We Talked to The-Drum About The-Dream, Psychedelic R&B and the End of Genres

It's a cliche, but The-Drum's eyes really do light up when they talk about The-Dream. Retinas flex like biceps as Brandon Boom and Jeremiah Chrome rhapsodize over their namesake's studio techniques. I realize I'm in the presence of a quantity that's claimed much more often then it is encountered—authentic music nerdiness. I don't mean the self-appointed "epic win" nerdiness of fuckboy Reddit techies or the Fantasy Football-ish obsession of trend-hunting soundcloud "TRVPLVRDS." The-Drum are real-deal R&B acolytes, their boundary-pushing production aesthetic coupled with an intimate understanding of the genre's history and form. Contact, released in July, flipped pitched-up vocals, water droplets, and ambient drones into synthetic sensuality, across which transpired the loose narrative of a hacker breaking into pharmaceutical companies that sell hallucinatory audio-drugs. Many declared it "future R&B," but The-Drum maintain they are more psychedelic than futuristic—psychedelia informs our understanding of the present, forcing us to rethink its limits by surpassing them. The-Drum draw inspiration from 80's sci-fi novelist William Gibson, whose vision of the future included cyberwar, fleeting microtrends and constant technological mediation. In 2013, what's so futuristic about that?

Noisey: How did The-Drum start?
Jeremiah Chrome: We were friends for a few years before we ever made music or anything. Really it started with a weird experience that I had—I was on a lot of drugs and listened to an R&B song, and it sounded really psychedelic. It was “Sex Room” by Ludacris, but it didn’t sound anything like the actual version, it was an acid version. I never realized how psychedelic R&B was. I hit up Brandon and we started working together.

Brandon Boom: When we started making music we were just in our basement for like nine months banging out tracks every single day. We never sent them out, never tried to get press or anything. We were just cultivating the sound and trying to establish what we were going to do. A lot of producers come out with like two songs, and they start sending them out to blogs to market themselves. We did the total opposite of that. We didn’t even think that we were ever going to be a band, we just made music.

What were each of your formative experiences with R&B?
BB: I had a really young mom. She had me when she was like 16 so growing up she was really into music, always in the clubs. I remember getting Crystal Waters tapes and Toni Braxton tapes when I was a kid, I grew up with R&B. That led me right into gangsta rap like Tupac, Makaveli, that kind of stuff. I’ve always stayed into it.

JC: I didn’t come into R&B until my mid-20’s. Growing up I was about anything that was angry. I was a metal-head, played guitar. And then I slowly got into post-punk, which got me into dance music, which got me to DFA, and house. Once I got to Chicago I was fully into electronic music, but like space-disco house stuff. It wasn’t until I was around 24 that I started getting into R&B because that was definitely the antithesis to Slayer in high school. I just came at it backwards. I started a lot more through late-80’s and early-90’s R&B before coming full circle to the new stuff. Once I heard The-Dream it was over.

BB: The-Dream was a big thing that brought us together. The production on his vocals is so weird and psychedelic on a lot of his older tracks, panning and swirling around. We were definitely interested in that, especially the song “Fancy,” where it’s like an R&B song and the beat just doesn’t come in.

Do you feel like The-Dream is at the top of R&B right now?
BB: It has shifted a little bit. I feel like Jeremih now has a slight edge. If you listen to Late Nights with Jeremih, the way that it’s mixed and mastered is amazing, although it’s not better than The-Dream’s first and second album.

JC: I think that an issue is that The-Dream was working with Tricky Stewart on every release, and that guy seems to be why it was mixed so amazingly. The production on the new record is not bad, but it doesn’t sound so insanely THX "wooooomm” hi-def.

And he moved away from the '80s shit.
JC: Yeah, there was always a Prince song.

BB: Usually on a The-Dream record you have three types of songs—the sensitive ballad, the sexy banger, the Prince jam, and then some kind of cheesy dance thing. On the newest record he just went with one kind of style.

What did you think of 1977?
BB: At first I wasn’t sure, and then it grows on you. Now I love every song on that record.

JC: To me, 1977 is all about the first four tracks. Those are really good.

I love the song with the line about buying a boat on the toilet.
JC: “Click yes. Bought it.” He is buying a Porsche, a yacht, and a house all on the toilet. That one’s also a good example of one of my favorite things about The-Dream which is the pitched-down chanting chorus that starts off the song.

If you could play with an ideal lineup in an ideal setting, what would that look like?
BB: In the theater where Abraham Lincoln was shot…

JC: [mimicking Brandon’s voice] I’m going to say something that is totally not what you would say.

BB: Should we limit it to just R&B, because that helps a lot. Definitely R. Kelly, The-Dream, Keith Sweat. Actually, let’s narrow it down to the 90’s. Okay, so Jodeci, R. Kelly, Keith Sweat. There has to be a girl in there, Crystal Waters…Toni Braxton.

JC: No, no, SWV.

BB: SWV. Here we go. Now we’re cooking with gas. R. Kelly, SWV, Keith Sweat. Jodeci, and then Nate Dogg comes out. Everyone is like, “What the hell?” And it's not a hologram. It’s actually Nate Dogg.

JC: I’d say some sort of tropical island would be good.

BB: And on the obscure tip, I would like to see a show with this group called Reel Tight. There are all these amazing 90s R&B groups. And Gyrl with a y. That could be a side show that’s also amazing.

You've produced for Chicago rapper Kit. How did that process work?
JC: One thing about the Kit project I’m very excited about is how collaborative it is. I'd have a beat and then he'd come over and I'd sing a hook and he'd be like, "That's cool." I hate the idea of working with others over the internet. I’m really into doing a lot of vocal takes—normally when people record they get one or two takes and then they're done. When I work with people I try to get them to do like five good takes, and then I go and line everything up so I can have the vocal processing the way I want it. Also I want to work with him there even when we're not recording so that he can be like, "That's dope" or "I’m not really into this."

You’ve cited the novels of William Gibson as an influence. Do you think we’re living in a time when his cyberpunk perspective is increasingly relevant?
JC: I definitely think it’s becoming increasingly relevant.

BB: It was relevant when it came out too. Totally.

JC: He created the term cyberspace. I feel like the William Gibson who wrote Neuromancer in 1980 would be disappointed with what we’re living in now, as far as how we interact with technology. I hope that it starts to morph into something a little more edifying than it is right now. You have access to all information and you can learn about anything, but there’s a disconnect with paying attention and attention span. I don’t even have a smartphone, but I’ll just be at a table and there are seven people staring at their fucking phone. I don’t think that’s a good application of technology. It stops human communication and interaction, which is counter-productive.

BB: People like to say that we’re trying to make future music. Really, we’re looking back and idealizing a 1980’s vision of the future.

When I think of your music as representative of some kind of futurism I’m thinking about the way you take sounds evocative of technology and infuse them with an expressionistic R&B sensibility, with cyborg-like results.
JC: I’ve said for a long time there’s nothing new at this point for music. It’s more like the new hybridization of things. You could be the first person that takes this influence and this influence and makes something out of that. When we first came out everyone was describing us as “post-dubstep” and some other signifiers that felt inaccurate. One cool thing about the internet and the technology we have now is like, when I was in high school, you had to read the review and go to a store and try and find it used if you thought it was good. Now you can stream every album on the internet. You don’t need a person to tell you what it is. I feel like that has helped move away from genre distinctions. The only genre I have been comfortable at all with for The-Drum is psychedelic R&B.

BB: It was never about making futuristic R&B, it was about making music that sounds like you are on drugs. Audio hallucinations. That is how we went off on that sci-fi concept for Contact, the idea of an audio-visual pharmaceutical company selling audio programs for different sensations.

Has synthesis has replaced genre for you?
JC: For sure. Even when I try straight-up copying something it doesn't come out that way. It’s always filtered through my sensibilities. For a long time I would try and exactly copy certain beats, and people would say, “This sounds fucking weird, I don’t know what you’re talking about.” So that is mixed with a purposeful attempt to push the idea of genre. I feel like in 2013 it is endemic of music journalism where a writer will throw a genre tag out just to make something easier to write about. It goes from journalistic to editorial. That’s where a lot of those random genre titles come from. It’s not because anyone who makes the music calls them that. It is not because anybody in that scene calls it that. It’s because somebody was like, “I got a deadline, let me write this shit.”

There's a sick William Gibson quote about a future ruled by microtrends: "Fads swept the youth of the Sprawl at the speed of light; entire subcultures could rise overnight, thrive for a dozen weeks, and then vanish utterly."
JC: Literally. Musical cycles have started becoming smaller and smaller. By the time of Witch House and Chillwave it started to get super fucking compacted and you would have just have heard of something and then it was like, “Oh that’s over. Didn’t you hear?” We are genuinely trying to get away from genre because we don’t want to be here for a second and then, like, “Oh, they were that vaporwave band.”

At the same time, it seems like modern modes of consumption are opening a lot of opportunities by breaking down the divide between a so-called “generic mainstream” and a “creative underground.”
JC: Oh, definitely. I don’t think the core of that will ever actually change, there’s too much of a market for it. But all of those markets are splintering so much that they feel like they have to have everything. That’s what most of the majors are feeling at this point—they have to have David Guetta and that shit, but also Evian Christ and Arca are producing on Kanye tracks. If you told me that a year ago I would be like, “You are fucking lying. There is no way that is happening.” That direction will have ripple effects.

Ezra Marcus is on Twitter—@Ezra_marc