Through their new H?SHTAG$ mini documentary series, the fine folks at Red Bull Music Academy are working their way through as many hashtaggable genres as possible at a fairly impressive rate — and with impressive care, it should be noted. In January we pointed out Episode 1, “Don’t Call It #AltRnB, which works quite well as a visual companion piece to SPIN’s own Trend of the Year: Alt R&B essay.
The series has also taken on #CloudRap and #PostDubStep along the way to this most recent installment, which focuses on #Beats with a large assist from Flying Lotus, and cameos from Hudson Mohawke and Lunice of TNGHT, plus the Gaslamp Killer, XXYYXX, Shlohmo, and XLR8R editor Shawn Reynaldo. At the start, we see FlyLo pal Erykah Badu explaining, “They makes beats all day long. This is what they do.”
“It wasn’t cool to use a computer to make music,” says the man himself into the camera of his beginnings. “People were looking at me like I was fucking crazy … I’ve seen this shit change.” And though the film is brief, we learn of the rise of an international network of left-field producers from Internet concerns to festival draws, in part thanks to the Los Angeles beat bastion called Low End Theory.
In related news, Low End’s most famous son (Lotus, of course) will be contributing to the forthcoming album from drum and bass originator Goldie, according to FACT. Burial and Photek will also be among the British producer’s cohorts for his first LP since 2009’s Memoirs of an Afterlife. The onetime Snatch star will also release a three-disc retrospective on March 11 titled The Alchemist: The Best of Goldie 1992-2012.
