Bedroom Beats & B-sides

Book excerpt: The first decades of the 21st century saw dramatic changes in the music industry as new technology transformed creation, communication, and consumption. Amid this turmoil one change occurred relatively quietly, almost naturally: so-called bedroom producers, music makers raised on hip-hop and electronic music, went from anonymous, often unseen creators to artists in their own right. In Bedroom Beats & B-sides: Instrumental Hip Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century, Laurent Fintoni details the rise of a new generation of bedroom producers at the turn of the century through the stories of various instrumental hip-hop and electronic music scenes. From trip-hop, jungle, illbient, and IDM in the 1990s to just "beats" in the late 2000s, the book explores how these scenes acted as incubators for new ideas about composition and performance that are now taken for granted. Combining social, cultural, and musical history with extensive research, the book tells the B-side stories of hip-hop and electronic music from the 1990s to the 2010s and explores the evolution of a modern beat culture from local scenes to a global community via the diverse groups of fringe idealists who made it happen and the external forces that shaped their efforts. Includes quotes and stories drawn from more than 100 interviews with producers, DJs, label owners, and more including James Lavelle, Charlie Dark, Luke Vibert, Mark Pritchard, Flying Lotus, Georgia Anne Muldrow, El-P, Hudson Mohawke, Kode9, Prefuse 73, Anti Pop Consortium, Dabrye, Waajeed, Tekilatex, Ghislain Poirier, Kutmah, LuckyMe, Benji B, The Bug, and many more. Bedroom Beats & B-sides is the first comprehensive history of the instrumental hip-hop and electronic scenes and a truly global look at a thirty-year period of modern music culture based on a decade of research and travel across Europe, North America, and Japan.