This was my first reaction there was a rym list too called Drumless and I thought that's stupid as hell and weirdly entitled to let white users come up with hip-hop subgenres now but rym didn't invent that term it's actually producers themselves.

You read their description last page? They do acknowledge that it goes back at least as far as RZA but that it became a more prominent sound. Don't think they're wrong tbh

I dunno I mean I'm all for looking at labels critically and with hip-hop especially it's always hard to separate stuff, but like, that s*** is undeniably useful for discussion, recommendation etc. And artists do work in certain lanes consciously too.

Like on a very basic level yes Future and Mach-Hommy are both hip-hop but obviously apart from that super general label their music hardly sounds anything alike. We established discourse so we can call one trap and one "underground". Then someone like Lucki comes of course and confuses that too but that's part of the game

@insertcoolnamehere just went through twitter search filtered by ppl I follow... there's def been a good amount of discourse on this by producers in the last 3 years. And it seems like Roc Marci was one of the first peeps to call it just "drumless" (or "drumless fire" lol)

...you can only do 10 embeddeds per post apparently

It's actually a surprisingly good description of SRS too, I think nowhere2go might actually be the only track with added drums and Dec 24 and ontheway the only ones with prominent drums in the sample. Should get the vote for primary genre on there tbh.

Obviously it's significant to be able to describe the production on there since the sound of that album was so a massively influential, highkey one of the core touchstones of this whole scene.

its a fine characteristic of a sound but in no way representative of what it actually is. its like calling s*** mumble rap because 'but you cant understand what they're saying!!!'. I hope it wont stick.

as far as any other suggestions, I remember Diary Rap floating around in 2018 and kinda liked it. at this point im sure there wont be any name for it until at least a few years later when ppl start looking at our modern s*** retrospectively.

I dont know one rapper from 'the scene' who uses a name or wants people to use a particular name for the music that they or their peers make, and I'm completely at peace with that. I still use lo-fi sometimes lol but thats mostly for brevity, I think something neutral like 'new wave underground' would apply here fine

like when we talk about drumless I think of daringer and mixtape wsg, not navy blue who has 'drums' in most of his songs. they mention that in the description and then justify making this an umbrella term for all underground genres of music? like why? there's a reason why we dont call J Dilla and somebody like DJ Paul 'sample-based hip hop' because that wouldn't make one bit of sense grouping them together unless you want to be super technical about it

all in all, a very dumb attempt at putting categories onto music coming from a website that im not very fond of anyhow. I get why they're doing it now since they've been around for so long and actually want to legitimize themselves, but im not huge on that general approach to begin with so f*** it

I don’t like the idea of calling this music anything but hip-hop but people do kind of take the idea of subgenres a little too seriously. It really is more for ease of discussion among listeners than anything. Who cares what name someone uses if you know exactly what they’re talking about when they say it 🤷🏽‍♀️ Doesn’t make the music any less good, and if the idea of rap without a lot of drums turns you off, you’re not gonna like it no matter what its fans decide to call it.

Ok I’m ok with the term now as long as the artists made it the term

Lol

yeah this. makes it hard to argue with imo and lowkey good on rym for recognizing it (before any of us even took note apparently lol)

And also this, haha. If the artists themselves are using the term (albeit seemingly ironically in some of those tweets), f*** it.

Why every nigga on Instagram
Rap like Mike, Mach Hommy or Earl Sweatshirt now

Please link someone who’s trying to rap like Mach.

I don't wanna do that to niggas with no clout. But it's a lot of niggas

Real

I'll say this though, I know a lot of niggas in the DMV that have that same lazy flow over drumless beats.
It's equivalent to when girls do that little sing/talk thing

I hear more random Earl acolytes than Mach ones. Like, multilingual bars and everything?

shoegaze was a term used derogatorily at first but the genre ended up being known as that too

I feel like most rock subgenres apart from maybe hardcore have all started out derogatorily, haha. Emo, nu-metal, hair metal, funk rock. I believe the first time “punk” was used to describe music it was on a flyer for a Suicide gig that the band themselves made, but a punk still used to just be someone in prison who sucked d*** (insert Starker adlib) for cigarettes.

It's not about no drums but rather no additional drum patterns or breaks laid on top but rather (if at all) only "leftover" drums from the sample kept in the loop which then create unconventional patterns which are different from boom bap etc. Navy is def a prime example of that style tbh. Also he considers Ka his biggest influence, who in turn along with Marci is seen as probably the most influential in making this a thing through the 2010s.

Dump Gawd: Hommy Edition is high in the charts and was mainly produced by Sage, Earl and Alc and is actually a very good example of the style tbh (and in context of this younger scene one of the earliest examples too)

(of course you could make a point Dilla by this definition also pioneered drumless, Donuts probably has some joints which would qualify as early examples, some Madlib joints too probably)

Wrote a longer post about this where I phrased it as a question but deleted it because I think it’s pretty undeniable: SRS is the 808s & Heartbreak of underground rap, as far as how divisive it was and how influential it’s been.