{"id":1134867,"date":"2021-10-29T17:19:07","date_gmt":"2021-10-29T14:19:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1134867"},"modified":"2021-10-29T17:19:07","modified_gmt":"2021-10-29T14:19:07","slug":"the-zoomer-embrace-of-drum-n-bass","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1134867","title":{"rendered":"The Zoomer Embrace of Drum \u2019n\u2019 Bass"},"content":{"rendered":"
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The Zoomer Embrace of Drum \u2019n\u2019 Bass<\/h1>\n
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Reimagined by young artists like PinkPantheress, piri, and Vierre Cloud, UK club styles from the 1990s have found a new audience on TikTok.<\/div>\n
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By <\/span>Cat Zhang<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/div>\n

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PinkPantheress is leading the drum \u2019n\u2019 bass revival on TikTok. Photo by Brent McKeever, treatment by Maddy Price.<\/span><\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/header>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n
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In late August, Charli XCX went on BBC Radio 1\u2019s Future Sounds and introduced one of her favorite songs of the moment: \u201cI run to this song at the gym sometimes \u2026 it\u2019s called \u2018soft spot,\u2019 and it goes so hard.<\/em>\u201d A sweet pop tune set to skittering drum \u2019n\u2019 bass percussion, \u201csoft spot\u201d was made by two 22-year-olds in Manchester named Sophie McBurnie and Tommy Villiers, who met on a date earlier this year and hit it off. The song is about the nervousness and affection McBurnie, who performs under the moniker piri, felt toward her now-boyfriend: \u201cI can\u2019t help it,\u201d she sighs in the chorus, \u201cyou\u2019re in my soft spot.\u201d<\/p>\n

Defined by fast, syncopated breakbeats and heavy basslines, drum \u2019n\u2019 bass emerged from UK underground rave culture\u2014specifically the jungle scene\u2014in the early \u201990s and influenced later subgenres like dubstep and grime. Villiers has been making tracks in this style since he was 17, DJ-ing house parties and sharing instrumentals to SoundCloud. While he and piri had experimented previously with disco, \u201csoft spot\u201d was the result of piri toying around atop a drum \u2019n\u2019 bass beat. Her vocals are light and hazy, and she skims over the fast-paced melody in the verses in a way that resembles Ariana Grande. The single was officially released on June 4, and while the initial reaction was modest\u2014Villiers and piri were elated when a local radio program played it\u2014attention began accelerating after a few weeks. Spotify spotlighted \u201csoft spot\u201d on its Fresh Finds playlist, and the song started taking off on TikTok. It now has 5.6 million Spotify streams and over 130,000 TikToks featuring it.<\/p>\n

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TikTok content<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

In recent months, young artists offering more delicate, bedroom pop-inflected spins on drum \u2019n\u2019 bass and other \u201990s UK club styles like garage have seen exceptional interest from their generational peers. This is true even, or rather especially, in the U.S., where drum \u2019n\u2019 bass never fully lodged itself in the mainstream, meaning young listeners are likely encountering these sounds for the first time. Spotify\u2019s Planet Rave playlist\u2014which includes songs like \u201csoft spot,\u201d Nia Archives\u2019 \u201cHeadz Gone West,\u201d and Take Van\u2019s \u201cTime Goes By\u201d\u2014is the platform\u2019s fastest-growing playlist for the 18-24 demographic. Launched in July, the playlist builds on viral momentum from TikTok, which has amplified quite a few songs with brisk breakbeats, female vocals, and a lo-fi sheen.<\/p>\n

In fact, piri had been convinced that \u201csoft spot\u201d was a \u201cTik Tok-y song\u201d\u2014a label that once evoked cocky, meme-filled rap tracks\u2014and actually tried paying a few creators to promote it upon release. \u201cAfter PinkPantheress\u2019 success, it was clear that people liked that vibe,\u201d she explains, noting how the speed of drum \u2019n\u2019 bass is conducive to a quick, frame-by-frame montage style common on the app. \u201cThe song is also dance-y, and chill, and pretty girly.\u201d<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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It\u2019s impossible to talk about the rising zoomer affinity for UK club music without invoking PinkPantheress. A semi-anonymous university student from Bath, England, she started sharing 20-second song loops to TikTok late last year. In early breakthroughs like \u201cPain\u201d and \u201cBreak It Off,\u201d she sings nimble topline melodies over garage and drum \u2019n\u2019 bass classics, namely \u201cFlowers\u201d by Sweet Female Attitude and \u201cCircles\u201d by Adam F. Her other influences\u2014explored to various degrees on her debut mixtape, to hell with it<\/em>\u2014include K-pop, pop-punk, and that zone of 2000s British alternative pop occupied by artists like Just Jack, Lily Allen, and Imogen Heap. She had virtually no following when she started posting, and her clips were visually unremarkable, with her face blocked out by big text. But these loose reworks quickly accumulated hundreds of thousands of views. TikTok named her Craig David-inspired garage-pop single, \u201cJust For Me,\u201d 2021\u2019s \u201cbreakout track of the summer\u201d; it\u2019s featured in over 2.2 million clips and has gotten both a lighthearted drill remix and an unnecessarily soppy Coldplay cover.<\/p>\n

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TikTok content<\/h4>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

PinkPantheress\u2019 fast-paced ascent has been distinct from other TikTok sensations. Her music was not propelled via flashy trends where thousands of people iterate on the same dance, nor was it shrouded in a highly relatable backstory or amplified by any pre-existing online fame. (PinkPantheress hasn\u2019t even revealed her real name.) If you want to get clinical about it, you can map her songs at the intersection of several separate online trends: bedroom pop, hyperpop, pop-punk revival, 2000s nostalgia, \u201990s rave revival. But broadly, her popularity seems to signal a more casual turn on TikTok; the music feels particularly suited to low-key lifestyle content like make-up tutorials and thrift hauls, the soundtrack to the day-to-day lives of young women. Notably, 80 percent of the artists featured on Planet Rave are female, and the majority of listeners are also female, says Ronny Ho, Spotify\u2019s Head of Dance and Electronic Development.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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Aside from her sample choices, what makes PinkPantheress distinctive is her voice, which is angelic and slinky, almost winsomely flat like Clairo. Like the breathy, childlike trills of vocaloid Yameii Online on \u201cBaby My Phone\u201d or the satin purrs of Doja Cat on hits like \u201cKiss Me More,\u201d it fulfills a desire for a softer, more feminine delivery style on TikTok. The airy and\u2014for lack of a better term\u2014girly atmosphere of PinkPantheress\u2019 songs makes them more accessible entry points into the harder music she\u2019s referencing; although drum \u2019n\u2019 bass is far past its subterranean, pirate radio era, and there are more tranquil variants of it, the genre can still seem severe and insular.<\/p>\n

Because the buzz around PinkPantheress has been so intense, some listeners have erroneously assumed that other young artists dabbling with drum \u2019n\u2019 bass and garage are merely crude imitators of her. (\u201cUsing a drum sample =\/= me sounding the same as her,\u201d wrote L.A. artist Take Van in a recent TikTok.) PinkPantheress has distanced herself from any claim to ownership, noting in a recent NPR interview that it\u2019s important for \u201cpeople overseas to realize that [these genres] weren\u2019t started in my bedroom,\u201d but was started \u201cyonks and yonks ago by artists like Shy FX.\u201d But even before she exploded this year, there were a few songs whose zealous reception already indicated growing youth interest in drum \u2019n\u2019 bass, or some variation of it. These include \u201cPretty Cvnt\u201d by the DnB\/breakcore artist Sewerslvt, and even more significant, \u201cmoment\u201d by the 20-year-old Sydney producer Vierre Cloud, who previously went by the moniker lildeath.<\/p>\n

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Cloud posted \u201cmoment\u201d to SoundCloud in July 2019, but it really ascended in 2020. A 17-year-old British gamer named benjyfishy, arguably the best Fortnite player in the world, used the song as outro music in his streams that spring; according to data from Chartmetric, \u201cmoment\u201d began surging on TikTok several months later in October 2020. The song has been circulating on the app for over a year, incorporated into various edits (anime, K-pop) and featured in an \u201caesthetic\u201d trend (users recording themselves organizing icons on their iPhone home screen); a similar song that borrows its drums and uses the same vocal sample, HeathcliffTheBandit\u2019s \u201cBus Ticket,\u201d also gained steam. PinkPantheress\u2019 rise has also renewed interest in \u201cmoment,\u201d which currently has 61 million Spotify streams.<\/p>\n

The song is essentially a flip of \u201cA New Kind of Love,\u201d an unreleased recording by the early \u201900s British electropop duo Frou Frou, comprised of Imogen Heap and producer Guy Sigsworth. Like many young internet dwellers, Cloud had first heard Heap on Clams Casino\u2019s legendary cloud-rap instrumental \u201cI\u2019m God.\u201d Heap\u2019s voice is an amazing instrument\u2014earthy and tactile, yet so pristine that it feels almost synthetic. On \u201cA New Kind of Love,\u201d she does something between yodeling and exhaling, pushing out air in wordless stretches. Cloud pitched and sped up her vocals, layering them over a rattling drum \u2019n\u2019 bass pattern. \u201cI believe drum \u2019n\u2019 bass and UK garage are going to be the next big genres, or at least rhythms,\u201d he tells me, explaining that \u201ctrap is getting very played out right now.\u201d He has experimented with a variety of genres, previously finding success making lo-fi beats, and his production of \u201cmoment\u201d reminds me of several YouTube editing styles: In the middle, the song briefly quiets like you\u2019ve stepped into the bathroom at a party, and near the end, it decelerates and dips down in pitch like a slowed + reverb video.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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At the center of this wave of interest in drum \u2019n\u2019 bass is an exceptionally ordinary story: a song\u2014or several\u2014goes viral and it exposes a mass of people to a sound they previously didn\u2019t know. If you look at the artists associated with PinkPantheress on the \u201cFans Also Like\u201d section of her Spotify\u2014which is determined by the share of fans artists have in common, plus whether they have overlapping descriptions in music sites and forums\u2014the top two results are Eyedress, a Filipino singer-songwriter whose biggest hit is post-punk, and Luci4, a glitched-out trap experimentalist. The three artists don\u2019t have immediate sonic commonalities, but they\u2019re all young and \u201calternative,” with viral hits in the past year or so on TikTok. Planet Rave may be organized under the loose heading of bedroom-oriented dance music, but it reflects Spotify\u2019s belief in \u201ccurat[ing] for culture\u201d rather than genre; selections runs the gamut from \u201cmoment\u201d to Isabella Lovestory\u2019s reggaeton and Shygirl\u2019s horny raps.\u00a0<\/p>\n

You can be cynical about this kind of strategy, but it also reflects a basic reality: that fidelity to one sound or cultural ecosystem is a thing of the past, and the future hinges on endless collisions and recombinations. Piri and Tommy Villiers also make house music; Vierre Cloud is starting to produce future riddim; PinkPantheress has said she wants to explore R&B. Even the faces of this new wave of club music aren\u2019t insistent on staying with it.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<\/article>\n

Source URL: https:\/\/pitchfork.com\/thepitch\/drum-n-bass-pinkpantheress-tiktok-column\/<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Columns The Zoomer Embrace of Drum \u2019n\u2019 Bass Reimagined by young artists like PinkPantheress, piri, and Vierre Cloud, UK club styles from the 1990s have found a new audience on TikTok. By Cat Zhang October 29, 2021 PinkPantheress is leading the drum \u2019n\u2019 bass revival on TikTok. Photo by Brent McKeever, treatment by Maddy Price. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1134868,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[54],"class_list":["post-1134867","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-pitchfork-com"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134867","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1134867"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1134867\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1134868"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1134867"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1134867"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1134867"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}