Discourses On Speculative Futures: Sonic Affectivity And Chicago Bop

On overcoming cultural inertia

Still from DJ Nate and Sicko Mobb’s music video for the song “House Party”

Given that today marks the tenth anniversary of Sicko Mobb’s seminal Bop mixtape “Super Saiyan Vol. 1”, I thought it would be appropriate to try to write a critical reappraisal of the genre as a whole that emphasizes its potential for the opening up of “speculative futures” in a culture declared wholly absent of them. As examinations of cultural figurations that exist outside of the very narrow criteria privileged by contemporary discourse are few and far between, I thought I’d try my hand at redressing such discrepancies. Enjoy.

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Introduction

In his essay entitled “What Is Hauntology?”, the late cultural critic Mark Fisher argued that, “by 2005 or so, it was becoming clear that [electronic] music could no longer deliver sounds that were ‘futuristic’”¹. The production of new music, of course, had not halted, but ceased to be imbued with any kind of “capacity to conceive of a world radically different from the one in which we currently live.”² For Fisher, this was emblematic of a culture caught in the grasp of nostalgia and nihilism, wherein the invocation of the past becomes necessary for any and all expressions of the future. Fisher’s essay goes on to discuss the application of this phenomenon - which, in a nod to Jacques Derrida, he termed “Hauntology” - to the production of cinematic and televised media in the 21st century, but his initial comments with regard to music are both provocative and unsettling. Can contemporary music be wholly “new” and yet lack the capacity to articulate the future? Has the possibility of expressing even the semblance of a future through art been entirely foreclosed? And to what extent is this phenomenon determined by different spatial, social and economic conditions? 

These questions are intended to comprise the basis of an analysis of Chicago’s short-lived “Bop” movement, whose unique harnessing of affect in the face of the horrors of “ghettoization,” structural racism and economic immiseration on the West Side of Chicago point towards a possible refutation of Fisher’s argument. Sonically, Bop bears similarities akin to the rhythmic structure of its antecedent Chicago Footwork, while being decidedly more ebullient and maximalist than the dark, skeletal production associated with its musical contemporary, Chicago Drill. In addition, the centrality of dance to Bop, itself a frenetic display of elbows and knees colloquially termed “Boppin’”, serves as a conduit for the physical expression of the jubilance and intensity of the music at communal events known as “Fefes” or “Fiestas”. This, in turn, necessitates situating both Bop music and performance in relation to the ways that both the built environment and social dynamics of Chicago’s West Side inform the embodied experience of blackness which emerges from these conditions.

I argue that Bop destabilizes Fisher’s initial proposition regarding the futility of positing a future through cultural production precisely because Bop’s hyper-locality - its emergence from distinct socio-economic and cultural conditions in which the possibility of the “future” has been permanently foreclosed - challenges the apparent universality of this phenomenon,; and its phonic and material expression of joy and ebullience in conditions where expressions of nihilism are pervasive challenges the utopianism and teleological character associated with Fisher’s rendering of the condition of “futurity.” Bop’s envisioning of the future, then, is not so much dependent upon a transcendence of hauntological phenomena, but its ability to open up a site of possibility for the expression of novel forms of subjectivity not bound to nihilism. Thus, through the multifaceted harnessing of the affects of joy and intensity, Bop reconfigures the spatial and social character of the ghetto so as to express the possibility of a new ontology of “blackness” whose existence is denied by established frameworks.

Bop Music And Dance 

To better situate Bop’s distinct, spatial, phonic and material character, it is necessary to provide a general overview of the genre itself. As stated previously, Bop emerged at the beginning of the last decade during a particularly fertile period in Chicago’s music history. According to journalist Meagan Garvey, Bop’s syncretic sound reflects an apotheosis of the dominant trends in Chicago music over the ensuing decades, channeling “the warped yet indelible imprint of house, mutating under hip-hop's influence into juke, growing more combative and experimental and shifting the focus from ass to feet via footwork, with rap ultimately reigning supreme.”³ This synthesis sees Bop strike “a fine balance between approachability and experimentation,”⁴ as evident in its negotiation between the desire to produce music suitable for dancing and an emphasis on an increasingly singular sonic palette. 

These aforementioned tendencies manifest themselves sonically in two distinct ways. The first is Bop’s breakneck pacing; Often understood as one of the primary means of distinguishing genres from one another, Bop’s careening tempo, which regularly exceeds 150 BPM, is one of its defining characteristics. This brings the genre more in line with the rhythmic character another of Chicago’s musical innovations and one of Bop’s sonic antecedents, Footwork. Much like Footwork, Bop strays towards rhythmic complexity, occasionally emulating the “syncopated bass and drum-machine patterns”⁵ and triplet fills associated with it, though it tends to exhibit a more rigid compositional structure becoming of rap. This rhythmic complexity is complimented by a sonic palette, described as “buoyant, upbeat and heavily reliant on autotune rap-singing,”⁶ which has become Bop’s defining characteristic. Bop artists regularly rap at breakneck speeds, their voices rendered nearly unintelligible by autotune, all while being buoyed by a coruscating cacophony of bubbling synthesizers; though the lyrical content often indulges rap’s perennial concerns - drugs, guns and women - the music’s undeniable exuberance and heavy emphasis on melody often mask their significance, transforming them into more of a formality than a central aspect of the sound.

Bop’s unique sonic character is married to a similarly distinct style of dance, known colloquially as “Boppin”. “Boppin”, much like the genre itself, embodies a similar kind of hybridity, drawing heavily from the same kinds of propulsive movement associated with Footwork. Involving a frenetic, yet precise, display of “loose butterfly knees and steps,”⁷ married to an assortment of vaguely interpretive arm movements, “Boppin’” serves as the physical manifestation of the ebullience and hyper-kineticism of the music. While lacking the formal complexity of Footwork dance, the rapid movement of arms and legs channel the music’s rhythmic intensity, while its gestural fluidity reflects the music’s sonic buoyancy. Bop’s status as music then, is as much determined by its attendant array of movements as it is by its specific sonic elements. This relationship between music and its physical manifestation, its “aural-kinesthetic” character, is thus necessary so as to understand Bop’s unique affective qualities. 

Musical Affectivity And Contested Black Identity

The figuring of affect within Bop, its marriage of the gestural and the sonic, physical and phonic, is predicated upon the centrality of both to the constitution of black identity. In his book “The Black Atlantic”, Paul Gilroy points to the significance of these forms of expression within black communities as a direct by-product of the refusal of language and other forms of individual autonomy through the racialization of enslaved subjects.⁸ For Gilroy, “Music becomes vital at the point at which linguistic and semantic indeterminacy/polyphony arise amidst the protracted battle between masters, mistresses, and slaves.”⁹ As such, the inaccessibility of language resulted in the elevation of modes of sonic and gestural production in the determination of the communicative practices of these slave populations. However, Gilroy is keen to express that these phenomena are not to be taken as essentialist; what these forms of communication privilege is a formation of a particular kind of embodied subjectivity determined by “the outcome of practical activity: language, gesture, bodily significations, desires.”¹⁰ Bop should thus be seen not merely as a genre of music or a particular form of gestural activity, but as both a social practice and material expression of exuberance mediated by the unique synthesis of music and performance it fosters. 

Bop’s existence as a social practice is inevitably set against the social landscape from which it has emerged, one in which a distinct kind of black identity defined by an overwhelming sense of nihilism appears to predominate. It is thus instructive to compare Bop’s figuration of blackness, one defined primarily by its material manifestation of the joy, with another emergent from the same social landscape - Bop’s musical contemporary Chicago Drill - that mirrors this aforementioned conception of black identity associated with Chicago’s West and South Sides. I believe this comparison is necessary in order to better understand Bop’s intervention within a social climate in which the possibility of a “future” appears to have been permanently foreclosed. 

In direct contrast to Bop, Chicago Drill’s sonic palette is defined by its dark, menacing atmosphere and skeletal production. Songs lurch and churn, enveloped by melodies more suited to a funeral than a rap recording; the frequent sounds of gunfire almost appear to assume the place of standard percussion. Drill’s macabre sound serves to reinforce the genre’s almost myopic fixation on murder and death. Rarely does a drill song neglect to mention the threat of murder or its occurrence, with nearly every other bar containing some form of reference to guns or shootings. Constant allusions are made to “dead opps” - deceased opponents - with the many of them either consisting of mockery or celebratory remarks. The chorus to Drill progenitor Chief Keef’s 2012 song, “I Don’t Know Dem” effectively reads as an exhortation of these very behaviors: 

“This nigga looking at me like he want some (Let's get it)

Pistol to his face if he owe some (Bang bang)

My niggas keep them tools and make 'em blow some (Grraa)

OTF, they riding for Sosa (Sosa)

Riding with my hitters, bitch, we on some (Bang bang)

Ride on an opp and then smoke 'em (Bang bang)

Yeah, we keep them horns we will blow them (Bang bang)

Who is these niggas, I don't know them? (Bang bang)”¹¹

These lyrics and their conspicuous preoccupation with death are illustrative of a social climate mired in an overabundance of poverty, violence, social exclusion and racism. Drill appears to reside at the nexus of all of these societal ills, reflecting the profound sense of hopelessness that appears to be pervasive amongst both its listeners and practitioners. Chicago’s West and South Sides are places where even the possibility of a “future” other than one defined by such constant horrors has never existed - Drill appears as but a continuation of this, a music attuned to the cruelty of the ghetto without the capacity to articulate a different conception of blackness than the one reflected in its lyrics. 

Given this, the very fact of Bop’s existence reads as remarkable. By virtue of positing and materializing a conception of blackness rooted in ebullience, Bop destabilizes extant preconceptions regarding the capacity of these conditions to engender expressions of blackness that do not hew towards the nihilism expressed within Drill. The ability to transform bodies into engines for the expression of intense joy rather than the administration of death demonstrates a refusal, whether conscious or not, to engage in behavior and forms of production that reify these aforementioned preconceptions. What is being presented here, then, is not so much a coherent vision of a “future” beyond the social reality of the ghetto, but the opening up of a space of possibility neglected by other cultural figurations of blackness endemic to it. 

Reconfiguring The Ghetto

Bop’s challenging of established social dynamics also requires an examination of its relationship to the racialized spatial character of the West Side of Chicago, insofar as it exhibits a discordant relationship with the predominant characterizations of the ghetto within the academic imagination. These characterizations tend to involve a conflation of black lived experience with external conceptions of black identity that tend to either reify existing social conditions within them or completely deny the possibility of forms of black social life that fall outside of the limited scope of existing analysis.¹² This is most evident in regards to French sociologist Loïc Wacquant’s account of what he terms the “hyperghetto”, a zone of black existence characterized by “behavioral deficiency and cultural deviance”.¹³ Rather than appealing to overt racial logics that mandate the exclusion of black individuals from society, Wacquant’s figuration of the “hyperghetto” and its status as a “ repository of concentrated unruliness, deviance, anomie and atomization”¹⁴ transform it into a site for the “pathologization” of blackness itself. For Wacquant, this pathologization is tantamount to fashioning the ghetto into a container for “the racial detritus of post-Fordist capital”,¹⁵ thus fully dispossessing inhabitants of any kind of socialization not constructed within these logics, if not the capacity for socialization altogether. Drill’s nihilism and morbid fascination with murder thus appear to be a logical outcome of such conditions; deprived of the capacity for harboring even the mere semblance of sociality, the ghetto now serves as a means for the complete extermination of whatever appears left of it.

Wacquant’s characterization of the “hyperghetto,” however, cannot account for the existence of Bop, as it challenges the very presuppositions that Wacquant’s characterization is grounded upon. Bop, to a certain extent, mirrors the kind of destabilization which Dhanveer Singh Brar affords Footwork music, insofar as it also “marks the distinction between ‘there’ as a post-industrial waste storage facility, ‘here’ as a place where black music is produced, and breaks that distinction by overflowing with phonic and gestural ferociousness.”¹⁶ In the case of Bop, this breakdown primarily occurs at parties, colloquially referred to as “Fefes” or “Fiestas”, where “Boppin’” is performed. These parties function in a comparable manner to Ian Condry’s conception of the “genba”, Japanese nightclubs and other sites “that become a focus of people’s energies and where something is produced.”¹⁷ For Condry, the “genba” affords an exploration of “nodes where collective activities have performative effects”,¹⁸ in that it takes into account the productive character of various social dynamics exercised under the auspices of the “genba”. In the case of “Fefes”, these dynamics emerge from the interactions between music producers, dancers and attendees within the confines of the “Fefe”. The collective intensity of these dynamics, their ability to articulate a productive and exuberant form of black sociality through communal gesture, thus confounds the ostensible impossibility of this process under the conditions of Wacquant’s argument. Instead of serving as a limiting force, the “hyperghetto”, “on the contrary, is its atmospheric generator.”¹⁹

This kind of social production also points to a process of “gestural desedimentation”, whereby the material practice of “Boppin’” and its communal practice at “Fefes”, reconfigures the reified character of the built environment of the ghetto. In this context, the process of “desedimentation”, “as in to make tremble by dislodging the layers of sedimented premises that hold it in place”²⁰, serves as an effort to redress or re-envision spaces rendered subordinate to the kinds of logics associated with Wacquant’s account of the “hyperghetto”. Insofar as the racialized space of the “ghetto” is held to be a fixed construct by the imposition of the pathologizing tendencies outlined by Wacquant, it is also a territory in which these pathologies are regularly exercised. Beyond having to address constant regulation and antagonism by entities such as the police, “Fefes” often have to contend with the reality that the streets and parks that play host to them are often sites of considerable violence. That these places which harbor the denigration and extermination of black life can simultaneously support an irruptive expression of exuberant black sociality further point towards the capacity of “Fefes” to reconfigure the built environment of Chicago’s West Side. The “gestural desedimentation” which occurs at “Fefes", beyond merely asserting alternative functions for terrain rendered subordinate to the pathologizing tendencies of the “hyperghetto”, emerges as the conduit for materially realizing the formation of a new ontology of “blackness” within spaces wholly inimical to it. 

Conclusion

The speculative character of Bop emerges from its capacity to harness an intensive sociality, borne of a unique phonic materiality, that unsettles the absence of the possibility of a “future” within the racialized conditions of Chicago’s West Side. Bop’s scope, its ability to point towards a kind of embodied black identity, sustained through a synthesis of gestural and sonic formations, predicated upon joy, highlight the inadequacy of established frameworks to locate cultural potentiality outside the narrow epistemological methods they employ. That Bop could emerge from a social climate wherein the condition of nihilism and the impossibility of a future are effectively synonymous with the territory that harbors it suggests that it may be time to reconsider what exactly constitutes the future. It certainly appears that it cannot account for the existence of cultural figurations such as Bop. 

1. Fisher, Mark. “What Is Hauntology?” Film Quarterly 66, no. 1 (2012): 16.

2. Ibid. 

3. Garvey, Meaghan. “An Intro to Chicago Bop, the City’s Latest Collision of Dance and Rap.” Pitchfork, August 22, 2013.

4. Ibid. 

5. Brar, Dhanveer Singh. “Teklife.” Essay. In Teklife, Ghettoville, Eski: The Sonic Ecologies of Black Music in the Early 21st Century, 56. London, England, England: Goldsmiths Press, 2021.

6. Garvey, “An Intro To Chicago Bop”

7. Ibid. 

8. Singh, “Teklife”, p. 33

9. Gilroy, “The Black Atlantic”, p. 74

10. Ibid., p. 102

11. Chief Keef, “I Don’t Know Dem," track 8 on Back From The Dead, GBE Entertainment, 2012, digital file.

12. Brar, “Teklife”., p. 62

13. Loic Wacquant, “Deadly Symbiosis: When Ghetto and Prison Meet and Mesh”, Punishment and Society 3, no. 1 (2001): 104

14. Loic Wacquant, ‘Three Pernicious Premises in the Study of the American Ghetto’, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research 21, no. 2 (1997): 345

15. Brar, “Teklife”, p. 67

16. Ibid., p. 73

17. Condry, Ian. "Hip-Hop Japan: Rap And The Paths of Cultural Globalization”. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006., p. 6

18. Ibid., p. 18

19. Brar, “Teklife”, p. 73

20. Ibid., p. 71