It used to take ages for underground sounds to find their way into mainstream pop music. Information moved more slowly, recordings took more time to produce, and there were layers of cultural gatekeepers to be navigated in the process, so subcultures that craved obscurity could usually find it. The internet and digital recording technology have changed that. Now, if your timing’s right, you can see a specific synth sound or drum programming technique make its way from some nobody producer’s SoundCloud page to pop radio in maybe a couple of months, but sometimes in just weeks.
The shadowy postdubstep underground bass music scene, for instance, is currently finding itself thrust into the spotlight by Kanye, Drake, and their legions of followers who've adopted increasingly dark-toned aesthetic identities informed by artists like SBTRKT and Arca. This scrutiny and appropriation will only intensify in the wake of Lorde’s Pure Heroine, which transmuted minimalist bass music that would've qualified as avant garde only a few months ago into chart gold. So what does a musical community with a preference for operating under the pop-cultural radar do when mainstream artists start knocking it off for parts? The smartest and most productive thing would be to launch its own competing, alternative product: And now it has, in the form of Kelela Mizanekristos.
Raised in the Maryland suburbs around D.C. on a diet of 1990s pop-R&B divas before relocating to the bustling L.A. bass scene, Kelela is attempting to do what dozens of top-tier singers, songwriters, and producers are also trying, which is to take the moody sounds of the sorts of electronic musicians orbiting club nights/labels/collectives like Night Slugs and Fade to Mind, and give them a more pop-friendly spin that will appeal to listeners who don’t normally go in for severely dark dance music.
Unlike other singers working at similar aims, Kelela is tight enough with the Fade to Mind/Night Slugs crews to collaborate with them directly, so her beats come straight from the source: Bok Bok, Nguzunguzu, Girl Unit, FtM founder Kingdom, and other affiliated artists who’ve helped define a booming, severely stripped-down sound pieced together from bits of techno, grime, R&B, drum & bass, and dubstep’s pre-neon days. It’s well-constructed launchpad that she’s acquired for herself, and she doesn’t waste it.
Cut 4 Me is an ambitiously catchy record as well as being an aesthetically ambitious one. Essential to this is Kelela’s decision to play against the beats' moodiness—that juxtaposition drives the album’s likability. The beat by NA for “Do It Again” is horror-movie creepy, with a hypnotic John Carpenter-like keyboard figure looping over booming haunted house drums, which she decided to use as the foundation for an slow-motion sex jam straight out of the Aaliyah playbook. The Nguzunguzu-produced “Enemy” is as twitchily abrasive as the most staunchly underground first-wave dubstep, so she tops it with a cotton-candy pop-R&B vocal that could have been lifted from a turn of the millennium Brandy B-side.
Kelela’s an unlikely diva for a scene that’s attracted more than its share of dance music purists who don’t go in for frippery like vocalists, but it works. She also needs to close some of the gap between her ambition and what her voice is capable of—it’s a perfectly good voice, but lacks much of the expressiveness and power that singers who don’t come by those things naturally need time to develop. But this kind of works, too. A full-blast diva would obliterate the subtlety that the beats rely on, and the spunky-newcomer charisma that her performance projects imparts crucial warmth to their icy sounds.
The voice can be worked on, though. The more important things that Cut 4 Me teaches us about Kelela are that she has the taste to pick out a fantasy all-star team of collaborators, the talent to make herself heard over their beats, and the intelligence to get it all together at the exact right moment. That’s all instinct, and that can’t be learned. If she wants pop stardom—if not the five-star kind like Rihanna, then at least the cultishly-adored kind like her former tourmate Solange—she couldn’t be in a better place.
