Mumbling Music, Soundcloud Rap, and Feeling Like an Old Man

I never thought I’d be “over” a genre within the space of a year. My obsessions tend to be longer-lasting, or at the very least, something that I can return to later even if it’s solely for nostalgic purposes. After “discovering” hip-hop in 2015 I quickly gravitated towards the “trap” subgenre whose outlandish figures like Young Thug and Future provided a much-needed break from the years of straight-laced and hyper-earnest music I’d been listening to most of college.

In addition to trap’s personable artists, the subgenre has managed to become one of the most popular and dominant sounds over the past several years. This combination made the scene feel communal and accessible as it grew to become an undeniable a part of the cultural zeitgeist. In fact, hip-hop is part of the cultural landscape now more than ever as artists are propelled to success by internetmemes which has led to a “look at me” mentality.

In 2016 a distinct new class of rapper began to emerge who utilized the path that had been paved by their trap forefathers to carve out their own niche and fortify themselves as the “next generation” of hip-hop. This group of (then) up-and-comers included people like Lil Yachty, Desiigner, and 21 Savage who quickly earned the derogatory label of “mumble rap,” a name inspired by the MC’s apparent lack of technical proficiency on the mic. These rappers took cues from people like Young Thug and Future (who are also often lumped into this group) but remain distinct for a few reasons. One: almost all of these artists blew up while still in their teens. Two: almost all of these artists used SoundCloud as a platform in their rise to prominence (paving the way for future artists). Three: Many of the most popular “mumble rappers” also happened to be members of the XXL 2016 Freshman Class.

This inclusion in XXL is the most important commonality to note because it elevated the genre instantly and placed these artists squarely in the spotlight. As these rappers gained popularity and publicity over the summer of 2016 many people criticized the freshmen class for their evident lack of technical skill. It quickly ballooned to a genre-wide discussion about what these rappers “brought to the table” if they were eschewing the things that were typically used as barometers of quality within the genre.

I’ve already put my flag in the ground on the topics of lyricism and proficiency in hip-hop in this post from last year on the importance (or lack thereof) of lyrics. In retrospect, comparing these rappers to groups like Sigur Ros may have been a step too far, but I still stand by the overall sentiment of the post.

Now, I hate to sound nostalgic for something that’s only a year old, much less hoist up these artists who I ultimately think are just okay… but these mumble rap artists were significantly better than what we see coming out of the scene a year later. Thanks to the 2016 Freshman Class, hip-hop became an ongoing debate of “style versus substance,” and we’re only now seeing the implications of this shift a year after the emergence of mumble rap with the birth of a brand new scene. But before I get into that, let’s take a look at two specific artists from the mumble rap movement to help us make a direct comparison.

Two Sides of the Same Sound

Lil Uzi Vert is a Philadelphia-based rapper who first made waves in 2015 with his third mixtape Luv is Rage. In 2016 he rose to prominence thanks to his fourth mixtape Lil Uzi Vert vs. the World which birthed two singles, ended up going gold, and solidified him a place on the 2016 XXL freshman list. In 2017 he’s reached unprecedented heights thanks to a (bad) verse on Migos’ quadruple platinum “Bad and Boujee” which paved the way for his own (much better) track, the monumental “XO Tour Llif3.” Tour Lif3 was originally uploaded to Soundcloud as a throwaway track and has since become a breakout phenomenon going x3 Platinum in 6 months, proving both the popularity of Uzi and cementing the platform as a viable test for mainstream hits.

Moving onto another “Lil” rapper from the same scene: Lil Yachty is an Atlanta-based artist who originally broke through in 2015 with what everyone presumed was a one-off viral hit “One Night.” Within a year his next hit “Minnesota” was being played on Drake’s radio show and he caught fire. This platform brought Yachty a newfound audience which elevated his just-released Lil Boat mixtape and propelled him to the forefront of the hip-hop stratosphere.

I chose to highlight these two because they became symbols of the mumble rap genre within the space of weeks. And while they’re often lumped together, they oddly represent two opposing sides of the same sound. So why these two guys? Aside from their inclusion in the 2016 Freshman Class, they both blew up at the same time, dropped high-profile mixtapes within a month of each other, and use many of the same tropes within their music. I also believe one of the more silly reasons these two were lumped together was because of their hair.

It sounds stupid, but Lil Yachty’s bright red braids and Uzi’sever-changingdreads became emblematic symbols of the mumble rap movement. Most of the 2016 class had a unique look, but these two stuck out like sore thumbs with their distinct and brightly-colored mops. What’s more, these two rappers specifically started challenging hip-hop norms by disregarding classics and even going as far to state that they are “not rappers” but instead preferring to be labeled as “rockstars.” For better or worse, they became symbols of the new school: two figures that stood in direct opposition to the traditions of the genre. It’s easy to see why they sparked debates, spurred controversy, and turned off old heads the world over in 2016.

There was a clear line being drawn in the sand over the 2016 Freshman. One side saw this crop of artists as energetic, hair-dyed teenagers with little artistic substance beyond the beats they were rapping over. Meanwhile, the other side saw this scene for the fun, carefree, and easily-digestible entertainment that it was intended as.

If it wasn’t apparent by now, I’m fans of these artists, and I resented the fact that these 18-year-olds were being cited as the “downfall of hip-hop” as if their very existence was an offense to the genre’s history. I’ll admit that it took me some time to come around to each artist, but Uzi and Yachty’s 2016 tapes quickly became some of my favorites that year. With upbeat, colorful, summery songs, these artists were just teenagers, but there is a time and place for the type of music they were making.

I was decidedly on the side of these artists. I didn’t see these guys as the "end of hip-hop” that so many classic rap fans were quick to decry them as. I’ve already linked this previous post on why a lack of substantive lyrics doesn’t equate to lack of substantive music, but The Needle Drop’s Anthony Fantano explains this subgenre’s appeal well in this video where he draws a comparison to this new sound and the punk mentality of the 70’s. These artists became unwitting figureheads for a movement that they didn’t necessarily even create, but their music doesn’t invalidate traditional hip-hop or threaten other artist’s artistic output.

At the end of the day, Yachty and Uzi are two musicians are working towards very different visions with Uzi representing more of a moody, rock-inspired crooning emo trapper and Yachty being more of an upbeat goofball “bubblegum trap” artist. They got judged unfairly, lumped into the same group, and became polarizing figures within the matter of a few months. But on a more positive note, they engaged and energized the younger generation, which led to hip-hop becoming the most popular genre in the US for the first time ever. Their techniques and approaches to music also paved the way for a new type of rapper who took their styles and carried them to their logical extremes. That brings us to 2017.

Mumbles Begat Soundcloud

Compared to this innovative wave of energy that we saw in hip-hop last year, 2017 has felt like a step backward in many ways. We’ve had fewer projects from bigger names, and less “movement” in the genre as a whole. I’m also willing to admit this perceived drop-off in quality could be chalked up to personal bias because, while I feel less enthused by the genre, hip-hop as a whole has still experienced a major influx of activity this year. The problem is its momentum that’s hyper-specified and that I feel absolutely no connection to.

I’ve never wanted to be the old guy who doesn’t “get it” yet, within the space of a year I feel like I’ve already crossed over into old man territory. A year after the rise of the “mumble rapper” we’re now witnessing the birth of a new class of artists dubbed the “Soundcloud Rapper.”

One major artist to blow up from this scene is XXXTentacion. I first became aware of his existence in early 2017 as he was gaining rapid popularity online while behind bars after being arrested for assault at 18 (you read that right). Between Lil Wayne’s infamous stay in prison to Max B’s recent memed-out sentence, rappers are no stranger to trouble with the law. XXX was let out on false charges (which I don’t buy) but I’m willing to (again) admit personal bias because I find the assault of a woman more heinous than simple gun charges. This controversy was a bad way to first hear about an artist and left me with a negative first impression of both the artist and the “scene.”

Around this same time, a Georgian rapper named Playboi Carti released his eponymous debut to surprisingly-high reviews. While not technically part of the same subgenre, Carti’s “Magnolia” blew up inexplicably, earning him a platinum and granting him access to high-profile collaborators the genre over. Carti’s music is similarly lacking in substance the same way that Uzi and Yachty are, so I can’t fault him for that. What I can fault him for is featuring on two and a halfseparatetracks this year in which his contribution is solely ad-lib-based. God knows I’m not against ad-libs, but it’s incredible to watch someone make a career being propped up by decent beats and more talented artists as they shout “what?” in between each of their bars. Oh and Carti was also taken into custody for assault in 2017 as well, only to be let off a month later.

Despite the public and controversial beatings, Both XXXTentacion and Playboi Carti have enjoyed success and made it onto the XXL Freshman 2017 list, ensuring them both a moderately-successful career. Comparing these two freshmen with the two I highlighted from the 2016 lineup provides a stark contrast between one group of mumbling trap artists and the second group of women-beating teenagers. Even setting aside the quality of their music, elevating and rewarding the abhorrent behavior of the latter two is undeniably a step backward for the genre. And as I’ve been editing this piece, TV’s Eric Andre has publicly spoken out against these artists citing a similar concern.

The Dregs

Now we move onto the two artists that inspired me to sit down to write this post in the first place: Lil Pump and SmokePurpp. These two Florida-born rappers are making music in the same style as XXXTentacion with distorted blown-out bassy instrumentals and loud aggressive chant-like vocals. Pump blew up several months ago on the back of the mindlessly-repetitive “D Rose.” The track, which finds Pump explaining why his expensive watches make him feel like Derrick Rose, was uploaded in late 2016 and has since garnered almost 30 million plays on Soundcloud. There’s honestly very little else to say about the song beyond that.

Critics and journalists took note of this subgenre’s meteoric rise in popularity and began writing Hunter S. Thompson-style gonzo journalism pieces about the scene including this one from Rolling Stone and this incredible write-up by The New York Times. I’d had these articles saved to my Pocket for later reading, but it wasn’t until I stumbled across a Noisey interview whose title was so great that I willingly dove into it.

The article in question “Reading This Interview with Lil Pump and Smokepurpp Will Make You Stupider” is a particularly glazed-over interview with the two Floridians in which the interviewer searches desperately for any semblance of a deeper purpose to these two artists. Their answers, relegated mostly to single-syllable words half-formed sentences, quickly revealed that there is no deeper level to Lil Pump and Smokepurpp. They’re not in search of anything, not inspired by anything, and their self-described “ih-norant” music is their artistic end-all be-all.

Now, look. I listen to a ton of stupid music, some of it just as “ignorant” and turnt up as this, but this new wave of music feels so baseless and devoid that I don’t see any silver lining to it. In fact, I write this primarily from a “worried mother” type perspective because these kids are fucking sixteen. Lil Pump (born August 17th, 2000) was admitted to the hospital following a lean scare just ten days before his birthday. XXXtentacion (born January 23rd, 1998) has (aside from the assault charges) put on a litany of violent concerts including fist fights, two-story jumps, and barricade collisions. I’m not the first to speak out against these artist’s carelessness, and I have a feeling I won’t be the last.

It’s music that trades out the bare minimum artistry that was there before for pure adrenaline and shock value. And again, maybe this isn’t “for me” and that’s why I don’t get it. If anything, these artists are simply a logical continuation of the mumble rap scene taking visual, musical, and artistic queues from the generation immediately before them. And Desiigner and Lil Uzi Vert have pulled equally-dangerous stunts at their shows… but it’s interesting to watch this progression take place so rapidly over the course of a calendar year.

And to circle away from the onstage antics and back to the music: I’m not saying Yachty’s music is high art. It’s still pretty dissonant, off-putting, and even bad on a technical level. But what Yachty traded those qualities out for is a unique sound and image based around himself. It may be discordant music, but it retains an undeniable sense of bright fun catchiness. Meanwhile, I feel like this new crop of artists retained that similar lack of technicality but traded out any sense of fun for pure adrenaline.

I don’t know where all this is headed. I do think it’s exciting that all this has happened within the space of a year, and it just goes to show how quickly the hip-hop genre is evolving and shifting. Maybe it’s just part of a bigger splintering and within a few years, we’ll have all these subgenres of hip-hop with dozens of artists occupying each well-defined niche with their own space carved out. I fully expect many of these guys to fall off and fade into obscurity soon (or at the very lease encounter more trouble with the law) but overall I think this energy bodes well for the genre. I just don’t want a teenager to die for it.

As long as young people continue to be inspired they’ll continue to innovate and push boundaries. I may not like the music, but I’m always in support of innovation. I sincerely hope I’m still on board for the next “wave” of explosive creativity in music, but I also know I will hit a point in the future where I just stop “getting it” and I accept that.

I don’t necessarily resent the scene, the music, or these artists. I think some of their extracurricular actions are deplorable and shouldn’t be celebrated, but that’s really about it. I see the appeal of the music, but I also know that it’s not for me. If anything, it’s exciting that real, young, independent musicians have the ability to build as much of a platform as more established artists, but sometimes that fan base is built on the back of shitty behavior that nobody should emulate.

It’s also interesting to watch the “gaze” of hip-hop move so quickly from one crop of artists to the next. It seems that nobody gets to spend much time on the throne, and now the artists that were exciting last year are practically legacy acts by the scene’s standards. It’s weird when the “primary focus” (or at least most explosive scene) of a genre is one that I fundamentally disagree with on nearly every level, but again, maybe I’m just turning into an old man.

I can’t think of any other way to end this besides words of hesitant encouragement. I want kids to keep innovating and scaring the adults (and 24-year-olds) by blazing their own trail. There’s something admirable about a sixteen-year-old throwing a song up on SoundCloud and becoming a certified star months later… but when it breeds violence and drug abuse I’m decidedly against it. It’s a fine line, and I respect everyone’s freedom/artistic choices/blah blah blah, I just wish everything was more positive.

So keep it up I guess. We’ll see where this scene goes. Who knows what the next year’s hot topic will be. For the time being, keep doing you. Just don’t do anything too stupid.

Heartache, Optimism, and Pop-Punk: How The Upsides Changed My Outlook On Life

The best creations are born of pain. A sad consolation prize for the inflicted, the result of life experience and raw suffering. As listeners, we judge music based on how much life and “realness” bleed through it, but we also don’t experience anything in a vacuum. Art is tainted by our own memories and experiences. It’s the reason that two nearly-identical albums can feel so different. It’s the reason you enjoy A while I prefer B. Memory is where it all comes into play, and it’s what we add to art as humans. In experiencing art we inject a bit of our own story in the listening process and add on to the creation in whatever way we can.

This is how our tastes, perspectives, and very personalities are formed: through interaction with both art and the world around us. While a positive experience, association, or context can improve our perception of an album, the inverse can also ruin something that’s otherwise objectively good. Think about any album, movie, or TV show that you used to recover from a breakup. Hell, think about a restaurant that once gave you food poisoning. Whether it’s well-founded or not, there’s probably a negative association and personal bias at play skewing your opinion.

I’m of the school of thought that traditionally “great” music starts as something you don’t necessarily love on the first listen, but becomes better over time. Music with depth and complexity that reveals itself with each subsequent spin. Challenging its consumer to be better. Most of my favorite albums were records that I didn’t think much of (or simply didn’t like) upon first listen, but gradually kept burrowing their way further into my brain.

And while memories often retroactively color our impressions of art, sometimes there are also individual works that are able to overcome our own mental hang-ups. Art that’s so strong it’s able to break through our negative associations and emerge from the other side, still enjoyable.

This combination of growth over time and overcoming an uphill battle of negative associations is one of the reasons that The Wonder Years’ second album The Upsides is one of my favorite records of all time.

From a South Philly Basement

Before I get into weird personal history: some quick background info on the band. Founded in 2005, The Wonder Years are a pop-punk act from Lansdale, Pennsylvania. Following two years of singles, split and EPs the band released their debut album Get Stoked on It! In 2007. Taking queues from the early 2000’s easycore scene, the band’s first record was a keyboard-heavy form of biting pop-punk. Get Stoked is problematic, but also very symptomatic of the year it was made. It’s not a bad record, but it bears very few resemblances to the rest of the band’s work and has been retconned by the band for good reason.

The biggest point against Get Stoked on It! Is that most of the songs were written about generic late-2000’s pop cultural buzzwords. You got a track about a ninja, one about a cowboy, one about zombies, and much more! This is in direct conflict with the band’s later hyper-earnest heart-on-sleeve meditations that pulled from real life experiences and heartfelt emotions (as opposed to funny songs about astronauts). There are still some tracks like “Racing Trains” and “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong” that foreshadow some of the band’s future stylistic leanings, but as a whole, the record is much more underdeveloped and juvenile than their later work.

The band would later go on to “decanonize” this release, publicly stating their distaste for it both in interviews and even referencing it in future songs. When a remastered version of the album came out in 2012, lead singer Daniel Campbell said “If you like the record, enjoy the new mixes. If you hate the record, I’m on your side” which is something I’ve seen very few bands do.

Within two years of their first album, original member and keyboardist Mikey Kelly left the band. His departure essentially represented a “soft reboot” for the band which allowed the remaining members to pivot the group’s sound and take their next album into a more “honest” direction. A year after Kelly’s departure the band released their sophomore album The Upsides in 2010, and my life would change forever.

B-rate Version of Me

In 2011 I went through a horrible breakup. It was my first real relationship, and it hit me as hard as you could imagine a 17-year-old being hit. I’d recently got my driver’s license, started my first job, and I was embarking on my final year of high school, so overall it was a turbulent time of change for me. One night midway through February I was spurred to purchase a digital copy of The Upsides on a whim based on a Tweet made by Amazon Music. This is something I never do, but I had just gotten off a shift at my job and wanted to fill the void with blind consumerism. The album was on sale for $5, so even for a cheap 17-year-old, there’s not much to lose at that price. I can’t even remember if I even previewed the album, but for whatever reason, that tweet was well-crafted enough to spur me into a purchase right then and there. I was in the mood for something new.

I downloaded the album, loaded it onto my iPod, hit play, and sunk into it.

I don’t know how well I’ll be able to articulate the particular brand of slacker malaise I was engaging in at this time, but most waking hours that weren’t spent school were spent in my room playing video games listening to podcasts and music. I was pretty much distracting all my senses and escaping from reality as much as humanly possible without the use of drugs or alcohol. I wasn’t depressed, but I was in a state. Nothing really cheered me up, so it was more of an ongoing war of attrition with my own brain.

I credit The Upsides with single-handedly lifting me out of this post-dump funk and getting me back to feeling like myself. With years of reflection, I was being far more dramatic than I’m giving myself credit for, but I guess that’s kinda the point of being seventeen. It wasn’t the end of the world, but it felt like it… until this album came along.

A Pop-Punk Oddessy

Upsides begins with a bait and switch. Most pop-punk detractors dislike the genre for pretty specific (and valid) reasons. Maybe they don’t like the genre’s propensity for bitter lovesick lyrics, or they’re turned off by the whiny vocals, but in most cases, they probably have a cartoonishly-exaggerated version of the scene in their head. Thanks to the genre’s explosion in popularity during the mid-90’s, most people just think the music consists solely of whiny Blink 182-types when that’s not the case. While there certainly is no shortage of nasally lovesick songs, that sound isn’t representative of the entire genre.

For better or worse, Upsides begins with exactly what people would expect from the genre. Within the first seconds of the album’s opening track “My Last Semester” a nasally slightly-filtered Campbell sings over a twinkling electric guitar “I’m not sad anymore / I’m just tired of this place.” Within 15 seconds the singing ceases and the guitar strings sustain. An electric whir emerges from the back of the mix and quickly overwhelms the held guitar notes. Suddenly the entire song, album, and band spin to life, energizing the track with a cacophony of brash drum strikes, a biting guitar riff, and a driving bassline. Campbell, now singing at the top of his lung repeats the first lyrics with an angry vitriolic twist, and with that, Upsides has officially begun.

Those first lines of the album sound stereotypical (great, another white dude talking about how sad he is) but upon closer inspection, they’re actually a beautifully-constructed phrase that flips the listener’s expectations on their head by talking about the futility of those sad feelings. It’s a notion that’s devoid of nostalgia, firmly present, and anxiously self-aware. This specific idea of not letting sadness win is a recurring theme throughout the album that the band circles back to frequently. The mantra comes full-circle on the album’s star-studded closer and is even developed further on subsequent releases. But in this first song, the singer articulates this concept by listing all the reasons he could be sad, but then explains that he opted to find the silver lining in his situation: his music. Campbell would go on to address this later in an interview explaining:

“I thought that I had kind of beaten my issues, but when you struggle with depression or anxiety, you never really win. You always carry it with you and the point I learned isn’t to win. The point is to keep fighting. It turned out that ‘I’m not sad anymore’ wasn’t a victory speech. It was a battle cry.”

The opening line pulls double duty by acting as the album’s thesis statement while also serving as the band’s new mission statement. This represents a far tonal shift from what we last heard on Get Stoked. They’re not the same group of 18-year-olds who were singing about pirates and zombies three years ago. They elude to this with the meta line “college hit those dudes like a ton of bricks.” The band did a lot of growing up since we’ve last heard from them, and they are guided by a new creative north star.

Art Imitates Life

The foundation that the band began to flesh out with this record (and would expand upon over the course of a trilogy of albums) is a style of hyper-intricate, self-referential, and pop-culture-obsessed rock that depicts the good and bad sides of a life well-lived. Early on the band used the term “realist pop-punk” when describing the sound of their artistic rebirth. Call it what you want, but it’s still one one of the most refreshingly honest and true approaches to music I’ve ever heard, and it was an absolute revelation to me at seventeen.

There’s beauty in simplicity, and sometimes real life is more compelling than anything you could ever make up. TWY’s music doesn’t revolve around sweeping epics, chasing material goods, or even the other, it’s all music that’s firmly told from one perspective and all bears the insecurities and imperfections that come with it. The focus of the music varies from song to song, but this singular perspective allows for a cohesive vision that the listener can simultaneously empathize with, and project themselves onto.

Throughout The Upsides, singer Dan “Soupy” Campbell flexes his now-well honed writing ability, making it obvious he’d time between albums studying and working on his craft. One of the most under-appreciated aspects of his style is his acute ability to write minuscule details. Small observations and references that add a layer of specificity that makes the album feel more realized and lived-in. Each line adds onto the story that the listener is building in their head until an entire narrative is formed around the character. You’re fleshing out your own universe built on the language of the album and developing a one-of-a-kind relationship with its narrator.

Sometimes The Upsides tackles big psychological issues like post-college listlessness, relationship dynamics, and even death. At other times they zoom down to view life on a macro level and vignette the little scenes that happen in life like a broken down car or going on a midnight pretzel run to the stand behind your house. Sometimes it’s funny and biting social commentary on the Westboro Baptist Church or the shitty fist-pumping people you meet at parties. It’s an album that encapsulates the life of a post-college 20-something from every possible dimension.

To me, the quintessential song on the album is the Deluxe Edition’s penultimate track “Logan Circle: A New Hope.” The song is a stripped-down reworking of the album’s second track “Logan Circle” that echoes many of the original track’s sentiments but also serves as an incremental update on the life of Campbell. “A New Hope” is redone in a slower, more pensive approach that allows the lyrics and instrumentation to shine through and glisten to their full potential, highlighting both the brilliance of the lyrics and the proficiency of the band members.

The first verse of the original “Logan Circle” contains a lyric that hooked me for the rest of the album: “We just can’t blame the seasons / The Blue Man Group won’t cure depression.” The line resonated with me originally because it’s an obvious Arrested Development reference, but it also doubles as a bit of life advice about optimism and outlook. This all circles back to the cliched idea that this album is something I needed to hear at the time. I wasn’t hopeless, but I needed something hopeful. I needed to be told how to handle these feelings I’d never felt before. I needed to be told how to combat them and move on with my life, and that’s exactly what The Upsides did for me. It was musical therapy.

Emergence

Though I didn’t consider it at the time, I’ve only recently come to realize that pop-punk has been the genre that I’ve listened to for the longest in my life. It’s partly a byproduct of when I was growing up (thanks, mid-90’s) but also it just happened to be one of the first genres that I really explored. As a result, there was something comforting about sinking back into the genre after spending some time away from it. I feel like It’s cheesy to admit an album about not feeling sad helped me stop feeling sad, but Upsides was instrumental in my emergence from sadness in the wake of this first relationship.

It wasn’t just the optimistic messages, it’s that the songs found the optimistic messages in the face of everything else. Feelings of sadness are not invalid, but with enough distance, you realize that there’s no reason for them, there’s nothing to be gained from them, only energy wasted. It was a realistic portrayal of exactly how I was feeling then. And more on-the-nose, the album’s breakup song “Melrose Diner” served as both a validation of my feelings and a cautionary tale about becoming the shitty, bitter ex.

My love for The Upsides grew exponentially with each listen, and within a year it became my most listened-to album of all time, a title that it still retains to this day. In fact, my love for Upsides grew with each subsequent album that the band released as future songs would call back to lyrics contained within their earlier works. By fall of 2011, I’d begun my first term of college and the band had released their third album Suburbia I’ve Given You All and Now I’m Nothing.

The Upsides marked the beginning of a three album “trilogy” that depict the arc of Campbell’s struggles with anxiety and depression, and with the trilogy’s conclusion in 2013, the band cemented themselves as my favorite act of all time. With three releases that were all equally impeccable, I’ve now spent roughly 12 days of my life listening to the band’s various releases, a number I wouldn’t take back if you paid me.

At the end of the day, The Upsides is one of a handful of albums that changed my life, and there’s no higher praise I can hoist upon it than that. It’s a well-crafted and powerfully intricate release that rewards close listens and spawned its own mythology. It engages the listener in a way that few other pieces of art do. There are lots of albums in my life where I can point to a clearly-defined “before” and “after” period, but Upsides is an album that changed my entire way of being. It shifted my world one step towards a more positive existence, and I can’t thank the band enough for that. It’s a radical powerhouse of a record that I still listen to nearly every week, and I can’t fathom my life in a world without it. It’s a beautiful creation, and the world is a more beautiful place for it.

Thank you for everything, Upsides.

On Lyrics

I don’t think lyrics matter.

Well they do, but that statement was the only attention-grabbing way I could think to start this. What I mean is that I don’t think lyrics should be the main focal point of music. It took a bizarre combination of music genres for me to arrive at this conclusion, but let me see If I can walk you through my reasoning.

In my junior year of high school I discovered the Icelandic post-rock band Sigur Rós. The albums Ágætis Byrjun and ( ) specifically worked their way into near-daily rotation on my iPod. At the same time I also began to fall deeply into metalcore as I frustratedly grappled with my first real breakup. Metal’s harsh screaming vocals, pounding cannon drums, and abrasive guitar seemed to be a perfect reflection of how I felt internally most of the time. Any time I needed a break from that aggressive stuff, I’d go straight to Sigur Ros and use them as an escape. It was like mixing uppers and downers: I used these two genres to accentuate whatever I was feeling at the time. In jumping back and forth between two (seemingly) different types of music so frequently I started to notice some odd similarities. The primary connection I noticed was the way they both approached lyrics. As much as I loved the hardcore scene at the time, I almost never understood the lyrics. The typical criticism of “how can you even tell what they’re saying?” was completely valid. At that time I never had an answer to that criticism, but now I realize it was because I didn’t care about the lyrics; I cared about the music.

Lyrics are great. I’m a writer, I’m obligated to love the written word. Within the context of a piece of music however, I feel that lyrics shouldn’t be viewed as the most vital element. Even in hip-hop, a genre where the voice is the primary focus, there are still interesting ways to create music without focusing on the words explicitly… but I’ll come back to that in a second.

The connection between Sigur Ros and my newfound escape of metalcore was lyrics. Not the content, or the delivery, but the approach. Unless you spoke Icelandic, you had no idea what Sigur Ros songs are saying. Furthermore, some of their songs are written entirely in “hopelandic” a nonsensical language invented by the band which has no meaning. As the band describes hopelandic as “a form of gibberish vocals that fits to the music and acts as another instrument.” While that’s an interesting and novel approach, to an average listener (especially an American high schooler) the whole thing was unintelligible to me. As was metal. I began to realize that both genres were approaching vocals in the exact same way. Obviously you can make out the occasional lyric in a metalcore song, but to me the vocals simply became a part of the larger musical texture. I understood the emotion that was being conveyed without understanding exactly what was being said. I began to view the voice as an instrument.

While both of the genres were using vocals to the same end, they both had very different applications for me. Metalcore became the devil on my shoulder that screamed unknowable words in anger, and Sigur Ros became the angel who gently sang me into a lullaby-like trance. There was suddenly a duality to nearly all of the music I was listening to, it simply became a matter of asking myself what I was in the mood for.

As time wore on I got over that relationship and moved away from metalcore. I wasn’t that mad all the time, and I didn’t want to be. I transitioned into a more positive pop-punk phase which centered heavily around The Wonder Years. While their vocals are far cleaner than what I was used to, the ever-present nasally punk style was still difficult to decipher at times. After listening to The Wonder Years for some time I sat down one of their albums album and a lyric sheet in front of me and ended up discovering an entirely layer to the songs. Not only did I understand what was being said, I suddenly saw a deeper level that the music was operating on. There was something interesting about listening to an album dozens of times and only fully-deciphering it when you sit down with that as your intent. Listening to an album with unclear vocals makes a record replayable and allows the listener to fill in the gaps with their own meaning. Lyrics can add an additional layer to something that’s already enjoyable.

Which brings me back to hip-hop. One of my favorite hip-hop artists Young Thug started out as a very divisive figure within the rap scene. This article by the New York Post does an excellent job of articulately explaining why Young Thug’s music is fascinating. I often use that write-up as a primer when trying to get friends into Thug and while I think the whole article is a great read, it is long. I’ll post an excerpt here that’s relevant:

“genius.com is the watering hole around which today’s rap enthusiasts gather to parse lyrics and ponder the meaning of life. Young Thug has pages upon pages of lyrics posted on Genius. Many are riddled with debates not over what his words might be trying to convey, but what’s actually being said in the first place.

The refrain of “Lifestyle” crescendos with Young Thug’s syllables piling up like rush-hour wreckage. The crowdsourced consensus at Genius states that the rapper is “livin’ life like a beginner and this is only the beginning,” – but “beginner” sounds a lot like “volcano,” and the garbled ambiguity of the whole thing elicits a distinct pleasure.

Of course, that hasn’t stopped conservative rap fans from turning Young Thug’s inscrutability into a punch line. Less-than-imaginative listeners simply hear it as a stylish quirk. But it’s really a mode of being. Instead of skipping off into the hyper-communicative valleys of the Internet, Young Thug conceals things. He mangles his words in mumbles, swallows them in yawns, annihilates them in growls. He’s not concerned with being understood. So we listen a little closer.”

Within the past year there have been a whole crop of new artists in the hip-hop field taking after Young Thug. Up-and-comers like Lil Yachty, Lil Uzi Vert, and Desiigner have all sparked online debates over what “hip-hop” is and where lyricism fits within that.

My two cents (as you can probably guess) is that it doesn’t matter. Music is music. In fact, two of the artists mentioned above don’t even consider themselves rappers. So what does this mean? Are we headed for a Idiocracy-like future where all music is mumbled nonsense? I don’t think so. All I think this means is that the tides are changing. There will always be lyrical music, and people who need to get something out that can’t be communicated through sound alone. The difference is it’s just becoming more acceptable for this alternative non-verbal approach to be viable.

I love this type of music because I can project whatever I want onto it. That’s why I started to love it in high school. I could listen to the abrasive angry stuff and get my emotions out in a safe, harmless way. I could listen to Sigur Ros and reflect, or use it to bounce back from a spiral caused by too much of the other stuff. It all became a mirror of my own thoughts and emotions.

I still look at music the same to this day. Sometimes I listen to an album so much that I’ll memorize the lyrics, but my first listen is always dedicated to taking the piece in as a whole. Trying to decode what’s being said can end up taking away from the overall experience, so I don’t make it my sole focus.

Lyrics are just one piece of the music. You could pay just as much attention to the guitar, or the drums, or the beat, but lyrics are an easy thing to focus on because they’re decipherable. The lyrics are often at the forefront of the music (there’s a reason people call singers as a frontman), they give listeners a common point of reference and something concrete to focus on.

Furthermore, lyrics can add onto a song, but they can also detract massively. In the case of The Wonder Years, The Upsides was an album that I already loved before I knew every single word. Sitting down with the lyric sheet simply added an additional layer and gave me a deeper appreciation for something that I already loved. On the flip side, lyrics can be flawed, and it’s easier to notice flawed lyrics than flawed music. There are only so many words at the end of the day, but there’s an infinite number of sounds. A bad lyric can stick out like a sore thumb, just look at the mania surrounding a single lyric on Drake’s most recent album. Or listen to Ab-Soul’s verse on Chance the Rapper’s “Smoke Again” and tell me his plea for ass-to-mouth isn’t off-putting. Kanye’s magnum opus “Runaway” is a track I love but one that still contains a handful of lines and deliveries I don’t really dig. The song’s verses are followed up by a four minute outro which contains no words, but a garbled vocalization from Kanye. As discussed in this video those four minutes are a prime example of what vocals (not necessarily words) can do in a song.

I believe (at least within hip-hop) the lack of emphasis on lyrics can be traced back to Kanye whose early work represented a shift not necessarily away from lyrics, but towards a greater emphasis on sound as a whole. This was movement was capitalized by people like Lil Wayne who have decent rhymes, but were carried by swag and personality more than anything else. The current crop of “non-rappers” (Yachty, Uzi, etc.) are simply the next evolution of that.

Ultimately everything falls into a spectrum: on one side you’ve got extremely lyrical artists like Kendrick Lamar or The Mountain Goats, and on the other end you’ve got the complete absence of lyrics in groups like Sigur Ros or Explosions in the Sky. Don’t get me wrong, I love it all, and I’m definitely not “anti-lyric” I just believe taking a song as a whole is more powerful than taking it at “face value” and only paying attention to the lyrics. Every piece within the music is vital, lyrics are simply one component. Lyrics are as important or unimportant as you want them to be, but I think focusing too much attention on them turns music into a narrow art form. Emotion can be conveyed without words, and songs can tell a story through sound, we just need to listen to the whole thing.