My childhood love of rap music inspired an exploration of beat-making when I turned 13. No sooner than I'd discovered sampling, I scoured downtown Manhattan’s A1 Records and Bleecker Bob’s (among other record shops lost to eroding memory), searching for Fruity Loops fodder. I typically opted for the dollar bins. $20? 20 records. Even for a bad math student, the arithmetic was simple: If I could find one sample on each record, that meant 20 beats. Any more than that was icing.
The possibility excites when you slap down that $20. The practice sees you sitting in your room, sifting through often awful records, bracing yourself to survive whole songs in hopes you'll find five seconds of glory—or, hell, even a split-second you can use as a snare.
I'm 26 years old now. I've stopped making beats. I write for a blog (Complex's own Pigeons and Planes) and work full time as an A&R. I traded one hunt for another: Instead of digging in the crates, I now plumb the depths of SoundCloud in search of great artists. Each day, I listen to anywhere between one and three hours of new music from up-and-coming rappers, more often than not unsigned and looking not only for a post, but for feedback about their craft. Some submitted, some recommended by friends, much dug up from different corners of the Internet.
The hunt has different phases.
Inundated ears demand some original element. Whether delivery, word choice, vocal tone, melody, or a combination there of, a song needs to highlight something unusual in a rapper's style to hold my ear.
At first, a sort of restless search for a starting point. I dig on SoundCloud, Bandcamp, and through my inbox. I rifle through SoundCloud users’ likes. I pay attention to random recommendations by Spotify. I open emails with a variety of subjects—sometimes as simple as an artist’s name and song title, sometimes blank, sometimes simple pleas like “please give my music a chance,” sometimes outlandish attempts at attention grabbing—one that always stands out: “calvin harris meets nirvana meets santigold.” I take recommendations from friends and colleagues, college buddies who casually crawl SoundCloud and know my taste, other bloggers, managers, PR people, and artists themselves (often the most fruitful source). I listen to almost everything that crosses my path—sometimes intently, multiple plays on end, others for just long enough to determine that 20 seconds was 19 seconds too many.
Inundated ears demand some original element. Whether delivery, word choice, vocal tone, melody, or a combination there of, a song needs to highlight something unusual in a rapper's style to hold my ear—let alone make me want to dive deeper into an artist's catalog. Hearing “Look at Wrist” as an introduction to Atlanta’s Father sent me on a binge through the catalog of his budding Awful Records collective. Some of these elements are amorphous. Charisma and character come in many forms; Young Thug’s manic vocal explosions, Rick Ross’ disdain, and A$AP Rocky’s slick, measured cool represent vastly different sides of the charisma coin, unfairly so for those expecting honest critique. Others can be learned and molded over time—you can learn how to rap on beat, utilize poetic devices, and stack syllables. Just listen to Rick Ross’ 2006 album Port of Miami and then his 2010 album Teflon Don—you’ll hear a rapper who dedicated himself to bettering craft, even if he never reached the technical heights of a Kendrick Lamar or a Jay Z.
The boring music—the music that allows you to calibrate your compass toward a definition of “good”—often either fails to innovate in any considerable way (or, conversely and just as bad, experiments purely for the sake of experimentation), feels impersonal and cliche, or simply seems unpolished to the point that lack of basic sound quality distracts. Every rule has exceptions, but mimicry and unrefinement typically inspire a return to my search for great music.
The primary issue with much independently released music now, both bad and promising: The development process has been unearthed by the Internet, enabling spectators to judge quality and measure artists’ minor growth or stagnation at ages that would have confined rappers from bygone eras to the bedroom, the local venue, or oblivion. Rappers like Bobby Shmurda, OG Maco, Goldlink, and Vic Mensa (to name a disparate few) have all suffered critiques about content and technique that likely wouldn’t have arisen in eras when artists developed out of the Internet’s capacity for exposing growth as it happens and occasionally catapulting the unfinished into the blazing sun of the public eye. Plus, people forget how much of a factor historical conditions and sheer chance play in the outcome of events: We'll probably have another artist like Joey Bada$$ before another artist like Tyler, the Creator.
And so, as ever, to the hunt.
historical conditions and sheer chance make some things likelier than others: We'll probably have another artist like Joey Bada$$ before another artist like Tyler, the Creator.
Wherever they start, the good days and nights lead to a sort of maniacal exploration. The elusive promise of discovery stokes the flames; possibility makes each new choice exciting. The good sessions hinge on reward: The more small catches you reel in, the closer you mistakenly imagine yourself to the big fish. This illusion of proximity to a grand prize has been perfected in the logic of games like World of Warcraft: Provide constant, small rewards with the promise of the mega catch and you can hook an audience member. Great discovery hiding imminently behind invisible corners thrills with just-out-of-reach possibility.
So it goes with music: You don't know until you arrive. You have to keep moving—in spite of the fog of war—in order to arrive. Even when you do arrive, nerve and gut instinct need to grab the reigns from logic. Hearing Goldlink for the first time at a friend’s recommendation in August 2013—raw as he was—I felt that he held the tools for greatness. He hasn’t had a big hit yet, but rising from SoundCloud rapper to SBTRKT opener isn’t a bad one-year trajectory by any stretch of the imagination. When I first heard a remix of iLOVEMAKONNEN’s “I Don’t Sell Molly No More” in April 2014, I wrote “iloveMakonnen seems to have a knack for bizarre catchiness–off-kilter phrases and odd melodies combining for memorable moments (whether they’re the sort that make you grit your teeth because you can’t stand them or that you walk around singing for weeks is really a matter of preference).” Not precisely prophetic words, but ones that acknowledge the potential manifested in Drake-cosigned, Grammy-nominated hit “Tuesday.”
For each Goldlink and Makonnen, numerous other bets on potential remain inconclusive. Some of my recent favorites—Washington D.C.’s Chaz French, Chicago’s Leather Corduroys, and Boston’s Michael Christmas, to name but an unrepresentative few—seem to be percolating, if not yet reaching full boil with big national tours and hit singles.
The joy is in the cycle, the promise of the new and the notion that discovery of greatness in all stages of development is always possible and a reward in itself. Talent is not a finite resource. But time, the nature of inspiration, and the proliferation of tools for finding new music mean patience and persistence are your best friends. The rest is serendipity governed by random chance.
Jon Tanners is a writer and A&R living in Los Angeles. Follow him @JonTanners.
