Footwork producer DJ Paypal doesn't appear on the surface to be the type of artist that treats his influences with any sort of mindfulness. From his trollish stage name to the plainly ironic bite of Pen and Pixel's distinctive, lens-flare-heavy aesthetic on the cover of his new mini-LP Sold Out, he reads on first glance like just another node on Internet Art's massive recombination engine, which endlessly churns out kitschy (and occasionally brilliant) assemblages of random late-capitalist pop-cultural detritus.There's also the matter of the style he's working in: footwork is a particularly holistic musical form that until very recently has been virtually inseparable not only from the dance style that it soundtracks, but also from the brutally segregated, impoverished black neighborhoods on Chicago's South and West Sides where it was born.
It's a minor revelation to find out that Paypal's far more sincere than his image would suggest. The way that the drums on Sold Out's titular opening track pulse in and out of focus is an expert move well out of reach of the average SoundCloud dilettante, and throughout the album he displays the kind of rule-bending that only comes from closely studying the rules first. "A lot of kids hear like five tracks and start making footwork, and that’s not respectful," he told Pitchfork recently. It's clear from his music that he has listened to thousands and absorbed them into his DNA. And not only does he make incredibly good footwork, he's also helping to clear a path for its future evolution.
Paypal's a member of the L.A.-born Brainfeeder coalition of artists representing a certain organic, jazz-indebted segment of bass music experimentalists, and like most of the best material to come out of the Brainfeeder camp, it reconnects beat-based music with styles of pre-digital black music whose more radical avant-garde aspects have been forgotten over the years, or dulled by overfamiliarity—bebop, free jazz, and especially the synthesizer-crazed soul and fusion artists of the '70s.
"Ahhhhhhh" combines blissed-out piano riffs, pitched up vocal harmonies, and a burbling bassline. "With Uuuuuuu" and "On a Cloud" teasingly reference early synth-funk (the latter with a vocoder part that Paypal and coproducers Nangdo and DJ Taye blend into a crisp solo trumpet). Other parts of the record reach even further out—"Slim Trak" folds in Brazilian samba drumming, while "Say Goodbye" (featuring Keiska and Tielsie), drifts into a stoned-genius hybrid of dream pop and J-pop that's easily compelling enough to sustain an entire LP.
At the same time, Paypal's also a member of Chicago's venerable footwork music crew Teklife, and his tracks never lose sight of the style's more utilitarian roots scoring YouTube footworking videos and high school hallway dance battles. The old slogan that "music wants to be free" is a truer fit for remix culture than the music piracy advocates that coined it. There's a point in the life cycle of every musical style where it has to expand its worldview and open itself up to new participants and new influences, or else it stagnates and withers away. No artist needs to ask permission to borrow an influence, and with so much music available and making it becoming so cheap, it's not even a requirement that you dive more than surface deep into a style before you borrow it. But Sold Out shows what a difference it can make when you hold yourself to a higher standard.
