SoundCloud Infinite Niches: Axioms on SoundCloud Rap

Talking Points Version. Miniatures. 1.1.

I’m in love with SoundCloud music: I love it

Because I become sound-sensual, a libidinous, pornographic dataism of the ear. I mate with my musical content and I mate with the sounds of new accounts. The beauty of the music is sometimes in direct proportion to its secrecy. To think that a music may be this good and yet so unknown is a principle of (hopefree) hope.

It feels, almost, Aztec.

First of all, some axioms, call them mathematical if you like:

CloudAxiom 1: ‘SoundCloud rap’, a term adopted by everyone from Tarpley Hitt to the New York Times, is the name of a limitation. ‘SoundCloud rap’ is not at all (just) Peep-XXX-Juice.

CloudAxiom 2: ‘SoundCloud rap’ is not (at all) (just) the music of (young) (black) death, or for that matter extinction. Since it may be Black Kray as much as Bod [包家巷], it is not a music cordoned off by what was once known as American black theory.

CloudAxiom 3: ‘SoundCloud rap’ is not rap. That is, ‘SoundCloud rap’ is not (has never just been) the music of rap, even when defined as the music of that undefinable thing that comes after the ‘Trap Music’ (see Simone White) that follows Hip Hop.

When I listen to this music, the digitus becomes the phallic ear, and this phallus-ear is see-through colour. To be ‘on SoundCloud’ is to be able to sign in without interrupting the music. It is its own niche-drug-thing (orange?), and the universal is listening.

When I listen to this music ‘on SoundCloud’ I sexualise the whole of the internet in a chaste way, like Sophia Coppola’s Little Mermaid, like pods. ‘SoundCloud rap’ becomes the opposite of a prohibition. The music is the app.

CloudAxiom 4: Devastation is not a psychological behaviour. The ‘end of the world’ that music theory sometimes fixes itself on and off is not a given from the point of view of recent SoundCloud rap, which is more of an iteration of all global and universal ends into something else, as well as their ecstasy.

Summary: ‘SoundCloud rap’, which is not (just) Peep-XXX-Juice, which is not (just) (young) (black) death (or extinction), and is not (just) rap, is also not (just) the psychological attitude of devastation. Extinction is not an attitude to life and not an injunction to act out or metabolise. In Pyrrhonist terms, aphasia would be the form of a positive indifference. ‘SoundCloud rap’, which we are now in a position to describe, is this musical aphasia.

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T.B.C. . . .