JOHN’S GUIDE: NOISE RAP
IN TRIBUTE TO OCCASIONAL DETROIT
I would say that I know a little bit about music, but there’s a lot of gaps in my knowledge. This isn’t the definitive guide… It’s just John’s Guide.
Dear god help us all: It’s less than three weeks into 2024 and I’m talking about noise rap.
The style has been on my mind over the past month. It started when I read an oral history of the band Occasional Detroit in the new issue of the magazine Baited Area. O-D is a now forgotten group whose work predates Yeezus by well over a decade; it would be impossible to succinctly sum up just how skewed and singular this band was at their peak—I recommend copping the magazine and reading the history for yourself; I offer a few thoughts—but it’s safe to say that there weren’t too many rap groups touring with Wolf Eyes at the turn of the century, which maybe says all that needs to be said. Actually, there is a lot more to be said. Occasional Detroit was as much a visual force as a musical one; their complicated output deserves a place in a larger canon of radical American art.
What is noise rap? That’s anyone’s guess, but here goes: It’s an amorphous term that, if you cast a wide enough net, could be used to describe anything from lo-fi Rapper’s Convention tapes to the raw reverb sizzle of early Schooly D to El-P’s atonal backpacker funk to blown-out Atlanta mixtapes to “Beat Bop,” the collaborative single from Rammellzee, K-Rob and Jean-Micheal Basquiat. It could probably be argued from a certain standpoint that the term itself is redundant—a good portion of rap uses dissonance as a driver. But, focusing on the past 23 years of output, it is possible to form a semi-coherent shape around the style. As much as there is any sense of abrasion, what unites the below group of artists is a connection to a larger network of American underground music, one that often transcends strict genre lines. Also: drums through a distortion pedal.
Rubbed Raw “Live at The Big Pink, Philadelphia, 3/14/2006”
When I think about noise rap, the sonic image that immediately comes to my mind, for better or worse, is that of a mangled kick drum, the kind that you might hear in a passing car whose subwoofer is fucked. Rubbed Raw was a Philly and Baltimore group whose members included DJ Dog Dick and Rob Francisco from the noise project M Ax Noi Mach. Here, it’s early member Lil Crissy who shines, electrifying a packed basement over a distorted “Knuck If You Buck” instrumentaI. I see Jacob Ciocci in the background. I see a kid drinking Sparks in the background. It’s a perfect document of 2000s freakout America.
You can’t talk about noise rap without talking about Houston legend B L A C K I E. 2011’s “Warchild” laid the groundwork for much of what would come: There’s the shouty punk-rap vocals; there’s the production, which sounds like someone ran a drum machine through a fuzzbox and then layered it with noise-style, pitch-shifted keyboards; there’s the urgent political attitude. All of this eventually found its most famous form in Yeezus. Every subsequent B L A C K I E record pushed the music into unknown territory.
Death Grips “Guillotine (It goes Yah)”
The video for “Guillotine” currently has 15 million views on YouTube. Contrast that with B L A C K I E, who was a major influence on Death Grips, but whose biggest song has just over 100k. Death Grips and 100 Gecs are the yin and yang of online-brained alternative music culture. Both make music refined enough to ascend out of the basement and into 4Chan. You know, it often feels like internet kids aren’t getting the full story when it comes to the past 20 years of underground music, but how could they? The “full story,” if there is one, is defined by vanishing websites and rotting CD-Rs.
Dälek represents an earlier era of 2000s noise rap, one more connected to a classicist hip-hop tradition than a lot of the artists on this list. Their music is only one or two clicks more experimental than some of the indie rap that was happening in the early 2000s. I actually saw Dälek and B L A C K I E share a bill once. Also on that show, I believe, was CX Kidtronix, a Saul Williams collaborator who for a time played in Atari Teenage Riot.
Occasional Detroit “Live 11/22/2005 Hot L, Birmingham, AL”
No Occasional Detroit set was alike. Whatever was happening in the band’s day-to-day existence would spill out onto the stage. It was impossible to know what was real life and what was just show business. They were part of a confrontational noise circuit that included Black Dice and Wolf Eyes, so that insanity made sense in context. But there was something elusive about their style that resisted classification. Occasional Detroit’s twisting of tropes was uncanny in ways that predicated artists like Dean Blunt; their music distorted in ways that the next generation of noise rappers would make more legible. On a short, ill-fated tour I did with O-D, Towando (RIP) told me that the band’s name came to him while on LSD. They were from Ypsilanti, but they played in Detroit occasionally.
Lil Ugly Mane “Opposite Lanes”
Lil Ugly Mane is a musician who found viral fame through a semi-anonymous take on tape-drenched Memphis rap. Before that took off, he was swimming in the noise pool, big time. It’s a style he never fully abandoned, and on 2015’s Oblivion Access, which was made in collaboration with DJ Dog Dick—second Dog Dick inclusion here; he might be the glue that sticks together a lot of this list—Ugly Mane leaned into those impulses. On that record, the connection between southern rap and subterranean electronics is solidified, alongside the lingering residue of ‘90s hip-hop lyricism. Together with Death Grips and 100 Gecs, Lil Ugly Mane forms a body of music popular with kids who, in a different generation, might’ve attended the SnoCore tour.
Plate Tectonics and Sensational “20 Strippers”
Also known as Torture, Sensational made his name as a rapper who flipped Stockhausen and contributed to a mid-period Jungle Brothers record, an early version of which was shelved for being too weird. He went on to make a grip of experimental rap classics. “20 Strippers” is taken from an early 2000s collaboration with Plate Tectonics, a group that featured members of the classic Brooklyn-damaged band Pixeltan. It’s the only song on here to feature live drums, and it sounds like The Roots at Fort Thunder.
Most people know clipping. as the noise rap group that features a member of the original cast of Hamilton. Less people know that another member of the band, Jonathan Snipes, used to be in Captain Ahab, a Los Angeles duo that played a style of music they referred to as “ravesploitation.” His evolution mirrors larger changes in indie music from the 2000s into the 2010s: Snipes moved from helming a post-ironic art band to making beats for a more politically aware (but no less abrasive) unit. I played a great show with clipping., XBXRX and Ed Schrader’s Music Beat at The Smell in 2012. It felt like the end and the beginning of something.
Rammellzee “Paint to Pave the Road”
A fair amount of the artists on this list are impossible to sum up in a single paragraph, maybe none more so than Rammellzee, who, not unlike O-D, is one of those “I don’t even know where to start” kind of heads. After he passed away, Red Bull did a retrospective show focusing on all aspects of his practice—his sculptures, his language, his music—and I assumed that he was going to have a Basquiat or KAWS kind of moment within larger popular culture. That didn’t really happen. He might be too impenetrable. “Paint to Pave the Road” is a late-period track that does an alright job displaying the heroic b-boy futurism that was at the core of his practice, but an entire book is needed to understand the full scope of Rammellzee.
Wolf Eyes & model home “More Difficult Messages”
The energy of an earlier generation of noise rap is recharged in a 2023 collaboration between Michigan's Wolf Eyes and D.C.’s model home. The latter is the rare group to have both Sensational and Occasional Detroit namechecked in their Spotify bio. This song’s splattered beats and vocals are a crystalized version of the sound O-D spent their career tiptoeing around. It’s the sound of highbrow acceptance: maybe a cover of The Wire (which Sensational actually got), maybe a career playing in Europe for experimental music fans. But Occasional Detroit’s style was too intuitively weird to adhere to such defined sonic guidelines. They could never tailor their music to fit within the art music apparatus, which can be just as stifling as anything closer to the mainstream.
In the early 2000s, I was making rock posters and was visible enough that Rammellzee emailed me out of the blue to talk about an idea or something. I was confused, thinking that he was looking for this other artist by the same first name (he was), but he responded with the coolest, strangest email just going off about afrofuturist stuff. We had a few exchanges, but I lost them in a hard drive crash.