A Loss for Words
Bon Iver, Young Thug, and the Death of Language in Music
“I don’t need no words,” a sixteen year old Young Thug told Atlanta producer Dun Deal after scrawling a bunch of unintelligible symbols on a page. These “weird shapes and signs” were Young Thug’s lyrics. Now 25, Young Thug claims he can create “a perfect song” in ten minutes. He has released three mixtapes this year alone, and we are still waiting on his debut studio album Hy!£UN35 (or, HiTunes). Young Thug has swept through the rap scene with his high-pitched, woozy, and emotive vocals. He puts Hip Hop’s spin on scatting, slurring through sentence fragments and often foregoing words entirely. The Washington Post’s Chris Richards calls him “post-verbal.”
The best description of Young Thug may be tucked away in his 2012 song “Thinking Out Loud,” (the very name of which is a nice enough distillation of his work), when he raps, “I’m Casper / I’m a walkin’ cloud.” Young Thug is human confusion, an amorphous figure whose music demonstrates thoughts and voices unmoored from the person. Whether or not you agree with the critical praise thrown at Young Thug in recent years, that his warbling rap has created seismic ripples across the Hip Hop industry is undeniable. They may be stretching farther still.
A thousand geographic and musical miles from Young Thug, the Wisconsin-based indie rock band Bon Iver released its newest album, 22, A Million last month. Here is the tracklist:
These are undeniably obnoxious song titles, but before you trash the album outright, consider that Bon Iver might actually be doing shockingly similar work to Young Thug. Like the Atlanta wunderkind, Bon Iver’s music emerges from a visually imagined foundation. Aesthetically, the symbolism of these track titles is reminiscent of Young Thug’s lyrics sheets and the album title Hy!£UN35, but the role of symbols extends far beneath the surface. See, for example, the lyrics videos attached to each song, the way Bon Iver envisions words indistinguishable from sounds and signs, the way these songs spurn any semblance of traditional lyrical construction.
22, A Million is Bon Iver’s weirdest project to date, a lurid mess of an album that deploys lead singer Justin Vernon’s falsetto to pine after human emotions from out of this world. Vernon autotunes his voice into obscurity, creating a haunting and unnatural sound flying in the face of linguistic restraints. He stitches together a new language with scraps of the Roman alphabet and hieroglyphs that, when spoken aloud, sound as otherworldly as they do robotic. Tom Breihan of Stereogum calls it “positively post human.”
Sounds morph together and divide again in meiotic splits. Vernon layers his voice over itself, grating Vernon against Vernon until it is nearly impossible to parse an individual thought from the noise. Using voice-altering software created by Vernon’s engineer Chris Messina specifically for this album, Vernon’s voice is warped into unique forms, starry and atmospheric. Instruments and vocals drift in and through each other as if they are all different points on the same sonic plane. On “666 (Upside Down Cross)” an electronic scratching noise is marked in the lyrics as the line “bit by bit” sung in refrain — noises designating words. Vernon minces words together to create neologisms that grasp for otherwise inexpressible meanings: benefolance, astuary, paramind.
On 29 #Strafford APTS Vernon sings, “A womb / An empty robe / Enough / You’re holding it / You’re fabric now / Paramind / Paramind,” his voice growing higher and higher with each word until “fabric now” disappears into the ether. And paramind: beyond the mind. Bon Iver sings to transcend, dreaming of someplace outside bodily and mental capacity. Wherever that is, words are inadequate.
It is no surprise that Vernon has spent significant time in the past five years working in Hip Hop production; 22, A Million could not exist without Vernon’s love for the genre. Like Young Thug, Vernon operates at what sounds like an inhumanly high register, but while Vernon and Thug share a mode of falsetto, Thug uses his in constant exuberance, Vernon in alienation and melodrama. In that sense he may be more in line with the slurrings of Thug’s Atlanta rival, Future.
While Vernon walks a similar line to those Atlanta impresarios, Kanye West’s influence on the album is the most explicit. Kanye has worked with Vernon several times, most notably on My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, and has called Vernon his “favorite living artist.” Interestingly, Kanye was originally inspired by the song “Woods” on Bon Iver’s 2009 Blood Bank EP, a song that, in retrospect, provides the best indicator of the band’s artistic future and which may well go down as the band’s most influential track. On “Woods,” just like on 22, A Million, and just like his depraved benefactor, Vernon croons through a vocoder in isolation and crisis of faith.
This is a musical age in which Chance the Rapper, known for a pointed articulation that verges on spoken-word, invites Young Thug and Kanye to yelp and hum through the choruses of his newest album, an age in which the Brooklyn-based Desiigner, the distressingly successful Future copycat, titled his debut album New English. An awful album, but for a rapper so blatantly following in the footsteps of Atlanta giants like Future and Young Thug, it seems a not-so-subtle nod to the linguistic revolution happening in Hip Hop.
On the wings of Kanye, Future, Young Thug, and now Bon Iver, we are entering into an age of musical impressionism that seeks to capture feeling in new ways. Maximalist production backs lyrics that bear a semblance of the former language, but which have been put through innumerable filters and emerged distant and ethereal; artists speak in emotions rather than in words. On “666 (Upside Down Cross)” Vernon drones, “No, that’s not how that’s sposed to feel.” Young Thug has said that for him, “the feeling is the meaning.” Vernon fights with himself, questions his emotions and wrestles with them for years before creating a finished product. Young Thug expresses himself without hesitation, releasing his feelings straight to the Internet. For Thug this hazy lyricism allows an expression of a more purely human emotionalism. For Vernon the feelings do not feel human at all.
I do wonder if we will look back on 22, A Million and say it was less ground-breaking than it was symptomatic. Bon Iver is following in a tradition at least as old as Kid A but which in recent years has caught the wave rippling outward from Atlanta Trap across Hip Hop and now beyond. It may all be post-verbal, post-language, post-human, and maybe even post-modern, but if Young Thug and Bon Iver are any indication, it will never be post-emotion.
