Neil Loots

As is well known, it is difficult these days to determine what exactly a genre of music "is" or "authentically consists in". I have been listening rather incessantly to the recent(ish) Flying Lotus album, and it struck me that I couldn't figure out exactly where this music fits into the grander scheme of all things musical. I suppose it may be considered to be "experimental hip hop", since it exploits "the hip hop beat". On the other hand, it does not inhabit "the hip hop idiom", which, although it can probably not be reduced to any one thing, traditionally seems to have dealt thematically, for lack of a better phrase, with "the social reality/milieu of (American) hip hop artists and MCs". Flying Lotus's album certainly evinces an "aural landscape", but not also, or not also explicitly, a particular "social landscape" since Flying Lotus does not to any large extent present himself as a "personality" within the music. Similarly, Massive Attack, and "trip hop" in general, exploited, amongst other things, the hip hop beat without being "hip hop" in the traditional or "strict" or "genealogical" sense of the term.

So what this rambling amounts to is the following question: Can there be such thing as "experimental hip hop", or would this "form" rather be subsumed under the more "catch all" term "electronica"?