Examining new genres from the UK and across the Atlantic, including mumble rap, Brooklyn drill, UK drill, trap dancehall and Afrobeats, Unreal explores the dystopias and dissociative transcendence offered by this boundary-pushing music.
With a foreword by Simon Reynolds, Unreal explores the plethora of new street genres that have emerged at the turn of the 2020s.
Musical futures depicted throughout the twentieth century evoked the movements and material qualities of machinery. However with the arrival of the twenty-first century and the introduction of auto-tune into urban music, a new transhumanist notion of the future has increasingly taken hold of these genres, prophesizing a time in which man and machine become integrated with, and increasingly indistinguishable from, one another.
Unreal examines new genres from the UK and across the Atlantic, including mumble rap, Brooklyn drill, UK drill, trap dancehall and Afrobeats, arguing that sonic innovation has been plentiful during this era as these new genres have grappled with this new transhumanist paradigm. Through in-depth examinations of artists such as Young Thug, Future, Migos, Pop Smoke and Vybz Kartel, Unreal explores the dystopias and dissociative transcendence offered by this boundary-pushing music.
