Laurent Fintoni - Bedroom Beats and B-Sides: Instrumental Hip Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century

About the Author

Laurent Fintoni has written about music and culture since the early 2000s. He began his career writing about the turntablist, hip-hop, and drum & bass scenes and throughout the 2010s was a regular contributor to FACT, The FADER, Bandcamp, and the Red Bull Music Academy Daily among others. He has also worked as a tour manager, label manager, and A&R for various independent labels and artists worldwide. Born in France, he has lived in London, Tokyo, Brussels, Milan, and New York City, and currently resides in Los Angeles where he is most likely driving around looking for food.

First published by Velocity Press 2020

velocitypress.uk

Copyright Laurent Fintoni 2020

Cover illustration

Dan Lish

Typesetting

Paul Baillie-Lane

pblpublishing.co.uk

Laurent Fintoni has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988 to be identified as the author of this work

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, without permission from the publisher

ISBN: 9781913231040

For Gregory Ras G Shorter

Airhorn!!

Preface A Word From Our Sponsors

Id like to tell you that theres a clean and clear narrative to how this book came to be, but there isnt. It has a few starting points. One of them materialised in a Berlin bar on a January night in 2012 when a stranger Id just met told me I should write a book. I was in town to give a talk. That talk was based on a series of articles, written while I was living in Japan in 2008, and a mix, inspired by those articles and which I put together with some friends after my return to Europe in 2009. Taken as a composite, the articles, the mix, and the talk argued for a sonic lineage from boom bap, the popular 1990s New York City hip-hop sound rooted in productions from the likes of DJ Premier and Pete Rock, to the then recent rise in instrumental hip-hop with an electronic slant. A new wave of beats that felt fun and exciting building on more than a decades worth of experiments at the edges of hip-hop and electronic music. Upon hearing all this, the stranger casually dropped his suggepstion. I was puzzled by the idea at first, but eventually, it took hold and now, eight years later, the book is a thing. Lets backtrack a little more, though.

First and foremost, this book is the result of my own personal journey through the beats of hip-hop and electronic music. It started for me in the early 1990s in the south of France when I was a teenager buying French hip-hop mixtapes and import CDs featuring American hip-hop acts. It continued when I moved to England in 1998 where I discovered electronic dance music and more mixtapes, albums, and odd instrumental music that didnt quite fit the dominant narratives of house, techno, or rap music. Eventually, this fandom morphed into research and writing about beats because while I always liked vocal music, the beats were really what I had always connected with. Guru said it was mostly tha voice, but what I really felt was Premiers chops.

Fifteen or so years after Id first discovered hip-hop and beats, I landed on this idea of connecting the boom bap sound from the 1990s to the beat movement of the late 2000s via various strains of hip-hop and electronic music production that had happened in between. I wrote about it, discussed it with people in various countries and articulated it as a mix. And then someone told me I should write a book, and the more I thought about it, the more I worked on it, interviewing artists and talking with them, the more it became clear that the original idea had to evolve. The more I tried to pin down a narrative on boom bap and its legacy, the more I realised it was about much more than just that. It was about technology. It was about the distinctions we make between hip-hop and electronic music, and what exists in the liminal space between the two. It was about two decades of giving weird names to beats and instrumental music because they didnt fit the accepted narratives. It was about B-sides. It was about bedroom producers and their own journey from the sidelines to the stage. It was about a culture.

Over the past eight years I have written and uttered what feels like hundreds of variations of a sentence that begins with, This book is about. At first, it was an exercise to try and clarify to myself what I actually wanted to do. Then it became a way to try and explain the book to people. Eventually, it was the elevator pitch for a potential publisher. And yet that fragment of a sentence still feels frustratingly limiting. But you need to know what this book is about and I need to get on with telling you the story.

The first few decades of the 21st century saw huge changes in the music industry as new technology transformed creation, communication and consumption. Amid these shifts, one change occurred relatively quietly, almost naturally: so-called bedroom producers, music makers raised on hip-hop and electronic music, went from anonymous, often unseen creators to live performers and chart-toppers. Today, bedroom beats and the people behind them can be found in the Billboard charts, on music festival line-ups and in various popular playlists on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.

Beyond technological and market forces, this change was, first and foremost, a cultural one, the latest manifestation of what well call beat culture, a timeless, rhythmic continuum that stretches back millennia to the spiritual drums of African traditions. The democratisation of music-making tools and bedrooms becoming studios sparked new musical movements. Focused on experimentation, artists explored the close relationship and potentials between hip-hop and electronic music in new ways. Beginning in the 1990s with instrumental music for global hip-hop heads and rave comedowns and culminating at the end of the 2000s with young people playing beats from their laptops, these movements (known by a variety of names including trip-hop, downtempo, jungle, IDM, turntablism, leftfield/alt hip-hop, or just beats) acted as incubators for innovative ideas about music production and performance that are now taken for granted.

Invented by the music industry with the vinyl single in the 1950s, the concept of A and B-sides was a commercial imperative to sell more records. It wasnt long before artists and labels began to use the B-sides of singles to release material with less commercial appeal but more artistic potential. Some of those B-sides became unintentional hits, while others languished in homes and record shops waiting to be discovered by curious listeners searching for more. Vinyl singles started being phased out in the 1990s as the industry shifted its focus to the massive profits heralded by CDs. Yet, sides remained an enduring reality in the DJ-led, burgeoning new markets of hip-hop and dance music. More importantly, sides now existed as a concept in the collective imagination. For major labels, the word B-side was repurposed to mean any bonus material they could make money from, even if it was sold to you on a CD or digitally. For more curious and adventurous consumers the B-side, whether literal or physical, represented a foundation of sorts on which the A-side rested. The A-side was the track everyone knew and loved, but the B-side was where you went to find the real gems. It was where indulgence and expression could take full flight via edits, instrumentals, dubs, versions, remixes, or even just sonic doodles. The B-side completed the artistic whole and opened up new worlds of possibilities.