Please Touch That Dial
A pair of Durham EPs give credence to the idea that a yearning for a more tactile and terrestrial existence remains very real.
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From the many tea leaves at our disposal, it remains difficult to truly assess how pervasive the desire for the nostalgic, organic, and tactile really is among people — particularly young people — today. To see the sustained success of vinyl sales, vintage and collecting culture, or Gen Z "Luddite" clubs trying to extricate themselves from the matrix completely, gives one impression. To acknowledge the unrivaled dominance of TikTok, or of Instagram as the persistent, default bulletin board of Millennial creative life even 14 years after its creation, gives another.
Generally speaking, the happenings of the Durham, NC hip-hop/R&B scene hardly constitute definitive proof one way or the other on the matter. But two new EPs from Jaythehbk and CJ Monét nonetheless give a hopeful indication that if the movement reaching back for the human and intimate — as opposed to rushing enthusiastically towards the future a few weird losers are making for us — isn't winning out completely, it's at the very least alive and well.
The callbacks to an earlier, simpler time are omnipresent and unavoidable on Jaythehbk's TEARDROP., which takes the form of a tongue-in-cheek, Grand Theft Auto-style faux radio station — complete with call-ins and hosting duties (featuring local, real-life media personalities AyeeeDubb and Chubbz), and of course, its very own hackneyed, chef's kiss catchphrase: "where souls collide and real players glide."
Most noteworthy isn't exactly the radio structure itself, which has been employed many times before, from Charlotte rapper Verbal Van Goh's recent Top9@8 mixtape to the underground classic The Listening by Little Brother (broadcast exclusively over the "airwaves" of "WJLR — The future of hip-hop music"). What's more remarkable is the concept's generation-spanning resilience: when The Listening first caught the attention of Questlove and the rest of the Okayplayer message boards in 2003, the 22-year-old Jay was not even one year old.