What the music blockchain scene can learn from the rise of global bass
It’s been a while since it’s been a glorious insight to state that the digital era of music has been one of exponential change, but it makes for a nice opening line. Current consumption methods would take a week to explain to your nan: distribution systems have become insanely fluid, record-industry business models are guided by the need to tick off social-media metrics, and the depth of our engagement with music has been brutally diminished, resulting in a rise in the amount of sages who think it’s really important to be able to return to the time of sniffing and gazing at record sleeves.
But it’s where the recent changes have come from that is perhaps the most encouraging part. Globally driven cultural shifts in fine art and cinema have been a thing since pretty much day one, but in mainstream contemporary music, change has tended to come from the same epicentres: America, Britain, France and Germany (Kraftwerk and Krautrock defining the formal template for pretty much all of dance music doesn’t get enough love — they could take a few decades off and still be in credit). As a Brit, the existence of Eurovision would always baffle me as it seemed like we were having to be shit on purpose to fit in to this parallel world where our musical tyranny held no sway. If global charts were any kind of metric, surely we should steamroller it every year? Apart from the regular summer hits that holiday-makers brought back with their duty-free cigs and booze, where was this mass creativity suddenly coming from? Yeah, that kind of arrogance was probably why we always so frequently lost; that, plus the whole geo-politics thing. That was the younger me thinking that, by the way, don’t judge. Now I just don’t give more than 0.5 of a shit about it.
Thankfully, one of the most significant, but still pretty low-key, moments in recent years trampled all over that hegemony and hinted at the potential strength of the new, inclusive digital era: the discovery and rise in 2004 of Brazilian funk carioca, better known as baile funk. One part Miami bass, one part hip hop, one part mangled pop ethics and 500 parts barrio party vibes, baile funk was (and still is) an infectious, fresh sound that inspired a shit-ton of dance music producers, most notably Daniel Haaksman and Diplo, and boldly stood to one side from what was going on in the mainstream. The bigger deal was the fact that it showed the internet’s worth as beacon of democratic inclusivity and that a globally connected digital network could potentially hold as much sway over public opinion as any major-label marketing push.
This sea-change was echoed and amplified by the supposedly short-lived but equally influential moombahton scene of 2010 onwards. Created as a happy accident by producer and DJ Dave Nada when he stumbled on the rhythmic link between certain Dutch house tunes and latin genres like bachata, Dave quickly formulated a genre that fused 21st century dance music production techniques and tropes with the low-slung dembow beat that the Puerto Rican reggaeton scene shared with Jamaican dancehall. Primarily distributed via Soundcloud (itself a key part of the revolution) and globally woke blogs like Generation Bass and Walmer Convenience, and hyped by a vociferously engaged community on Facebook, Nada was joined by producers like DJ Sabo, David Hearbreak and Dutch wunderkind Munchi — who all in turn fired up bedroom producers from around the world: artists from Peru, Lithuania and Australia were quickly sharing space on a level playing with their more-established peers, imbuing the sound with inflections from their own locale. Of course, music had always been open to everyone around the world, but here was an internet-enabled, internationally democratic workspace for artists. Moombahton heralded a clutch of microgenres that took cues from non-traditional sources: kuduro, the Buraka Som Sistema-birthed upbeat sound built upon Angolan rhythms, and zouk bass, a more downbeat style drenched in Middle-Eastern vibes, plus a fair few more subsequent styles that I slept through. This all sounds adorably niche, until you join the dots: the moombahton scene was strongly supported by genre magpie Diplo (who you could probably endorse on LinkedIn for cultural appropriation), who then became the figurehead for the sound under the Major Lazer project. Lean On by Major Lazer and Sorry by Justin Bieber — both produced by Diplo — and One Dance by Drake cemented the 110bpm dembow as THE pop sound of the decade, resulting in the likes of Sia, Little Mix, Ed Sheerhan and countless others getting on board. Despacito picked up the baton as the figurehead of the latin market seeking to reclaim ownership of their sound, while parallel to this, DJs like Uproot Andy, Geko Jones and Riobamba weaved trap and footwork with these latin flavours to keep beat production fluid and forward thinking, without compromising how it resonates with cultural heritage.
This is the second key age of world music, but while the Paul Simon’s Graceland-led spell of the late 1980s had the whiff of a patronising search for a stereotype of authenticity and a notion of roots, this current phase is one of pervasive equilibrium that results in Afrobeat, reggaeton and tropical-hued bangers being broadcast from Boiler Rooms sessions and clothes shops all over the planet, while Damon Albarn is clocking up the air miles on his African side projects. Plus, I’m getting Soundway’s glorious Nigerian disco compilation heaters and curious gems like Quantic’s cumbia bubbling up in my Spotify Discover Weekly, so all good. Moving away from this cohesive dance music sphere, K-Pop’s seismic shift from Gangnam meme currency to earnest crossover dominance reinforces how pervasive this overall trend is: my teen daughter and her pals are all about Black Pink, without it being any adventurous taste move on their part. If, like me, you find blokes with guitars predominantly unimaginative, tedious and predictable, this is a wonderful time to be a consumer: my first session digging around on Resonate turned up some intriguing German hip hop and suave downbeat African vibes.
This is probably the bit where I should tie it in with the blockchain. Baile funk and moombahton showed that bookies are offering lower odds on David against Goliath in this digital age, and that seeds planted in rarer pastures can be nurtured and grow to an unfathomable size. The parallels to the Brazil and Central America music scenes are the countries where blockchain tech is flourishing while America and UK struggle to decide how best to react to it: think of countries like Slovenia, where the government are fully behind start-ups like Viberate, which could put up big numbers in the artist-promoter booking world. Think about how often you hear crypto chat refer to ‘the Chinese / Vietnamese / Singapore ethereum’. Think also how start-ups like Resonate are breeding outside of the mainstream music industry and how the majors are keeping the blockchain industry at arm’s length, potentially at their own cost. Sure, many great projects will sadly go to the wall, and there will be unfathomable sadness should the current crypto bloodbath starts claiming victims, but if and when the breakthrough does come it’s going to be absolute scenes.
The reason why there is such a visceral response to Trump’s wall and Brexit is that, politics aside, both are tone-deaf responses to how the world works. You sit in Swedish furniture while drinking coffee ground from beans from half a world away while using an alphabet that’s Roman in a democracy that has its roots in Greece. Get over yourself. Nothing sums that up more than the news stories about the people driving the ICE immigration policy getting shit from protesters while they’re dining at Mexican restaurants. The writers at The Onion were probably pissed off when they read that. The ruinous arseholery of baby boomers must not be the dominant narrative. When the story of this age is written, the industrial revolution will look like a sneeze in comparison: rapid, fundamental change change is possible from any place at any time.
The blockchain seems to be metaphorically toiling away doing warm-up sets in basement clubs at the moment, but given support and time to flourish, and with inspiration from the rise of global bass, it could be playing the big rooms in no time.
