Souls Laid Bare: The "Drumless" New Wave of East Cost Hip-Hop
MCs like MIKE, Navy Blue, and AKAI SOLO, all hailing from NYC, have been building a library of rap-poetry for weary hearts by digging down the terrain of East Cost Hip Hop for a new sonic underworld.
By Koray Soylu
A couple months back, I have written down a one-liner on a piece of paper, and put it on my wall. It said, “World is bigger than you.” I needed remembrance. I needed it because I often had found myself measuring my worth through the identities I carry, and the things I have to offer to world. World had revolved around me, and it often put me off its axis. Reminding myself, through that scribbled note, that I am not alone in my suffering and joy, self-deceit and naive hopes helped me to be a more grounded being. I have connected with people I don’t and will never know anything about, and with that bizarre mechanics of our world: Life is a hustle; it is the story of wounds rooted in the sepia tones of our memories, in the fresh-cut disappointments of the recent, or in the wells of insecurities that echo with our voice, ranging from subtle mumbling to Pavarotti screams.
”You should never delude yourself into thinking you’re more important than the things that happen around you and the things that you do it for.” says AKAI SOLO, a rapper & producer based in Brooklyn, in an interview following his gracefully tormenting LP Spirit Roaming (2022). For me, it is an emancipatory calling of the utmost pious state that has the wisdom of a thousand Dalai Lamas. It is neither fancy nor is it full of words with pizzazz, stowaway in the niches of English. But it is a statement inundated with pristinely humane qualities, nonchalantly unveiling our anchors as human beings: We lead, in fact, solitary lives, confined to our mind and body, and to our pathetic capacities to feel and experience. But we are not alone in this. World is bigger than us.
I was born in 1996, far way from New York. Being an Istanbulite who is in his late 20’s, I have grown a conviction that acts as my guardian angel and liberates me from my surroundings, allowing me to surpass my physical realm. That is the experience I have of seeing my heart expanding beyond the borders of Istanbul, and reaching for posts all around the world, including over the vastness of Atlantic, to New York City, where a new strain of hip-hop artistry has been brewing MCs and producers since the mid 2010’s. The likes of MIKE, Navy Blue, AKAI SOLO, Medhane, and many others, surfacing from New York’s [sLUms]., its neighborhoods’ corners, and from the privacy of the home space, have been building a library of rap-poetry for weary hearts, drenched in an abstract idea of a fleeting production, while being almost completely away from the spotlights of mainstream music media and the trap mania.
These rappers, coming from different backgrounds and having experienced a life with shades of cultures criss-crossing, have embodied a lyricism that is filled with the intensity of nostalgia, the slow-burning heartache embedded in longing, and the yearning to live in the face of adversary, only to be bolstered by a sonic quality that lingers between dreamy soundscapes of the subconscious and the radio theatre of the late ‘30’s. It is, in fact, a music scene in bloom, resonating with a certain aesthetic of self-aware, confrontational MC narrative coupled with a lo-fi wonderland, making me fantasize about an alternative The Caretaker universe where New York state of mind bubbles underground and forces its way up in contained wailings of the artists making it a scene.
The New Sound
Since the early 2010’s, a certain sect of underground hip-hop in the U.S. (but also in United Kingdom) has been shapeshifting towards a distinguishable form molded from the works of up-and-coming MCs and producers across the country. That form is not entirely reflective of all the rappers who are indulging in this brand new revelation of what rap music can be today. From Los Angeles to Atlanta, and from North Carolina to New York City, though, the jazz-sample-heavy sound of this hip-hop, together with bars & verses that could have very well been diaries abstracted, is being reimagined for reflections on past traumas, hot-served tribulations of the self, and the state of the world. Abound in introspective calls and responses for mourning and healing, drumless, a common marketing term for this sub-genre of hip-hop, creates a lethargic, frail, and ethereal atmosphere for a meditative effect.
To tell the truth, I got a problem with eatin', i be druggin'
To tell the truth I'm not supposed to be off in here
I'm supposed to be sleepin', but I be turnin' and tossin'
To tell the truth, I miss my partna dem
To tell the truth, you can't be loud when you're the wrongest, fam
To tell the truth, I'm at a loss of friends
Well time wait's for no man and death wait's with cold hands
I'm the youngest old man that you know
If ya soul intact, let me know
For instance, Earl Sweatshirt, a LA resident and one of the genre’s pioneers, takes the listeners on a cruise in his EP Solace (2015) through bewilderingly hazy soundscapes, accompanied by a fractured narrative on a past bygone, desperation that paralyzes sustenance, and the crushing weight of depression, with hints of modest wisdom scattered across the EP that goes beyond the individual soul trials. The sonic dimensions of Solace is drumless par excellence, from the aesthetic of imperfection (you could actually hear Earl start over reading certain verses when he is not contend with his delivery) to a production that evades the leading use of drum beats, and informed by a fluidity between sound-snippets in ghost form: It is a mellow, laid-back psychedelia realized by sonics made to sound suffocated, disregarding the predictability of a hip-hop song in structure and flow.
This new sound of hip-hop finds kindred spirits thousands of miles away from the coasts of LA too. Amongst them are Cities Aviv, based in Memphis, whose Man Plays the Horn (2022) is a hypnotizing album of sound-loops that float half-awake over aquatic ambients, or Archy Marshall (aka King Krule) to Jadasea in London, with solo and collab works marked by a minimalist, trippy cuts akin to drumless’s trademark inner-workings. However, New York, the city with a hip-hop heritage of more than half a century, had been the hotbed for emerging names that have become synonyms with the genre, and nurtured a close-knit music scene with rappers & producers often guest featured in each other’s works; co-produced singles, EPs, and LPs that are staples of drumless, and found independent outlets such as billy woods’s Backwoodz Studioz where a community of like-minded creatives still converge.
New York Is My Home
For a lot of hip-hop fans, New York City is the mecca of the genre. The music, born in the hands of DJs playing in parties where kids would breakdance, has historical, social, and cultural connections with the city. From DJ Kool Herc to Afrika Bambaataa, hip-hop’s many godfathers are New Yorkers. And bands like Public Enemy, A Tribe Called Quest, Wu-Tang Clan, as well as emcees such as Nas, Notorious B.I.G, and Yasiin Bey are behind some of hip-hop’s most critically-acclaimed albums of all time. A melting pot par excellence, and with various neighborhoods that are ground zeros of hip-hop, New York continues to offer novel trajectories in rap music that are not necessarily flanked by bold, forward-thinking thought experimentations, but unique in its narrative & sound nonetheless, as well as in its image of what a hip-hop artist could be, carrying the torch for NYC’s hip-hop tradition to territories left hitherto untouched.
In that regard, the emerging artists of New York, with ties to London and Nigeria, and to Chile and Panama, are embodying the omnipresent phenomenon of the city, which reminds us time and again that NYC is the meeting ground of people with stories to tell and experiences to share, all tested through the lens of time stretching back to generations, and travelled across the world only to meld into each other for the ever-expanding saga of being a New Yorker.
MIKE, for instance, with family roots in Nigeria, had spent the better part of his childhood in London and moved to New York during his early teenage years. Navy Blue, a Los Angeles native turned New Yorker, who collaborated with MIKE on 2019’s Carlos, is Chilean on his father’s side and African-American on his mother’s side. AKAI SOLO, who co-released 2021’s True Sky with Navy Blue, was born in Brooklyn to Panamanian and Nigerian parents. Beyond these rising names, billy woods, a father-like figure to aspiring rappers in New York, heralded as the poster MC of the NYC’s underground, and with endeavors in hip-hop that goes as far back as to early 2000’s, is the son of a Jamaican mother and a Zimbabwean father. Following his father to Zimbabwe, woods had lived the next eight years in the country before moving to New York in 1989.
Each of these artist connect with the Big Apple through histories scattered across decades and countries, only to become fellow New Yorkers excavating the soil of their souls. Driving inspiration from memories aging, loved ones lost, the refuge found in belonging, the existential mishaps of the present, and the unbending rule of time, obsessed with being perpetual, they share a sonic as well as a thematic sensibility for expressing the niches of their being, and the wisdom self-thought as much as observed. Their souls are laid bare, and in the background, is New York.
Souls laid bare
Whatever I make, I always want it to feel sincere. I be fucking up. Even in real life, I’m not a perfectionist. I think it’s better to express that rather than try to pretend to be this clean, sharp person through the music.
— MIKE in an interview for Crack Magazine
MIKE
Grief, served
Born Michael Jordan Bonema, MIKE’s beginnings in hip-hop can be traced back to 2013, when he was an enthusiastic 14-year-old. But it was [sLUms], a neighborhood rap collective from NYC that he was a founding member of, that catapulted MIKE into the rap game. Together with his friends, including King Carter, Adé Hakim, Darryl Johnson, and Jodi.10k, MIKE laid the foundations of a soon-to-blossom career in hip-hop.
Following [sLUms], Bonema have sailed for a productive solo career that kept him busy until today, releasing series of mixtapes, EPs, and albums, and often bringing his deadpan, tenderly depressed spoken-word delivery to the verses of friends and fellow emcees. Beyond his trademark low-register, throaty vocal variations, MIKE, who lost his mother in an early age, is one of the recent pioneers in hip-hop for breaking the gnawing silence around life truths that are often disorienting and catalyzers for self-destruction. Taking stripped-down, sincere, and therapeutic expeditions over the lands of depression, loneliness, and anxiety, MIKE avoids evasion and harvests endurance for sustenance, generating healing formulas for wounds needing long-due ointments.
This is, to an extent, MIKE’s humanitarian service, extending beyond the crevices of his mind to the corners of the world (see, I am reporting from Istanbul) for people with similar life labors, suffering in their solitude. MIKE rolls words that are heavy on the tongue and on the heart, in songs of his own and his collaborators, like Pigeonfeet, off of his album May God Bless Your Hustle (2017), with a first verse that ruminates over almost all things bleak:
Death always win the race, nigga, depression isn’t just a phase
It’s hard to dub the L when it’s all up in your face
Cough up in the race, caught up in the place
Getting lost in these days, harder to place
So I’m hard with the games and the stars hold my faith
As much as these lines, and a lot of others from songs spanning his discography, feel like cries from the rock bottom, MIKE finds inspiration not in the heinous callings of the dark, but in his power to “…help people be open to expressing themselves and learn how to grieve by how he grieves.” And this is not a trait particular to MIKE, but almost an ascended state to which fellow NYC rappers Navy Blue and AKAI SOLO also subscribe to.
Navy Blue
Shades in blue
“Very selfishly put, I need to make this (music) for me. And the gift of it is, in making it for me, I can offer it to people as some kind of hug or something, which I like. It makes me feel like I didn’t endure all that I’ve experienced in vain. I can share my experience and help somebody.” says Navy Blue, born Sage Gabriel Carlos Atreyu Elsesser in 1997, and a New Yorker since college. Following an obscure stint in the depths of SoundCloud, Navy Blue was introduced to a wider public in Earl Sweatshirt’s Some Rap Songs (2018). From there, he has built a library of predominantly self-produced LPs and EPs, embroidering a sound texture with materials portioned from jazz, reggae, dub, and more, made grandiose through lo-fi instrumentation of guitars, strings, brass, keys, and minimal electronics, often uncompromising in volume and ambition.
But beyond its musical aspects, Navy Blue’s music, like the color tone of his moniker, is a captivating invitation to deep dive explorations for what’s behind, welcoming the audience into his memory, mental torments, and been through hellscapes with open arms. His particular charm lies in his unbending dedication to produce sounds of imperfect qualities that coalesce into narratives very humane, which, discreetly or overtly, manifest that imperfections are ingrained in our fabric, be it addiction, mental fragility, or else.
I couldn't fake it, I'ma tell the truth
Depression was the birth of Navy Blue
My message is to serve a greater you
The transmutation of my hurt is now of use
I had to shine a light on my abuse
This is, though, not a peculiar working formula in hip-hop, for neither MIKE nor Navy Blue, that they implement for the particularity of drumless. Making music and letting go of god-honest contemplations on their selves and sensations, from past to present and beyond, is a sacred doing for them. When asked by Pitchfork on the hardest thing about making music personal, Navy Blue answered, “All of it. It’s all difficult. There’s this analogy about a wall: You try to get over, around, or through the wall every which way, but sometimes it’s OK to surrender. My form of surrender is talking about it in a healthy way. And that’s why rap music is incredible. Even if the subject matter is sometimes negative per se, it’s still a healthy place to put your shit.”, shedding light on the fact that music is a space of release and unloading for him, often reverberates in the psyche-reflective, gloomy atmospherics of drumless that take strolls between light and dark, frequently lost to the depths of melancholia, only to reappear in the resounding voices of emcees clinging to life.
AKAI SOLO
“An overarching thing that I like to do with my music is use myself as the conduit, or the guinea pig, or the crash test dummy. I use my issues and I try to expand it to a broader audience. You’re not going to relate to this exact thing, but there are little impressions or instances that should be familiar. Even if it’s not the exact words, it should be a similar feeling.”
-AKAI SOLO in an interview for Passion of the Weiss
AKAI, born and bred in Brooklyn, is a preacher of the drumless school per se, embracing its certain musical imprints as well as its emphasis on the turmoil found in the personal. Drawn to rap because of his love for writing essays and reading poetry, AKAI SOLO circled in and around the east-cost’s vibrant independent hip-hop community, releasing numerous solo and collaborative LPs with the likes of Navy Blue and iblss, and lending his verses to renowned artists such as Moor Mother and Armand Hammer.
In him, as much as in MIKE and Navy Blue, there exists an openness to feel pain, inflicted while living, but also a curiosity for rigorously interrogating the spirits roaming. Their openness, on the other hand, extends beyond the sensations inside and reaches for an intellect that observes and acknowledges. A wealth of consciousness inform their creative worlds, built up brick and mortar by words filtered through their personalities, that garners enough strength inside, enabling them to face the experience of existence. This maturity, hardened in the many fires of life, belongs to them.
“I do strongly believe that people can be victims of circumstance, but I’m also aware of the fact that human beings are very powerful species and everything can start in the mind.” says AKAI SOLO, crystallizing a state of pious serenity, whose profound takes on living throughout Spirits Roaming harbors a narrative that centers around the unavoidable allure of endurance, a common trope in the discourse of drumless:
My heart weary, but what that's gotta do with the path
You either see it clearly or claim to, but that's chattin'
Improvement, all I pursue with self in its entirety (What else?)
We warriors for tranquility, simply fruit born in simplicity (What else?)
“Think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”
In 1645, Japanese swordsman and philosopher Miyamoto Musashi wrote his 21 principles for living in the Dokkōdō, which translates to “The Way of Walking Alone" or "The Path of Aloneness” in English. The fourth principle, which states “think lightly of yourself and deeply of the world”, is a north star for AKAI SOLO, helping him navigate the course of his life. Upon reading that principle, I return to a place of the personal and think about myself again. “Closing my mouth just to open my ears - I learned the most about myself within these couple of years” says Navy Blue in La Noche. I do too. I think I listen better. I judge myself calmer. These last couple of years, I have matured to a man of restraint, shying away from choking down big lumps of words caught in the magnetism of the moment. I crave a mindfulness that could disregard the calls of the individual insatiable for it is the reason I often feel drained, luring me time and again into an abyss of obsessing over my self-image and worth.
In MIKE, Navy Blue, AKAI SOLO, and so many emerging independent emcees of New York, I sense a similar yearning for a virtue that accepts pain, insists on living to see another light of day, and harnesses a religiousness for collective soul-salvations, sacrificing the petty individualism for the kindness of attending to the other. While ruminating over that virtue the other day, I have taken a note writing, “Each of these rappers find empowerment in fragility”. I wholeheartedly believe in that, just as I believe in my conviction that they are not weaker, but stronger for their fragilities. They are stronger because they don’t yield confronting them. MIKE, Navy, and AKAI, each of them, serve for a greater cause also, for they destigmatise men suffering and needing help. Their philosophical, astute verses, amplified by the intensity of their music, are resonant with this destigmatization, freeing the feelings very human from the intoxicating masculinity: Your turmoil in Dokkōdō is not emasculating. If anything, it is humbling. It is what makes you a human being.
Hi, we hope you have enjoyed reading our article! While you are here, kindly take a moment to listen to our playlist below, which brings together songs from East Cost’s finest emerging rappers defining the sound of drumless. All tracks are handpicked and curated by SHEER Magazine’s writers.