clipping.

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clipping.
Clipping 01.svg
Hutson, Diggs and Snipes (2017)
Hutson, Diggs and Snipes (2017)
General information
origin Los Angeles , United States
Genre (s) Experimental hip-hop , industrial hip-hop
founding 2009
Website www.clppng.com
Current occupation
Daveed Diggs
William Hutson
production
 Jonathan Snipes

Clipping (stylized as clipping. ) Is an American experimental hip hop trio from Los Angeles . It consists of rapper Daveed Diggs and two producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes. Their second album Splendor & Misery , which tells an afrofuturistic space story, brought the group one of two nominations for the Hugo Award in 2017 .

Band history

Debut and record deal

Clipping was created in Los Angeles in 2009 as a remix project by producers William Hutson and Jonathan Snipes, who played together in the noise band Unnecessary Surgery. While Hutson studied theater studies and performance art and later received his Ph.D. with a dissertation on experimental music. Acquired, Snipes also worked as part of the electro-pop duo Captain Ahab and film composer. Without commercial intent, they first wrote their own beats between noise and power electronics , which they mixed with raps from other artists. In the spring of 2010, Daveed Diggs , who had been friends with Hutson since primary school, joined as a rapper. In February 2013, the three released their first mixtape midcity via Bandcamp , which earned them the title of “Band of the Week” by the British Guardian . It also caught the attention of Sub Pop , where Diggs, Hutson and Snipes landed their first joint recording deal just three months later.

CLPPNG and Wriggle

The first full-fledged studio album the band was titled CLPPNG in June 2014 at the former Grunge - label Sup Pop. While the band had received some confused reactions for their mixtape, they tried to produce more traditional beats and to adapt genre-typical styles on their label debut. The album, which contains a John Cage cover version as a closer, received mostly positive reviews and reached number 46 on the Top R & B / Hip-Hop Albums . Clipping took two years for their next release, the six-track EP Wriggle . In addition to the theme song sampled by the British band Whitehouse , the track shooter in particular caused a sensation. To record it, the band members fired a total of 15 different firearms that they had borrowed from a friend's father, and spun three fictional stories around the unconventional drumbeat. The music video shows Daveed Diggs with simple choreography standing in the middle of a green screen, while the storylines described in the text play around him.

Studied actor Diggs also pursued a career in theater and won both a Tony and a Grammy Award for his roles as Marquis de Lafayette and Thomas Jefferson on the Broadway musical Hamilton .

Splendor & Misery

In September 2016, the band released their second studio album Splendor & Misery ( German about "pomp and misery"), which was largely created on the modular synthesizer in Snipes' cellar and entered the top R & B / Hip-Hop album at number 16. Unusually for hip-hop, the album is characterized by a continuous plot that was conceived by Hutson and packed into rap lyrics by Diggs. The afrofuturistic - dystopian concept album tells - based on an alternative outcome of the American Civil War - the last survivor of a slave revolt on an interstellar space freighter, with which the on-board computer falls in love. In a reversal of Lovecraft's cosmicism, the protagonist decides to turn away from the world known to him and heads for the great unknown. The album cover, designed by Hutson, shows a barefoot slave in a space suit and acts as an allusion to the portrayal of runaway slaves in the American media of the 20th century, made famous by Jacob Lawrence .

This extraordinary project brought Clipping 2017 a nomination for the Hugo Award in the category "Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form)". So was Splendor & Misery his first album since Paul Kant former Blows Against the Empire in 1971 and has been nominated for the prestigious science fiction prize. In the end, however, it couldn't prevail against the competition - including TV series such as Game of Thrones and Doctor Who .

Towards the end of the 2016 presidential election campaign , the trio contributed the diss track Fat Fingers to the anti- Trump playlist project 30 Days, 30 Songs . The music video includes a recording of a man smashing the future president's star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame with a pimple .

The Deep and Face

In August 2017, Clipping produced the song The Deep for episode # 623 We Are the Future of the radio program This American Life , which ties in with the Afrofuturism of Splendor & Misery . The five and a half minute track tells the story of a group of slave descendants who live in the depths of the Atlantic Ocean and try to defend themselves against the oil industry. The band was again considered in the same category by the Hugo Awards, but had to give up again.

Clipping's latest EP Face was released for download on their Bandcamp page in May 2018 .

style

In contrast to many other bands, Clipping do not rehearse together and pursue a more academic approach to their work. The three members are inspired by their sideline activities and preferences for science fiction and avant-garde composers of the 20th century. Clipping describe their style of music as "party music for the club that you shouldn't have visited", "the car that you no longer know how you ended up in" or "the streets where you don't feel safe" . The brutal background noise, stylistically attributable to noise and compositionally to musique concrète , consists, for example, of smashing concrete blocks, running water, crumpling beer cans, rolling ball bearings, singing thermos flasks or a ringing alarm clock. The rap music, which is "deconstructive" according to laut.de , also experiments with glitch and sub-bass . The Guardian ruled that Clipping would take Death Grips ' staccato noise to the next level on their debut mixtape and sound like they were trying to bend Industrial Metal into a new, brutal form. Despite the noise production, clipping is definitely part of the hip-hop tradition.

The band's willingness to experiment is also evident in the lyrics. On the debut album CLPPNG, for example, the word “I” (I), which is the most common word in hip-hop, does not appear in the lyrics once. In this way, a typical contradiction in rap texts - between individuality and authenticity on the one hand and the use of generic codes on the other - was played with. The band compared this limited writing technique with the authors Georges Perec ( La Disparition ) and Walter Abish (Alphabetical Africa) . Rapper Daveed Diggs is stylistically based on contemporary West Coast rap and often delivers his lyrics aggressively and quickly. The verses of the song Shooter refer to the so-called hashtag rap. Daniel Gerhardt von der Zeit sees the band's “wonderfully ugly” and uncompromising approach as “ subversive intentions”, but not a declaration of war on the status quo, but rather the love of rap.

Discography

Mix tapes

  • 2013: midcity

Studio albums

Singles and EPs

  • 2012: dba118 ( EP )
  • 2014: Something They Don't Know
  • 2014: Knees on the Ground
  • 2016: Wriggle (EP)
  • 2016: Fat Fingers
  • 2016: Body for the Pile
  • 2017: The Deep
  • 2018: Face (EP)

Awards and nominations

Hugo Award

  • Nomination 2017
  • Nomination 2018
    • Best Dramatic Presentation (Short Form): The Deep

Web links

Commons : clipping.  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c Biography - Clipping. laut.de , accessed on September 16, 2018 .
  2. ↑ a b Paul Lester: Clipping (No 1,448). The Guardian , February 8, 2013, accessed September 16, 2018 .
  3. ↑ a b c d e f g clipping. Sub Pop , accessed September 16, 2018 .
  4. ↑ a b clipping. - Chart history. Billboard , accessed September 16, 2018 .
  5. ↑ a b Brittany Spanos: Clipping, 'Hamilton' Star's Rap Trio, Talk Noisy Life Beyond Tony Win. Rolling Stone , June 24, 2016, accessed September 16, 2018 .
  6. ^ A b c Jason Heller: Why clipping.'s Hugo Nomination Matters for Music in Science Fiction. Pitchfork , April 7, 2017, accessed September 16, 2018 .
  7. ↑ 2017 Hugo Awards. Retrieved September 16, 2018 .
  8. ↑ Cameron Wade: Clipping. Fit a Lot of Trump Insults into Two Minutes in Today's "30 Days, 30 Songs". Paste, October 28, 2016, accessed September 16, 2018 .
  9. ↑ 2018 Hugo Awards. Retrieved September 17, 2018 .
  10. ↑ Daniel Gerhardt: Hiebe out of love for rap. Zeit Online , June 16, 2014, accessed September 16, 2018 .