EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 8 - New Beat
Genre of the Day - New Beat
Album of the Day - Lust by Lords of Acid (1991)
Unbeknownst to me at the outset of my college experience, I would be blessed to share many of my Thursdays during the semesters these last couple of years in a freestyle rapping club. Through extreme proximity to one member (hey) and an admiration for the founder’s (who is also a friend I respect a lot) deep reverence for the art of rap, I began attending the alchemical yet cozy meetings. This place was called Decypher, where a zany cast of around a dozen characters converged for the joys of spitting some bars on a porch. I was nervous to the point of muteness the first few times I came up in the rotation to produce a measly four-bar verse, sheepishly waving my hand to the next person. Over successive meetings, though, it began to feel not only natural but communally electric and creatively rewarding to dig into wordplay, pacing, and ideas.
The importance of this club in today’s genre is not in any material sense, as the sounds enjoyed by Decypher from Tribe Called Quest-esque jazzy beats to surrealist microwave type beats bear no relation to today’s genre. However, the connection comes with the club’s mantra: new beat. When the beat went stale or was outrunning the rappers-for-a-couple-hours, a call for a new beat quickly reconfigured the energy.
Indeed, today’s New Beat is also animated with energy, though through an extremely racy and debauched lens. In fact, lyrically, New Beat presents a totally polar musical vision than freestyle rap, with an emphasis on repetition of just a few attention-grabbing, bluntly sexed-up lines. What possessed western Europeans to do these things and create such concoctions when they encountered electronic dance music has been a recurring befuddlement for me in this column, but it’s better than not taking risks. Plus, some of new beat’s essential elements are reflected in electroclash, so it’s clear that new beat was way ahead of a certain new wave-inspired curve.
New beat developed in Belgium, inspired by a dyslexic’s-nightmare strain of dance music abbreviated as EBM—electronic body music. EBM differs from EDM, which as a term wouldn’t originate until much later once rave culture became increasingly mainstream, in its industrial and dark nature. In the words of Belgian outfit Front 242 who were EBM trailblazers in the early ‘80s, EBM merged visceral aspects of humanity like sweat, flesh, and movement with the intimidating inhumanity of machines.
New beat took that compelling contrast between the vivid humanness of dance and the cold machinery that drove ‘80s new wave one step further by dropping in some chemicals via early rumblings of acid house’s sonic philosophy. Acid house embodies the exploitation of a particular musical machine, derived from applying the wonky, squelchy palettes of the Roland 303 synthesizer to house structures. New beat controlled these experimentations with slower beats, allowing a dark intensity to ruminate. Though soulful samples constituted the early vocal stylings of new beat, a contrast to the darker sonic influences emerged in the form of astounding, mostly ironic sexual declarations.
The self-proclaimed Lords of Acid take us below the Belgian streets with a chain of five-minute journeys defined by their corroded basslines, shadowy pads, and simple, humorous raunchiness. The bassline melodies and sonic textures figure as darker interpretations of electronic saw waves brightened by notorious early ‘90s house hits like 2 Unlimited’s “Get Ready for This.” “Let’s Get High” features maybe ten words total, but the dense supersaw synth overgrowth imparts an unbridled power to its propulsion. The titles of “Rough Sex” and “I Must Increase My Bust” leave little to the imagination, bewildering The Wall-style sexclarative chants and thick synth insistency combining into a sound capturing what might result if you threw The Joy of Sex into a bubbling vat of liquid mercury. Though decades have passed, new beat still feels as novel as its name would suggest and nearly clever in capturing the visceral wild-abandon extremes of the two core aspects of clubbing culture, humans and machines, while never taking itself so seriously.