![]() ![]() His lyrics, full of empty signifiers-AriZona Iced Tea, Mario Kart, cocaine, pizza-point to the hole at the heart of late-capitalist existence. Nine years later, his glazed, drifting music sounds less like an outlier and more like a blueprint: “Ginseng Strip 2oo2” blew up all over again at the beginning of this year on TikTok. Then, there are the mumblings of Swedish rapper and SoundCloud progenitor Yung Lean, a man with a kid’s face who has called himself a “human mannequin.” Alienation and dissociation have been central to his music ever since he first got noticed, in 2013, with “ Ginseng Strip 2002.” Back then, he was a curio, a teenager with a fumbling, vacant flow that most people chalked up to amateurism or incompetence. They rap in voices out of which all traceable emotion has been burned away, and the truths that emerge from voices like these are the hard, spare, lonely kind. There’s an entire generation of Detroit rappers- Peezy, Veeze, Baby Smoove, Shaudy Kash, DaeMoney-who adopt this voice as their baseline, who don’t so much rap as narrate their lyrics in an exhausted monotone. Back then, styling yourself as someone unfeeling turned you into a notable character, a sort of supervillain within the rap landscape today, it’s often simply a given. On the title track, she sings about literally fossilizing her emotions: “Did you see me putting pain in a stone?” The surface of her music is shiny, chitinous, insectoid, recalling another masterpiece of dissociation, David Bowie’s Low.ĭrakeo didn’t insist on his emotionlessness, or place it front-and-center like Chief Keef did in the 2010s. “I quit the earth/I’m out of my mind,” she croons on “Moderation”-presenting the desperate sentiment with the patient distance of someone teaching a song to preschoolers. On her 2022 album Pompeii, the Welsh singer-songwriter sounds Zen, impenetrable, the surface of her singing egg-shell smooth. If you prefer your numb remove to be of the more saucer-eyed variety, listen to Cate Le Bon. The closest her singing comes to a lilt is in the line “brain replaced by something”-the music of her phrasing suggests she’s never heard a more enticing prospect in her life. She’s like an anti-David Lee Roth, committed to sucking the color out of the surroundings, and her presentation is so oddly compelling that the antsy guitars backing her seem to exist to serve her anhedonic persona. Shaw’s voice sounds for all the world like one of Waller-Bridge’s monologues set to music, minus the glamorous self-destruction. The approach reminds me of the BuzzFeed essay “ The Smartest Women I Know All Are Dissociating,” which went viral in 2019, inspired in part by Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag character. She does this all throughout Dry Cleaning’s 2021 debut album, New Long Leg, performing her lack of feeling as if it were a lead instrument. She simply sounds absent, her voice a sign at the door reading “ No one’s here.” She doesn’t sound defeated or depressed, because those are scrutable emotional states. And then listen to how Shaw delivers it, speak-singing like someone you’ve just rescued from the site of a natural disaster. ![]() “I just want to put something positive into the world, but it’s hard because I’m so full of poisonous rage,” drones the singer for the London post-punk band Dry Cleaning on “Every Day Carry.” Imagine reciting this line into a mirror, testing out inflections-anguished, pleading, terrified. If you prefer your blank detachment with top notes of mordant, self-defeating wit and a bone-dry finish, Florence Shaw is your woman. But dry, dispassionate singing asks you to notice the mask, to ponder that there will always be emotional truths that will be hidden from you. Even the most trembling and overheated vocal takes are usually the result of at least a little advance planning.
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