Switched on Pop - Afrofuturism in Kali Uchis & Clipping (with Daveed Diggs, William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes)

Episode Date: May 31, 2018

Parliament Funkadelic has had waves of influence on popular music. Their Afrofuturist message and infectious grooves built the backbone of 70s funk, was revived in the 90s with Dr. Dre's G-Funk, and is once again in vogue with in the music of Kendrick Lamar, Childish Gambino and Kali Uchis. Bootsy Collins, bass player of Parliament Funkadelic, collaborated with Kali Uchis and Tyler the Creator on the track "After The Storm," which draws on the P-Funk sound. Similarly, Clipping pay homage to the P-Funk lineage through their Hugo nominated song "The Deep," which was produced in collaboration with This American Life. The story explores a mythology created by the band Drexciya. In the story, an underwater civilization birthed from African slaves crossing the Atlantic battles their makers to save their habitat. Listen to hear what makes both infectious tracks so effective.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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super-exitito with Shopify. Empezae. And then you euro al-mess in shopify.s. If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app.

It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share. their lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the eater app at eaterapp.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switchdown Pop. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. Nailed that. Today we want to look at how musicians push our ears to hear otherworldly sounds. And joining us is Clipping, who are made up of Jonathan Snipes,

William Hudson. Davy Diggs. You guys got your cues perfectly. Thank you. Clipping are a phenomenal hip-hop group and experts at using both familiar and challenging sounds to make deeply affective music that straddles the line between accessibility and difficulty. And today, we're going to break down their Hugo-nominated single, The Deep, a truly otherworldly track about an underwater civilization berths from African women who had been tossed overboard from slave ships sailing to the Americas. Yeah. This track is truly deep, and I'm sorry for the pun, but I had to happen. But first, as an amuse bouch, we want to start with things as we always do. We're going to deconstruct a pop track together. And in this case, I think it's going to be really successful because today we're going to talk about

Kali Uchis and Tyler the Creators after the Storm featuring Bootsie Collins. So on the surface, I think this track may seem relatively, I don't know, simple, listenable. But underneath, I think that we're going to hear a lot of things which actually go to much greater depth. Maybe just as an easy question to start off with, what is this song about? Guys want to give it a try. I think it's about like getting past the tough time in a relationship and getting towards the good time, right? You got to struggle through the storm to have the sun come out.

Beautiful. Yeah. The sun is literally coming out in New York City as we're recording this. So it seems very fitting. Exactly. Okay. Easy. Is it a relationship?

I feel like the Tyler part makes it sound like there's a relationship, but her lyrics don't sound particularly specific to romantic. That's true. Although the word baby is the only thing that led me in that direction. direction, right? But I guess like if we're hearkening back to the 70s, like all the music is, that's also just like saying, man, right? It's like filler. It's just two syllables, bro. They go anywhere. Baby and B. It's like saying like or um or whatever. Baby. In the piece, she says, we've been struggling endlessly. And what I want to look at is where are we hearing

signs of maybe storminess or struggle happening in this track? Cool. I love that key change under Tyler's verse for some reason. Yeah. I love like a modulation that leads into a rapt verse where there's no pitch material in the vocal. It's not like it needed to change key for his vocal range or something, right? Yeah, absolutely. It's a super jarring shift. Yeah, there's a lot of weird jarring elements happening in here. Some of the things that I heard were, I guess, yeah, a lot of playing with pitch.

The song is very pitchy and bizarre. You can hear it actually in the instrumentation. It's kind of everywhere, right? You have underlying the entire track are these moduling. keys that are sort of going in and out of pitch. Right? You've got sort of a pitch on the envelope and a modulation of the pitch and the keys. And then you go to the guitars.

Right. Just like it sounds like everything's running through old tape, right? Ooh, yeah. Yeah. It's funny because it feels like music in the 70s sort of sounded like that accidentally because no synth stayed in tune and tape. There was so much tape modulation and now and now it's become an aesthetic that we're going for. Like I find we're constantly doing that.

that too. It's just like putting really slow modulations on the pitch just to get everything to keep kind of warm and sort of move around a little bit. So as a modern producer, you're you basically using an electronic plug-in, which is emulating the sound of tape, which goes in and out of pitch. Yeah, or just having the synth tune itself, right? Oh, yeah, right, right, right. Not even using a plug-in to do it. I want to go to what you said about the pitchiness moves beyond just the soundscape. It actually happens in the structure of the song, right? We move in and out of different keys. Like, a lot of keys, like unusual amounts of different keys for a pop song. Right. You mean more than one? Yeah. Exactly. I mean, unless you're like Max Martin, you don't do this. The more I listen to it,

the more it sounds like I want to be your lover, right? Like that Marvin Gaye song. I'm not sure like how much is sampled from there or not, but like it's so in there. Huh. Hmm. Which that song did a similar thing. It does move around so much. And then, there's like rumbling in it, you know, rumbling. I don't know, there's something that feels like storm clouds or something. I don't know, like under the whole shit. It starts with a big clash of thunder and then rain and then rain. So the storm is like on the nose.

Yeah, yeah. This song goes all over in terms of key. What allows her to be able to do that? And I think what it is is that we've got this underlying repetition. We've got Bootsie Collins baseline, which is just so fat. and really grounds us throughout the entire track to be able to then make aberrations in our direction. Is he actually playing the bass?

That's what I was just going to look at it. I was curious. I think he just does vocals on the table. I think it's not Bootsie playing bass. Because the beat is by Bad Bad Not Good. Yeah, so it's the bass player from Bad Bad Not Good. I assume who has done a very good job of emulating. I don't know.

Yeah, it definitely feels like Bootsie. My suspicion is that he yelled some things into a mic and someone else is playing the space base on this part. And I did hear that actually, I call you, which he's like, we actually went out to his home studio ranch, which I think is in Ohio. Mm-hmm. And did hang out and produce this track together. So this is not a phone and in over Dropbox track. Okay. All right. I'm not sure we know. Even though his voice literally sounds like it's on a phone, which I like. On a phone.

Chester Hansen plays bass on that song. Thank you for the appropriate fact check. Bootsie Collins vocals and songwriting. I guess he wrote his own lyrics. But maybe we can agree that he's channeling some, uh, some parliament of galactic. I would think so. Yeah. Okay. I want to give Nate an opportunity to share with folks how this sort of idea of a ground repeating riffy bass allows us to do more interesting things. So, Nate, you've prepared something for us, yeah? Oh, yeah. We are going to do a brief classical master's digression here. We're exploring now, Ostinati repetition. Back up, Austinati? You've got to define her terms, man. Right. Sorry, let me translate my Italian here.

So an ostinado is a... Ostinopities. I love losing the proper pluralization of Austenado. Right. Panini, Panino, Ostenado, Ostenadi. And Ossinado is a repeating musical phrase, which is something that we can encounter in music at every period,

sort of. We can go back to the Baroque era. We can go to the 1600s and encounter a composer like Henry Purcell, using Ostinati in his music. We can listen to what he would have called a ground bass. That was basically the Baroque equivalent of a baseline, a ground bass. A baseline that repeated over and over again. Let's have a listen to this ground in D minor.

Just as funky as the Bootsie alikeness after the storm. Oh my God, if we threw Bootsie Collins on top of that track, it would be dope. Yeah, baby. That's probably the most direct through line from after the storm to like the history of Western music. Because in reality, though, we have examples like Baroque ground base, repetition was not a huge part of like the history of, you know, classical Western music. But when you get to folk music, pop music, then these ostinati repetition becomes like the backbone of so much musical structure

because it becomes something that you can improvise on top of that. you can create grooves with really easily. I kind of want to fast forward now to an artist connected to this track, Parliament Funkadelic. My favorite band ever of all time. Yeah. Oh. And I think when we get to the deep in the second half of the show, we might find some other points of overlap. We're fast forwarding from Baroque England now to Detroit in the 1970s. But we're going to find the same concept at play. Parliament will take. a groove and extrapolate it sometimes over like a 15 minute track or more but what it does is it does the same thing it creates this ground and on top of that you can

improvise you can have these different sections let's check out a powerful ostinado from the end of a mothership connection mm-hmm all right that's boozy so in that parliament track the repetition grows and has all this variation but underneath there's something that's still recognizable as something you can latch on to. What's incredible is that you can take these ostinados and move them into different contexts. Like we can find Dr. Dre in the 90s taking that same asinado from parliament and working it into his track. Let me ride. But what's remarkable is that you can go forward and backwards in time with these ostinati in surprising ways. Because what we're

hearing in this Afro-Futurist Parliament track is a reference to a spiritual that's been around for centuries, Swing Down Chariot, which is here performed by the Golden Gate Quartet. Let's take a listen to that. Why don't you swing down sweet chariot starving? Let me ride. Swing down chariot stopping. Let me ride. Rock me lord, rock me lord.

Come and easy. Got a home on the other side, why don't you swing down? Man. In all these cases across time and space, you find that the power of repetition allows you to create powerful new texts. So much of the music we listen to, including this Kaliuchi song, like relies on this specific technique of something repeating and then something you can layer on top of and gradually make it more and more complex. jarring, but because there's something familiar underneath, it remains accessible. I think it cues up perfectly this idea that Jonathan introduced that we've got some weird modulation that's happening in Tyler the Creator's Verse. And this is where things start to take a

real turn. After the storm, all the way up through Tyler the Creator's Verse, we have just this riff that repeats over and over again. And then we are taken into a totally different direction because the whole thing just kind of goes and dips down, just half a key. And and pulls us back. And I want to zoom in just... Yeah, okay. I just want to zoom in really closely on that sound because it's so satisfying.

And if that's not enough, we're going to go really, really close. Enhance. So we're just going to melt down into Tyler's verse. And it's just, it's such a good verse that I think we should listen to the whole thing. Call it what you mean? Because you draw my candid.

Let's eat on to my randed. Produce some thrillers much hot with your vanilla. Does it also get slower slightly? Oh, I don't know. Are you hearing that? Kind of. I wouldn't be surprised. It may.

They slow down the tape. I don't know. Oh, interesting. That's what it sounds like. I wonder if it gets slower in relation to the pitch change. Or is that just an illusion you're hearing? Yeah, maybe because of the pitch change. I don't know, because of the pitch change.

So what's your all take on this first? What are you hearing? Well, it's funny talking about ostinati through time, right? because like so much of what Tyler is doing is referencing other pop songs. So to be like feels like Tyler is like, oh, I know what this is. You're saying like, I'm going to put this right in the world where we're trying to be. So like you hear like the umbrella reference really early on and then like name and dropping various of the Jackson 5 and then talking about the production of thriller. Right.

I really like that about the verse about like very intentionally connecting this. Yep. Very referential sort of pop song to like a tradition of pop music. It's awesome that he. he has these double meanings in which he's both talking about the relationship and citing all of his influences. Yeah. Yeah.

Even though he's been doing this for so long and he's so great at it, it's because of when I fell in love with Tyler, right? It's like so weird to hear him rap like this kind of in this way that is very much about helping people like get into the piece and is like for the piece as opposed to like all the destruction that he used to bring to tracks, you know, like he had sort of the opposite intent when I first became aware of him, when he sort of brought odd future to all of our attention. He's always been a great rapper who could do anything, you know. So for me, because I listen to that stuff so heavily listening to him pop up on these pop songs, it's like, it's fun. It's fun watching him

do the opposite thing. It's very like inclusive. This is a verse for everybody. I like that you use the word deconstructive, right? The track is almost deconstructed and slowed down to be like, hey, it's changing. Right. It's a jarring, but really, you know, potent moment about to happen. And he does have, like, one of the best voices in rap, like how deep his voices. To have that happen where the track slows down and to have that ultra deep voice come in, it's like you slowed her down. The pitch goes down. The tempo goes down. Well, that's where jury's still out on that one, but we're going to have to do some beat matching later. We'll see. And literally, The voice, yeah, drops to that gravelly deep timbre.

Like listening to a DJ screwed song. Yeah, totally. Tyler's just... Tyler's always already screwed. Sometimes on iTunes, people will leave reviews of the show, and they'll always say, oh, let's switch on pop that's in the show. And man, that Nate Sloan, he's got a deep voice.

He's got the best voice. And so I kind of have, like, vocal dysmorphia about just not being able to meet the quality of Nate's beautiful radio voice. However, it's very critical. here you've been one-uped on this verse because I think if you looked at this on an EQ, it would go below human hearing range. I sound the least like a rapper of any rapper I know to myself. And we're actually constantly struggling with what to mic me with so that I sound more like a rapper.

You know, so I get that. I sit in the baritone range. Better to be a bass or a tenor. Baritone, you're stuck in the middle. Not very useful. So this is not our only modulation. things get even weirder later on in this song. We eventually transition out of Tyler's verse. We move back up into our key. We get that repeated baseline, that ground bass, that thing which sort of brings us home so that we feel a sense of stability.

But the storminess is still there, right? We've got those weird pitchy sounds going underneath. And it would only be appropriate if this song had some resolution where the sunshine came out. And so I want to take us to the bridge. Nice. So what happens here, guys? What do you all hear it?

What just happened? So we have another modulation, right? Another key change? We did, yeah. Where did it go? I couldn't even tell if it went up or down, honestly. Who's got better ears than the PhD here? Anybody?

That's unnecessary, Charles. We go into the parallel major. We go from A minor into A major, and this is sort of an A major seven. Oh, man. I got stumped on this on our last episode, too, where we're talking about Ariana Grande, did the same thing from minor to parallel major and I couldn't hear it. All right. So now I understand, Charlie. And what I think you're suggesting is that this is literally the sun coming out, right? This is the switch to the major. Yeah, that's good. That's good. Exactly. I think,

Nate, you put it once that repetition is the spoonful of sugar that allows for more avant-garde and challenging medicine to come out. That repetition gives us the capacity to do these stranger moves on the track. I wanted to check in before we close it out, though, if you're hearing anything else on after the storm that just stands out to you. I heard lots of references moving in your brain as we were going. Anything else in this track? There's a deep hidden reference in here that I particularly love. In the lyrics? Yeah.

Wait, this is like a scavenger hug. I know. I'm trying to go through them on. All right, who's got it? Oh, it's going to hurt when you hear it. All right, here's what it is. That is the opening That is the opening track to

Kendrick Lamar's to Pimp a Butterfly That's Wesley's theory Yeah sung by George Clinton But don't those words also appear in Cinderella theory The George Clinton song Whoa Oh, dang Do they?

I'm not sure But that's what I remember thinking When I don't know, Bill looked that up I'm looking at up. Hold on. Hold on. Hold on. Whoa, we just broke through. Okay, I think it's important to know what's happening here. We got Bootsie Collins referencing George Clinton through different tracks, both obviously members of Parliament Flankadelic. And I think this is important here because, frankly, Parliament's music has become so potent right now. And they are a few in culture. If we look at obviously things like Childish can be as Redbone,

being one of the most important tracks of last year. And it's a real throwback and homage to that parliament sound. That whole album is... That whole album, right? Just one parliament reference after the other. I love it. It's crazy too, because like as we listened to earlier, this is almost like the second P-Funk revival

after 90s hip-hop incorporated into so many tracks from Dre, Snoop Dog, NWA. Now, 30 years after that, it's like, come back around again. It's really interesting. And I think it serves as an appropriate transition to talk about the deep because Parliament Funkadelic are known for their Afro-Futurist narratives, for having underlying their extremely danceable music, very political messages and messages that carry in a long tradition of bringing in sci-fi and fantasy and politics all within a track. And I am so thrilled in the second half of our show to go into your Hugo-nominated track at the Deep. But before we do, we just need to make sure

fact check. It's not in Cinderella theory. There's a lot of conversation about where it originated. Everyone says it's from some parliament song, but no one can find it. Oh, man. So actually, I don't know. Oh, man. I know I've heard that before, too, but we'll get to the bottom of it. We've got to throw it out to the listeners. We've got to find the answer to this. The internet forums haven't found it. Our professional fact checker here can't find it. The truth is out there. It's out there. We'll get back to it. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first? step as a podcaster. Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey.

Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly Democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement. agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current president. So what do most Americans think about deportation

and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. My sense is that people want border at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio and video feeds.

Welcome back to Switched on Pop. We are now going to talk about clippings Hugo nominated The Deep. I think like the Kaliuchi's track, clipping really successfully builds complex. soundscapes that defy normal expectations of what you're going to hear in a track. And the deep is a sci-fi narrative with very modern-day themes. What I want to do is try to understand how you built this narrative and how you support it with these non-traditional soundscapes. So let's take a listen to get the track in our year.

Tonight we remember. Y'all remember how deep it go. Start it from the bottom. Y'all remember how deep it go? For y'all had to come back deep. Y'all remember when it used to be deep. So deep. So deep.

So, so deep. So just to begin, could you expand upon the premise of this piece and where you're wanting to take listeners? Well, I'm never sure where to start the discussion of this song, right? Because we really wanted, it was about sort of, of homage to the band Durexia. And the story that we're telling is sort of based in a mythology that they kind of laid out really over the course of their album art.

Because like those songs aren't very lyric heavy, but they would sort of tell this story throughout their album covers. So we'd like wanted to place something in that world and continue that mythology and sort of paid homage to that band. Broadly, the narrative is about there is a society of of underwater beings who are the descendants of pregnant African slaves who have been thrown overboard during the Middle Passage. And there existing totally fine underwater except now we have spent so many years polluting the ocean that it is becoming unsafe for them. And so as they sort of

expand upward, as society continues to generate and they need more space and they're expanding upward towards the surface, the toxicity levels are getting way higher and eventually they need to make their presence known and retaliate in some way. And there are sort of arguments within the society about whether or not that should happen. But what we were really trying to do was make something that would be like the song that is sung every year at like a festival of remembrance of this date when we made our presence known. Right. So it was sort of in a in kind of like a folk song tradition where it's like this gets played at

midnight every year on the party to honor the day that the Dreeksians made themselves, like, known to the surface world. So while, like, the events of the song are sort of could be in our present or our very near future, the singing of the song could be a thousand years in the future or something. Right. It's trying to do, like, a John Henry sort of thing. We were really into that. We were talking a lot about John Henry at the time.

And you use this motif, y'all remember, throughout the entire track as a constant reminder that we're looking backward. I'm really sorry about this, but I did have to mash up a handful of y'all remembers just to get this in our ear. So here's a y'all remember collision. Y'all remember. Y'all remember. And y'all remember.

Y'all remember. Y'all remember. Y'all remember. I'm sorry about that. I'm really sorry. Yeah, I'm out of here. David, I really like how you use this motif because I think in a different but similar way to the Kaliuchi's track, the repetition of y'all remember keeps resetting us and brings us back home. Because the narrative that you're telling is fairly complex, right?

It's going through multi-hundred-year histories. It's a complex civilization being built up. There's a revolution. But you keep bringing us back to remembrance. It almost feels like to me, almost like a Homeric. retelling story of warfare. Yeah. Yeah, totally.

And also just to sort of highlight that this is a story that we all know already, right? It's the Passover. It's like a Seder dinner. Yeah, this is what we said. When we were making, I remember us discussing the idea of after every, y'all remember having a group of sort of 40 or 50 voices saying, we remember or something like that,

like as if it's like call and response as if you're, you know, as if it's a, it's a storyteller in front of a, huge group and really trying to reinforce the ritualness of this, but we abandoned that. We just ran out of time. So at the beginning of the track, you have the sort of, not the narrator, but almost like this computer voice that first says we remember. And then David, you come in and you say, y'all remember. Y'all remember how deep it goes.

So it does, you used to be before. Yeah. That's interesting. We've never. We discussed, well, David wrote, y'all remember as if the only pronoun that that society uses is y'all. that there's not individual. Yeah, yeah, there's no I. It's all y'all.

It's all collectivity. Yeah, which I don't really remember why I decided to do that. Was that your idea, though? Yeah, but then I also didn't follow it when I wrote that opening. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That Naila says. All right. I thought it would be fun.

She says our mothers, right? I know. I totally messed up. Yeah. We added the intro because this American life asked for it, right? They asked for some sort of help for the listener to sort of guide them through the narrative of the story and the set up. of the story. And so we added the intro with the sort of modulated female voice, sort of as a nod

to Drexia, because that's something they do in a lot of their tracks, because they'll have a kind of ring modulated female narrator talking about. Or like the controller organizing who's what ships are docking. Yeah, exactly. Cruiser number whatever can dock in this place. They've got like over. We wanted to be able to illustrate where we were physically, right, with the pressure of each place. Oh, right. That's why she says all that. That was a lot of research on Bill's part. I want to go into exactly this, because this piece unfold in a really fabulous way,

where there is a tension built throughout the entire track as people are literally rising out of the sea. And each verse, there are significant changes that happen. I want to start just at the grounding, which is really opening in utopia, right? Everybody's dancing around, no one's sweating, right? It's a really beautiful opening. Y'all remember when it used to be deep.

So deep. So, so deep. Hey. When y'all swam about your mama while your mama was asleep. So deep. So deep. And y'all remember when y'all had the dance floor lit, dark. No two step deep.

Y'all don't even sweat deep. I love that last moment so much. There's an entire parliament album, Motor Booty Affair, that takes place underwater. and it's all about dancing underwater and not getting wet, which I have always assumed was part of this same mythology. I assume that Drexia and George Clinton were drawing on the same idea, because this idea of a society of either ghosts or actual living, you know,

African slaves that have been thrown overboard exists in a lot of different cultures. If you read like Terrell McCraney's work, he talks about the bone people, which is like a reference to stories he was told as a kid. That's the same thing, but everyone's just the bones. all their skin is washed away and they're just bone people walking on the bottom of the ocean looking for their family. So I was very deliberately kind of nodding towards one of my favorite records that also takes place with black folks dancing underwater. Okay, so these references are running deep. Oh, sorry. That was completely unintentional.

But can you share with us a little bit about how you're establishing this underwater world sonically? Oh, yeah, sure. Well, we had sort of I decided early on that we wanted the trajectory of the whole song to be this rise to the surface, right? And we start the deepest underwater and then we end with the breaking through of the surface. Right. So we just thought about kind of different ways to do that with sound design. And one of the ways was that the track gets gradually faster, right? That each verse is, right?

I think we start at 65 beats per minute and we end at 120 or 130 or something like that. Well, because what we did first was we programmed the last verse to sound like a direct track and then we just recorded the same drum pattern slower and slower and slower and dropped out certain elements and there's a sort of a low-pass filter basically on every element that could have gradually opens over the whole seven minutes too so the sounds in the first verse are very sort of dark and deep and filtered and low and by the time you get to the end everything's kind of brighter and more open up the idea was pressure pressure as you're going up makes everything seem faster which is totally not how being underwater works no but it doesn't

It's definitely a metaphor. But it is how it works in movies. I feel like we have to hear this for a second. We start underwater in verse one. Y'all remember how deep it go. So all the sounds, you said there's a low-pass filter. Basically, you've cut off all the highs, and so it just kind of feels underwater.

And they're played slower. And they're played too. So all of the underwater sounds we've sort of recorded at really high sample rates so we could slow them way down and get these kind of large, deep, sort of sounding bubbles. That's just Bill blowing into a bowl of water with a straw slowed way, way down. Oh, wow. As you were saying, as we rise up, literally the various ships are going up further into the sea. We increase in tempo when we get that, what had been this really loose sense of a beat, and we start to feel like, oh, this is a hip-hop track. Who knew? David, you mimic it by the

rhythm of your flow increases to build that tension. We're getting how to get up in their heads and got to be in real, inspired circumstances of the birth has got y'all feeling like an army. Better yet a navy. And they're going gave y'all the blessing. Now y'all going crazy. We're getting faster. And then finally we rise out of the water and there's no more water.

Y'all remember so deep sunshine. Ride on it. Y'all remember when y'all had to let them breathe. Right on them. Yeah. And that's the breaking through right there. Oh, that's why you hear seagulls. It's actually an arch.

turn. Is that what it is? Oh, that moment at the very end is like cresting. And then the tidal wave, yeah. Breaking the waves. And okay, I get it now. Wow. That's fabulous. Okay, so we've risen up. We've come out of the water, flows getting faster. What other elements are important in establishing the soundscape for you? We're usually not so prescriptive with our sound design. Like, usually the sound design is a little more acusmatic, right, that we're more interested in what the sounds are rather than what the sort of extra-referential associations with the sounds are, but this time we really wanted everything to sound like it was underwater, have some interaction with water. Part of that has to do with, yeah, usually the sounds we use are much more abstracted from their reference, right? So the idea

is if we use the sound of breaking cinder blocks, the song is not about breaking cinder blocks, right? But in this case, the reason we were doing this was because this was commissioned by this American life as a segment on their show. And they really wanted the story. storytelling to be very clear. They were worried that our songs are a little, are usually too obscure, and that people listening, just tuning in on the radio and hearing it once,

needed to be able to follow it, sort of. So I think we did make this a lot more thematically watery in our sound design than I think we would have usually done. It got to a point where we actually had to push back, right? We were like, actually, we're not doing anymore to make this clear. Like, there is a difference between a,

and a story on the radio, and I think people will understand it. But like, there were, like, discussions over the process where they, like, kept asking for clarity. And we were like, we think it's clear enough. We think we got there. I think we did most of their notes. Oh, yeah. I think, didn't I were generally very good notes, actually? Didn't Iro want us to cut the line about not sweating, actually? That's funny. Oh, yeah. They wanted us to cut something in the first verse that we refused. Yeah. Well, it was, it was for time, right? It was like the first verse felt a little bit too long. It was for time.

It was just like there was like two bars in the first verse that he's like, I don't think this is really propelling the narrative forward. And we're like, yeah, but we need it to be symmetrical. And it wouldn't. It would have been a seven bar verse or something weird. Yeah. I like imagining Ira Glass as a hip hop producer. He's going to start working with like,

our empressario of Dr. Dre. You're like, I don't know, I think you should change Gucci gang. Gucci gang, really? they could have got that note I really like how you all are you use what is a very the narrative does take us in a very clear place I'm able to follow where you're going

and yet you're able to include some sounds in here which are incredibly jarring very powerful I wanted to play a couple of sounds that come out in this track that in context you're like oh yeah for sure that's what's happening but if you just heard this anywhere else

you're listening to some like really intense like death metal or something. Only everything explodes. Those are some terrifying sounds. Like absolutely terrifying. I guess what I'm hearing is that by providing us this really clear narrative, you're able to insert these more challenging

and interesting sounds. You all do this throughout so many of your tracks where the underlying production has a, I don't know, I feel like a really deep narrative connection to what David is. saying and oftentimes are sort of like they are affective and that they I find them both challenging and acceptable at the same time so I don't know I just wanted to share I think you do that very very effectively yeah I do think these are the most justified weird noises we've ever

used they're like they're there to tell the story so we got to make them but often we just make horrible sounds that aren't justified yeah pop on in a track I really like when you use alarm clocks intramed synthesizers. Well, yeah, and usually we could just get to say, well, we like the way that this sounds aesthetically, like in the same way that you would choose a guitar tone, right, or a dial up a synthesizer patch or something. But in this particular case, we had to say, well, how does this? How will a listener interpret this sound narratively?

I want to ask you about one more sound, which is the song, even though we are sort of moving from a, you know, the beat is so slow, you don't even know if you might just be listening to spoken word, right? And then eventually you get up and clearly we're listening to a hip hop track. And I think one of the things you do to ground us there is we've got a hook. So what is this hook and what is the purpose of including it in a song, which is, as you said, intentionally, extremely narrative? What is the sound? Oh, the bell, the bell sound.

Oh, the bell sound? Yeah. So that's, if you take apart a hard drive, there are these little metal discs inside of it. Who knows it is so rewarding? That make this really beautiful ring. They have a very particular pitch, yeah. Yeah, that's it. I think they're B flat.

I love that computer is tuned to B flat. that makes the jazz phd very happy. Yeah, right. And I had been sort of taking them apart and kind of figuring out what to do with a bunch of old dead hard drives that I was trying to do something. Well, because we recorded breaking them

for a different thing. We made like a bunch of clicking, like any hard drives that were broken. If you start like a broken hard drive that's sort of clicking and stuttering, if we were recording those and like starving them power and getting them to kind of like...

And dragging, we did a whole thing where we expose the disc and then I would drag like, paper clips on them and different pitches. Yeah, like if you... We did dry ice too. Screwdriver or something on the exposed spinning disc to make these sounds. We had all these discs that we had actually used some of them in the drum kit that we

had built when we were on Conan to do Aram Out because we built a drum kit for our friend Chiquiti to play out of just sort of found materials. And there were a lot of... Because it ended up that those particular discs were in the key of that song Aram Out. totally accidentally. Anyway, so then we recorded striking these discs with mallets and then quickly dipping them into water in a sort of... So the pitch bends.

Like Toru Takamitsu or John Cage style. Because the pitch bends on a resonating material, like object as you dip it slowly into water. I thought it would be kind of interesting to make a sampler instrument out of a ton of these, right? So that the initial pitch is the key that you're playing on the keyboard, but that it modulates as it bends into the water and each note is a different, we recorded, I don't know, a dozen of these or 20 of these or something so that each time you play a note, it's sort of

round robins through them. So it's never the same sound over and over again, but it has this weird kind of pitch bend on it no matter what note you're playing. And that's the instrument that's playing that very, very crazy mad scientist. Very Drexia inspired melody too. I think that kind of little descending minor key thing was something that sounds like hydro cubes. Yeah. I think is the Drexia track that that kind of sounds like. DeVude, what does the hook do for you in supporting the narrative? I think it's just a chance to like bring it back to the sort of call and response nature of the thing that we were trying to have.

If we had had time to do that idea to get 40 voices responding to the y'all remember, you know, it would have been that moment. But it's just, it's that point in the party. And also like it is, like you said, it's a rap song. Because we do so much that is in some ways challenging. to how rap songs function. We generally, structurally, are not that challenging.

Right? So, like, the vast majority of our songs are verse hook, verse hook, verse. We're playing with that a little more these days, but that was intentional early on because we wanted to make sure everybody still recognize these as rap songs. So we were doing things that rap songs do.

Yeah. And then, yeah, this was the same thing. That reminds me of, similarly, Trent Rezner was always deliberate in trying to create really, challenging industrial music to always use pop song formats. And it's unsurprising that Nine Inch Nails makes it onto the pop charts and had overwhelming successes because underneath what are some challenging sounds is a nice little pop structure. Although it's funny. You think of

his most successful song closer has like a three minute instrumental outro, which is pretty unusual for the pop song. There's got to be a radio editor or something. I love that approach in clipping in general and it seems especially effective for this song because it is like you're through a watery mirror at a society that like might in some way resemble our own. You know, they have, you know, hooks and choruses and instruments that sound familiar, but you can't quite put your finger on them. And that hard drive dipped in water is a perfect example of that. Where you're like, I think I know what this is, but I might also have no idea.

It's also very similar to the Kaliuchis with like this whole, I mean, it's a storm coming to sunshine, we're underwater coming to sunshine. All this pitch bendy stuff is always about like wateriness. It's like a metaphor for water. Yeah. If this weren't on a mount, I would have dropped the mic because that's exactly what I was hoping we would find that connection. Oh, I'm sorry, did I do it too fast?

No, that was. Well, just cut it that, cut that and put it at the end. You'll edit it to the end of it. I want to ask just one more question about the deep. And if you'd like, we can cut it because sometimes you don't want to reveal too much. Oh, we're pretty transparent. Okay. There is an online debate about what happens in the end of the deep.

Oh, really? Oh, I haven't noticed that. And I thought it would be nice. Maybe we could settle the debate, or if you want, open the debate even further. At the end of the song, there is this giant title wave that supposedly takes over and smashes all of the humans, right? And ends that civilization. However, the very last line of the song says that we're going to, let them breathe. And there's this

sort of very powerful moment David that you choose to make this connection where the underwater population sees the roots of their history in the above water population. And so some people online just thought, well, if you're going to let them breathe, maybe you're actually saving

them from the tidal wave. What's actually happening here? Well, I don't know if we decided if everyone dies or if it was just like a show of force you know, we tend to also, the three of us tend to have different interpretations of what happens in our songs. But in my opinion, like it was a show of force and a lot of people died. Let them breathe. To me was about drowning them essentially because they breathe water, right?

Right. So, but it's also a reference to another clipping song to air them out. Yeah. Which was also why we threw those ride on them overdubs in there because that's also from that song. And it was sort of a way of connecting our two, like, Afrofell. futurist works to one another. And like, I do a lot of things sometimes to, like, leave ourselves open to maybe connecting things later if we wanted to, not that we necessarily ever would, but this way, like, there was sort of a direct connection between those two worlds. So if we were to want to, like, make a story song that for some reason connected splendor and misery to this world,

that this would be an opportunity to do that, not that we would ever necessarily do that. I love thinking about our songs as, and this is sort of something we developed really while doing the Splendor and Misery album as primary sources, right, as opposed to interpretations. So we all have different stories of the narrative of Splendor and Misery, the three of us all have different ideas about what happens to that character. I mean, with a lot of overlap and a lot of similarities. But it's important to us that we actually kind of disagree on what we think happens. But also that all three of those interpretations could be true, right, given the primary source. evidence that we have, which is the album we made. Right? That like when you reconstruct then what actually happened, that these all make sense

that you could connect these lines. And I think the deep is kind of each of our readings is available. Which in turn means that like they don't necessarily agree. Everybody else is reading on the internet is possible to, I mean, except the dumb ones, but yeah. All interpretations are good, but the bad ones. I like that this leaves you open to potentially be the as a mobs of Afrofuturist hip-hop. And, which you decide that at some point in your career, like, oh, no, everything was connected and just go back and sort of like weave it all together over many generations and tens of thousands of years. It's possible. Just put it out there. It's nice to have options. You all have lots of

projects going on right now. I was wanting to see what's going on for each of you and what's going on for clipping. I actually don't think we can even, is there anything we can even announce as clipping or? We have a reissue of our very first release. It will have just come out. Nice. Our first untitled tape that we did for our friends labeled Death Bomb Arc in what year was that? It came out in 2012. 2012.

So we did a vinyl reissue of that with some new remixes and great. Yeah. Check out blind spotting. It's not out yet either when this comes out. So July 20th or 27th, depending on where you live, there's a movie that I co-wrote with a good friend of mine and clipping collaborator at times. Nice. And I assume that you all are maybe working on some music on the side.

We hope that you'll want to come and join us again when the next clipping work comes out. We are working, but we don't know when it's happening. There's no acceptable for that. And not only can we not announce it, but we can't announce it because we don't even know. Right on. Thank you, gentlemen, so much for joining us on the show. It's been a real pleasure. Yeah, that's really fun.

Yeah, thank you. We're big fans. It's really exciting. This episode of Switched on Pop was produced by me, Charlie Harding. And me, Nate Sloan. We are mixed and engineered by Bill Lance, designed by Luke Harris, and we are a proud member of the Panoply Network. You can find more episodes at switchedonpop.com. Reach out to us there.

Contact at switchedonpop.com. Twitter, switched on pop. And we'll be back in again with another episode in two weeks. And until then, thanks for listening. And thanks to you guys. It has been so much fun having you on the show. Thank you. Thanks again.

Thanks, yeah. That was great.