It’s no secret that I possess an affinity for the conventions of so-called Pop music. It’s probably just as well known that I also love so-called “weird music” that eschews much of the normalcy of traditional Pop songcraft and performing in favor of experimentalism. In my mind the two extremes are easily reconciled and their existence need not be mutually exclusive. But I also realize that in the “real world” outside of my skull popular music only rarely incorporates elements that one might consider “weird” or experimental, and conversely music which is viewed as embracing the avant-garde is almost never popular in any significant way.
With the exception of Wal-Mart Country or maybe angsty Pop-Punk there’s no music more popular these days than Rap and R&B. And while free-form innovation may exist within the Indie underground & on the fringes of the Hip-Hop scene, and many of the Soul genre’s legendary figures may have dabbled in psychedelia back in the ’70s, the popularity of rappers and R&B singers seems to coincide with their ability to follow formulas and maintain a status qou. For this very reason I was elated when Erykah Badu (popular and respected amongst fans of Hip-Hop and Soul both underground and mainstream) released an album like New Amerykah Part One (which pays homage to soulful experiments of the psychedelic past while dragging contemporary Hip-Hop into a future where technology, art, spirituality and politics melt into a mind-expanding psychotropic intended to spark revolution) to undeniable chart success.
Like I said, popularity and progressiveness don’t have to exist separately. And I certainly hope more high-profile musicians, particularly those involved in the Hip-Hop and R&B mainstream, follow Badu’s lead and reap rewards for their radical creativity. But for the time being most of the people doing that sort of thing aren’t just “far-out” because they’re on the leading edge or even because they’re trippy, but because they’re literally on the periphery when it comes to the traditionally Pop-music-centered entertainment media.
New York-based composer-turned-beatmaker Son Lux (a.k.a. Ryan Lott) is one of those artistically adventurous outsiders. But rather than taking plain-old-Pop “out there” he’s forcing his classical training and background in composing (for modern dance, ballet, multimedia gallery pieces, etc) inside through experiments in Hip-Hop-influenced composition built around sample-based sound-collage & hard beats, coupled with a disjointed approach to Pop songwriting. The result — a hallucinatory vortex of Classical, Jazz, Soul, Rock and Electronica, with vocals that come in repetitious snatches as catchy as any Pop hook or religious mantra, anchored by the use of heavy Hip-Hop-style drum-breaks, IDM-influenced drum-programming or choppily edited drum-samples called At War With Walls & Mazes — is about as “far-out” as you’re likely to hear a guy with a sampler intending to make anything resembling “Pop music” get for a while.
Son Lux “Weapons”
Personally I could hear a track like this sliding into a playlist alongside songs by the likes of Radiohead, Kenna, El-P, Saul Williams and the aforementioned Erykah Badu, a diverse list of artists who all attained notoriety without sacrificing their artistic integrity or individuality simply to honor the customs of a genre or scene, or to conform to the protocols of musical popularity.
- El Keter