EVERY GENRE PROJECT - August 30 - Jerk Rap

Genre of the Day - Jerk Rap

Album of the Day - King of Jerk by Young Sam (2011)

It’s been a very all-over-the-place day after a very all-over-the-place week, and in the words of Joni Mitchell I felt a bit like I was “fumbling deaf, dumb, and blind” amidst a series of social engagements. At a friend’s birthday party tonight, though, I happened to run into a dear friend and immediately get into conversation with a character she’d described to me before, her producer friend who was in town. I came to find out he produced thinkpiece-stimulating rapper Ian’s breakout hit “Magic Johnson,” and we got lost in conversation about the current rap underground. His words raced with a million-miles-per-hour passion as he told me about his background as a pianist and ragtime fan informing his ear-catching melodic takes on Zaytoven-styled beats, and I got to circulate so many tidbits and vignettes of scenes and people I’ve learned about through this column like lowend and pluggnb in a rare real-life instance of my accumulation of my musical forays being put to connective use. I got to inquire about his opinions on emerging sounds like Cash Cobain’s sexy drill and new jazz (according to him, the only legitimate representative of new jazz’ sound is its protective founder Amir). The conversation was a fantastic insight into the sheer passion and talent driving producers and visionaries. If you want to be on the pulse, look no further than Zukenee, a rapper he collaborated closely with on his recent mixtape whose gothic and medieval vision speaks to the limitless aesthetic boundaries of this moment in rap. 

As a whole, that has little to do with today’s genre, but jerk rap did come up. Though he informed me that the revival of jerk rap is mostly coming out of New York, in its first iteration it was a distinctly LA phenomenon and one that shines in halcyon days of late ‘00s oversaturated videos, big chains, and palm trees. Jerk rap evolved as a SoCal interpretation of the Bay’s hyphy, one of the most monumental scenes in west coast rap. Whereas hyphy drew a lot of its carefree, party-centric energy from glorifying ecstasy in whimsical ways, jerk rap’s joy stems from its own built-in dance. Jerkin’ was a spiritual descendant of Chicago footwork and a LA street dance known as krumping, and acted as an even more elaborate and flashy footwork act that essentially looks like running backwards in place. A jerkin’ routine is often accentuated by the pindrop—a sudden drop onto the outside of your feet combined with a spin—and even flips.

Jerk rap sped up hyphy while paring down its beats to more sparse, snap-accentuated beats and retaining a certain urgency from those siren-esque synths that blare a call to action to hit the genre’s accompanying dances. YouTube’s success aided the glorious proliferation of many short-lived dance crazes in the late 2000s, so jerk rap and its particular strain of swag was given a chance to reverberate far beyond LA. The genre became consolidated with the virality of New Boyz’ “You’re A Jerk,” its hook insistently drilling the dance’s centrality in the music into your head as the emcee simply smirks: I know. Later on, the dougie was introduced as a new character of the jerk universe and took over the summer of 2010. Jerk rap’s moment is reminiscent of a bygone era of such dances permeating every level of American culture as mass media became simultaneously more democratized and more exciting thanks to video-sharing platforms. 

To declare yourself the king of jerk is a bold statement—should you be crowned as such by virtue of your skill at the dance, or your rapping abilities over a jerk beat? Nonetheless, Young Sam understood that he had to back up his swag somehow, bringing a laid-back confidence reflected in the off-the-cuff and conversational feel of opener “Bored” over trademark chanted ‘ays’, bleeps, and swirls of saw synths. “Casper” is an all-consuming experience, its sub bass as unrestrained as the best jerk dancer and a rapid-fire hook, pitch-shifting left-and-right. “Go So Ham” delivers exactly what its title promises, barely stopping to breathe in its braggadocio-fest. These are dynamic, delirious tracks that suggest the gravity of perfecting your ability to perform the trademark dance in order to let loose with swaggy flair.

P.S. Not a jerk rap, song, perhaps, but certainly of the same aesthetic, LA-maximalist sphere.