EVERY GENRE PROJECT - February 2 - Moombahcore
Genre of the Day - Moombahcore
Album of the Day - Every Weekend by Hadouken! (2013)
Numerically rating music is a strange, arbitrary thing. Pitchfork is perhaps the king of provoking ire (and conveniently drawing mass readership) for its 1-10 scale of rating music. As a regular reader, I love how in-depth and incisive its reviews are, but I’m often surprised when the score seems too high considering that the review then seems to mention multiple points of contention with the album or seems way too low with no clear explanation given as to why. Case in point: the review for Pinkpantheress’ Heaven knows (filled with bangers) praises songs as ‘more fully realized’ and lauds the album for feeling like a forward step in confidence, yet rates it a relatively middling 6.4 for an indie darling like her. 6.4 is by no means a bad score: but typically a 6.4’s review would make more pointed criticisms.
At the end of the day, Pitchfork is a patchwork of writers and the writer certain albums are assigned to is an arbitrary, fuzzy process in its own right, but our obsession with the site’s numerical ratings rather than the content of reviews exposes our obsession with quick’n’easy quantification.
That’s why tools like RateYourMusic are theoretically useful: a wide swathe of listeners rating albums should ensure perhaps a less biased numerical score and the charts system allows music explorers to find what is considered the cream of the crop in any genre. However, RYM is also filled with silly and sometimes pretentious nerds and trolls, who are often in on some inside joke that I missed the memo on. That is the case with moombahcore: out of only four albums on its chart, the highest one has but a 2.30 rating. In my over a month of perusing these charts, that’s unprecedented, and it’s not a small sample at all: almost 150 people have rated it! But I have an inkling that there is some sort of hate for and memery of the concept of moombahcore festering here, as there’s also comments on many ratings joking that today’s album is the To Pimp a Butterfly or OK Computer of moombahcore. EDM as a whole has regular discourse about microlabeling genres, as it’s composed of so many scenes, but for some reason moombahcore just really pissed people off, as one Redditor diatribes here.
Not my circus, not my monkeys, but an interesting study in dubstep discourse dynamics as of ten years ago. Moombahcore is essentially a variant of electrohouse that cropped up in the early 2010s, which initially drew its name from moombahton which is a combination of house and reggaeton styles, but eventually lost its moombahton influences but retaining the name. Perhaps this sparked the hate? Its sound was inspired by tracks like Skrillex’s Bangarang and hovered on BPMs of a steady 110, filling the gap between faster electro house styles and slower brostep rhythms.
That’s a lot of words to say that to me, it’s hard to distinguish this moombahcore album from many other dubstep-adjacent varieties that cropped up around the same time. In terms of what I’ve actually listened to over the course of this project, it doesn’t have the intensity or really the innovation of Noisia’s brand of halftime, and is a far cry from achieving the hypnosis of psytrance. What it is trying to do, though, I think it achieves relatively well. Hadouken! feels particularly influenced by emo stylings vocally and lyrically. If anything, the lyrics are the catch here and perhaps a source of the poor ratings: they’re a bit dramatic and overwrought at points, and sometimes I feel they don’t ride the beat seamlessly. On some tracks, the vocals are a nice compliment such as Spill Your Guts and the transcendent Levitate, and there’s heavier-hitting rap verses here and there. On others, the sea of swirling, distorted, wobbly synths should be more front and center. Overall, this was far from a 2.30 rating to me: the melodies are dynamic, there’s genuine passion here, and being the pariah of moombahcore certainly can’t be easy. At the end of the day, it’s a reminder that numbers can obfuscate our appreciation of music, so sometimes you just need to close RYM and take in the vibes.