The music speaks for itself, but it wasn’t just about the beats. He made those beats until he physically couldn’t anymore; until the fingers that so elegantly graced each button on his MPC 3000 stood still. Dilla loved what he did more than anything else, and he rode off into the sunset while all of us were left bobbing our heads, with tears in our eyes.
Vaporwave. An internet “microgenre,” ill-defined as lazy, unimportant, slowed-down elevator music, embodies the outlook of millennials, Generation Z and even some of the more disillusioned members of earlier postmodernity.
On a Saturday morning in Brooklyn, 11 teenage boys sit around in a circle harmonizing sounds. They use their mouths, hands, pencils and even a piece of hard Starburst candy against classroom desks. “Now that was better than last time,”…