some aesthetic and effectual dimensions that better characterise the grand narrative of hip-hop innovation post-Dilla. After pulling out every record on my shelf that I’d define as wonky, and conversations with two producers I have much respect for, UK based Charlie Dark (Attica Blues, Blacktronica) and Tadd Mullinix (Dabrye), I set out to formulate my thoughts on ‘wonky’.
Firstly, there are the drums (and the drum machines), by scattering kicks and snares loosely intuitive frames of reference are disturbed. This is achieved by either switching off the drum machine’s quantize function (which results in shifting of beats just a fraction off the point where they should be) or experimenting with polyrhythmic structures and compound times.
Beat maker Charlie Dark warns against the temptation of aesthetic extremism when it comes to unquantized drums, the connection between producer and listener can be lost. “I have this theory that a good beat should be like a breath or a heart beat with a beginning and an end,” he says. “The problem I have with a lot of the dubstep/broken/Dilla copycats is that the theory of being able to follow the beat has been lost somewhat. Some producers are suffering from being too clever for their own good. We’ve all done crazy things at points in our careers, but at the end of the day I don’t care how good your tune is. If my dancefloor can’t dance to it or my listeners can’t listen to it, then I’m not playing it. Dilla messed around with quantize and timing but he came from a DJ aesthetic and at the end of the day his stuff was always danceable whereas a lot of the clone Dilla stuff is simply un-listenable. A microkorg and an MPC do not make you Dilla, but rather a sad biter! Learn to program with the quantize on first before you turn it off.”
One thing that is evident in many examples of ‘wonky’ is that despite the looseness of the drums there’s usually a unity of layers on the ‘one,’ which acts as a orientation point. This can be seen in Nobody’s ‘All the Golden Fronts,’ where a solid kicks works in unison with stuttering snares and a choppy sting sample which adds a little flutter to the head-nod. New Afro-futurist Ras G’s loop driven ‘Soul Pulsating,’ where the slight wobble is accented by pitch shifting the chords layered over the drum line, is also a good example of this structure.
“I try to achieve a looseness in the programming in order add feeling to the rhythm of my beats,” adds Mullinix. “But I am inspired by the coldness of synthetic sounds and sound pieces. I have no strategy other than wanting to listen to more music with these qualities. But I have to say, too much of any of these elements is a big turn off. I listen for subtlety and nuance in music and a traditional frame of reference helps to facilitate this.”
But there is a threshold when it comes to drum programming. “I see a very uninteresting approach to abstracting rhythm,” Mulllinix says. “Sometimes I hear over-inspired producers whose beats sound like shoes in the dryer. Just because it’s super loose doesn’t mean it has ‘feeling’ or funkiness. But maybe they don’t care about that. Lots of people are listening to Dilla thinking that he took rhythms way out of sync. What they don’t realise is that he was very subtle in this approach and that is what makes it so good.”
Wonkiness need not be just about putting some swing into the drums. The use of compound time signatures and polyrhythms also add an off kilter feeling to a beat. Prefuse 73 uses hyperactive polyrhythmic drums on ‘Life/Death’ so much so that I felt the need to pop a Ritalin the minute the needle hit the runout groove.
Dark, too, acknowledges the importance of polyrhythmic structures that sit outside modern electronica’s intuitive frame. His Attica Blues project set a precedent for ‘wonky’ with its use of staccato polyrhythms. Dark’s interest in rhythmic abstraction has evolved beyond aesthetic differentiation. “I get many of my ideas for beats from listening to phrases and conversations, which I guess in some ways, is related to the tradition of the talking drum. I’m trying to learn how to play the tabla at the moment and am fascinated with the traditions of learning being passed down. On a talking drum or tabla you are not just chucking out anything but playing and learning patterns that are generations old. It will be interesting to see if this passes on to the next generation of drum programmers.”
The second stylistic element relates to synthesisers and if viewed in terms of soundwave properties like frequency and amplitude the mystique around the sound becomes a little more apparent. Variations in these properties are used to produce the sawtooth basslines on Dabrye’s ‘Bloop,’ sine, square and triangle waveforms coupled with low bit rates produce a simplified melody structure (think: musical greeting cards or arcade games) that are characteristic of Flying Lotus. Lotus has become the poster child for ‘wonky’ LA, which seems to have become the epicentre of the leftfield beat movement, or perhaps it’s a scene ready for colonisation by hipsters with fresh out of the box MPCs and the latest kicks? Either way we’re seeing a lot of music coming out of this whatever-you-want-to-call-it that LA has become, some mind numbing derivatives, and some truly awe-inspiring and situating artists like Flying Lotus add greatly to their marketability…but I digress.
I characterise Lotus by the strong video game-like property in terms of his synths and track structure. In ‘Two Bottom Blues’ we see his kick drums wobble yet a more linear placement of snares allow for lo-fi keys and the underlying layer of hiss and noise to not be overly disorienting. Structurally, Lotus’ tracks follow game-like stages with new elements dropping in and out and synth stabs occurring at random intervals. Samiyam shares Lotus’s 8-bit rudimentary approach but his production style is varied in its pace and its sonic textures which makes his productions feel less nostalgic than some of the 8-bit game beats of his peers. The Return EP shows us a melody and melancholy, particularly on ‘trick platform’ and ‘cheesecake backslap’ which resonates in a different part of your brain, which is by and large left un-stimulated by ‘wonky’ fodder. Lotus and Samiyam’s collaborative project FLYamSAM is a surprisingly coherent example of the style. The aptly titled ‘offbeat’ appeared on the Ghostly Swim album, and ‘Green Tea Power’ illustrates that the two approaches when superimposed can produce results that are equally engaging.
Manipulation of a sound’s envelope, such as the attack (the speed at which a note reaches its peak) and decay (time it takes to fade to silence) also allows producers to achieve a wonky orientation of sounds. Hudson Mohawke’s ‘Polkadot Blues’ uses undulating attack and decay which makes synths sound like they start and end a little behind or in front of where they should despite being triggered in phase with the drum loop resulting in an asymmetric surge over a relatively solid foundation.
The third and final element characteristic of this sound is the approach to sampling. Digitality liberates sounds of their material confines and this fracture of form and content creates both great opportunities and constraints for artists working with appropriated material. Digitality not only allows access to a greater range of sounds, it allows for a greater flexibility for artists to manipulate or ‘flip’ samples yet conversely, digitality also creates the condition where copyright law restricts artists, forcing them to over-flip samples which takes something away from the essence of hip-hop. Musing on this, Mullinix says, “I regard hip-hop as a sampling art in part. Part of the tradition of hip-hop is to reference a piece of music. But flipping is a high art. It can be subtle in order to bring new light to an older piece and give respect to older forms of music. Or a sample can be drastically flipped in order to suspend the moments that are cherished of the source material. Sampling can be used as a protest to sampling laws. And I sometimes find that interesting too.”
I agree, the sample epiphanies of my future are likely to be more along the lines of ‘How’d they do that?’ as opposed to ‘They used that!’ And that is set to radically alter the nature of the relationships between original and derivative works in hip-hop music.
As a style, ‘wonky’ is at this point in time intrinsically linked to the future directions of hip-hop. A lot of that has to do with Dilla and his legacy and though it’s perhaps a little unfair to label much of the work that fits into this category as thoughtless or derivative of Dilla’s sound; there are other pitfalls that these producers, and hip-hop artists more generally, face. The danger is a future of technological determinism for the artform. The territorialisation around a style can sometimes serve as a creative engine and it’s an important phase in the hip-hop dialectic, there will always be a boom-bip even if there’s a few blips. It will be important for forward thinking producers to readdress the balance between the synthetic and organic elements of their productions and acknowledge the precarious link between rhythm and chaos as to avoid the monotony of stylistic convergence and machine driven simulacra.
by Suneel Jethani
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