On Snippets
11/2/2017
1.
You already know what the fuck time it is, we’re doing numbered vignettes again.
2.
Given a sufficiently long timeline, everything turns to shit. I don’t think that this is particularly controversial - consider LOST, the divorce rate, the existence of adult diapers - or even particularly sad. It just is. In creative pursuits especially, the strength and specificity of inspiration needed to make something great is necessarily finite.
3.
At the beginning of 2016, Young Thug posted an Instagram video of himself vibing to 15 seconds of what appeared to be his vocals over the beat to Jeremih’s Pass Dat. The original video has been deleted, but you can watch it five times in a row here. At the time of its release, the clip fueled massive speculation (1, 2, 3) - was this part of a full remix? Would it appear on Thug’s soon to be released Slime Season 3? Was there a Thug and Jeremih project on the way?!
The official song dropped eight months and (personally) hundreds of loops of the IG clip later. Despite turning out to be an official remix including The Weeknd and Chance the Rapper, the full version of the track was an utter disappointment. Young Thug’s part was almost entirely encapsulated within the IG video (good), but there’s all this other crap - practically the entirety of the existing release of Pass Dat, Chance the Rapper saying something, an utterly uninspired verse from The Weeknd (bad). I listened to it once or twice, then returned to a looped version of Thug’s snippet that I had downloaded and spent the past eight months with.
For those eight months, however, the hypothetical full remix of Pass Dat just might have been my favorite song. It could have been anything! And the one part that we had was so good.
4.
Post Malone’s Rockstar has just begun its third week as the number one song in the country. As detailed here, its chart performance has been greatly assisted by the massive success of a YouTube video, uploaded by a record label source, of a three-and-a-half-minute loop of the song’s chorus.
5.
In late 2014, I went up to DC to see a DJ set by Kode9, the head of the Hyperdub label. While he’s a big name in his own right, the main appeal of seeing Kode9 DJ is the prospect of hearing a preview of some unreleased music from a mysterious Hyperdub bloke named Burial. While Burial has released plenty of music, most of it acclaimed, devoted fans are intimately familiar with a particular unreleased snippet called Feral Witchchild, which is now going on a decade of existence as no more than the 34 seconds linked above. Pretty cool, right? What brought the song to that point? Where does it go after? Lots of people have ideas (to the point that several mediocre electronic musicians have attempted to piece together an entire 3-4 minute tune from the preview), but there’s no possible full Feral Witchchild that can satisfy the majority. It’s never coming out.
Kode9 didn’t play any Burial that night, but he did play a Hudson Mohawke track called Chimes. It had been released by that point, but for about two years prior Chimes had been something of a holy grail of unreleased tracks for myself and a couple of friends. Again, sounds great right? Probably a lot of cool shit going on before and after the big ol’ brass section. Especially when it sounds like there’s going to be another drop right when the BBC rip cuts out! Yet Chimes too disappoints; little more than the BBC rip played twice, even the additional fidelity of a proper studio release takes away from the effect. It’s no coincidence that these vaunted 30-second bangers disappoint when they see an actual release; the snippet is now as valid a musical form as the song itself.
6.
Burial's music has always been about an extremely specific feeling: walking home from the club on darkened London streets, half-formed memories and strains of melody that you'll never hear again echoing around your head. In late 2012, Burial finally leaned into the snippet thing with the release of Truant / Rough Sleeper, a twenty-five minute tribute to pirate radio by way of disjointed, contextless snippets put back-to-back-to-back and separated only by static. It's his best work by far.
7.
On a mountaintop just outside the city of Oaxaca, Mexico lie the ruins of the ancient Zapotec city of Monte Albán. One of the largest Mesoamerican city-states of the pre-Hispanic era, Monte Albán was inhabited for thirteen consecutive centuries before it was abandoned nearly overnight for reasons still unknown. Its lands were split up into numerous minor territories, which co-existed in relative peace until the Spanish conquest. Today, Monte Albán is regarded as one of the most important and best-preserved archeological sites of the pre-Hispanic era.
8.
It’s beyond cliche to quote it now, but Neil Young once sang It's better to burn out / Than to fade away on My My, Hey Hey (Out Of The Blue). That was a song about Johnny Rotten, but the sentiment is applicable more generally. There’s a compelling theory going around that the music media takes one extra album to catch up to when an artist falls off - specifically, that Arcade Fire actually began to suck with Reflektor but that no one was willing to call it out until Everything Now. It's an unfortunate phenomenon; there’s nothing worse than quitting something and realizing that the preceding six months or whatever was lost time, a slow slide downwards before the realization that there’s a cliff ahead.
9.