ARCADE KID (9)
By:
November 30, 2023
We are pleased to present ARCADE KID, a ’90s “drivethru” written, illustrated, and soundtracked by HILOBROW friend Nikhil Singh. Our readers are urged to check out Nikhil’s dystopian psychedelic-noir novel Club Ded (Luna Press, 2020).
1993 saw an atomic explosion of RnB and post-Nymphs ‘Modern Rock’. The nuclear strike was deafening, wilting all the fragile lilies blooming on the edge of Anglo-oblivion. Whitney Houston’s title track on the Bodyguard killed everything within a light-year radius. On the wrong side of the tracks, gasoline was fed to the disparate fires of UK’s ‘Indie’ scenes. Trends shifted. A new, hyper-commercial era. Echoes of the original cyber techno boom, struggling in pockets, morphing into EBM and countless sub-genres. Rave blossoming. The Bristol Sound. It’s trip-hop labels, quickly subverted by mavericks like Tricky, who toured metal drummer versions of his dreamy hits. The unexpected commercial appeal of Portishead. Dank vinyl cuts and post John Barry audiophilia. Revisiting Thunderball with a Molotov Cocktail. Influencing the influencers. Jungle beats. Dub. Brixton nights. Genre-fication, driven by corporate interests. MTV thinking. Music videos for everything. Drug stars. Washed out colour palettes. Whiteout fades. Sickening sunflower imagery. More jaded throwbacks to the early 90s mod revival. This thing called the internet, still in its infancy. A new incarnation of cyberpunk flowering on television. Bruce Wagner’s anarchic Wild Palms. Produced by Oliver Stone, featuring a timely cameo by William Gibson. Wagner was a dark horse. An initiate of Carlos Castaneda. Global spiritual movements. The voices behind the wall. Houston had that chopped and screwed pedigree. DJ Screw legacies everywhere. More than simple slow motion. ‘Dragging’ BPM had been around for some time. V/VM’s Sick Love in 2000. That gruesome, but perfect Lady in Red remix. A clear through-line from Chopped and Screwed, but with a Euro flavour. Even in Houston, factions argued about who was technically more innovative, between Darryl Scott, Screw and Michael Price. DJ Screw’s real impact was more of a social phenomenon. A product of his idiosyncratic musical knowledge, maverick creativity and grass-roots cottage industry. Since youth, DJ Screw was a bedroom producer. Proto-internet Savant. Amassed a vast musical archive. Tinkered with it. Morphing it by hand. His corner of Houston was less about dancing than blazing. The eclectic screw-tapes formed lines to his gate. Such was the market, cops thought he was trading narc. He opened up new worlds of music to his listeners. Free from the constraints of any industry. To such a degree, that he could single-handedly promote acts to financial independence. It was home-grown subculture. Influencing the commercial sphere directly. Something mirrored in the new, emerging online scene. Future-echo of download culture — rendered in analogue.
More NIKHIL SINGH at HILOBROW: DREAMING MEDIA (Q&A) | JOURNEY TO IXTLAN | HASHTAG FASHION POLICE PROBLEMS | ILLUMINATE OR DISSIPATE? | HATE ISLAND. ALSO: HADRON AGE SF (2004–2023) | ORIGINAL FICTION at HILOBROW.