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A brief update and an R&B CYBERFUNK recommendation

Thanks to a recent flattering link from Max Read of Read Max, I’ve had an influx of new subscribers. I felt I should reintroduce myself here, quickly, because my next post has taken a little time to put together, and because I have a full-time job which often involves working in excess of 40 hours per week, keeping the posting schedule charmingly unpredictable—though reliable nonetheless.

I used to be a music journalist—my first paid writing job out of college was freelancing at the Chicago Tribune. I spent the next ten years writing about all kinds of popular music (and occasionally, jazz) (but most often, hip-hop) at the Tribune, Stylus Magazine, NPR, The Village Voice, Vibe, Fader, Pitchfork, Complex, Baltimore City Paper, Mass Appeal, and others which I am forgetting. In 2012 I became a full-time staff writer with Complex, where I helmed (among other responsibilities) a popular column entitled Bout to Blow. A few years later, I received an opportunity to work in A&R at a record label and switched career paths. Long story short, I sometimes end up working late nights in the recording studio—as has happened the past two weekends—and so I’m not able to consistently pump out Content with the frequency I would like.

Nonetheless, this passion project is something important to me, as someone who still considers himself a “writer” at some level—an outlet for creative ideas I can’t find a home for in my day-to-day—and so I want to reassure readers of So Many Shrimp that there’s a fairly deliberate plan here. I have more than enough to write about, and I’m excited to share the path I’ve charted personally the last few years.

To learn more about exactly what I’m doing, you can read about the project’s inspirations in this post: an art project I’ve been working on. It’s also inspired by Ninja Turtles, Prestige Discourse Fatigue, and intuitive listening habits at their most pre-critical. This all led to a theory of CYBERFUNK, an aesthetic matrix that felt as if it found me rather than vice versa. We’ve had some fun with the concept. But if you want a shorthand idea of the style, I’d recommend checking out Ten Cyberfunk Songs You Already Know, which should give you some idea of its aesthetic universe.

The best way to experience it is to check out the exclusive CYBERFUNK mix I’m selling for $10 at Isil.Club. This is where the ‘rubber hits the road,’ where the rhetoric manifests into something real, and I don’t think you can really grasp the essence of CYBERFUNK until you hear it….

Loyal readers of this substack, of course, know all this already… so lets give them something fresh….

I’ve mentioned before that R&B and CYBERFUNK have some overlap, but despite this, much R&B—including that which fully embraced a new era of creative technologies—simply does not qualify. Its focus on perfectionism, its un-democratic professionalism, can—though it doesn’t need to—undermine the spirit of CYBERFUNK’s future-primitive. Put simply, much 1980s R&B is Future-Sophisticated. There are dozens, even hundreds of exceptions—but they tend to be scattered with some arbitrariness throughout the catalogs of R&B also-rans and legends, with no real coherent logic beyond my taste.

One CYBERFUNK gem—not exactly a secret, as it’s been unearthed in several previous crate-digging eras—is Frankie Beverly & Maze’s undeniable “Twilight.” Despite its presence in the canon of mid-80s record collector classics (it was even included in Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas soundtracks during the Tim Sweeney years), I’m claiming it for the CYBERFUNK canon because its singular sound always felt like an outlier on, I.e., a fake radio station also playing “You Dropped the Bomb On Me” and “Funky Worm.” It’s closer, if anything, to the Cisco’s “beloved Hold music” than the funk and electro-R&B in its cultural vicinity. And furthermore, no other song in the Frankie Beverly & Maze catalog sounds anything like it: