Julie Glassberg for The New York Times
The D.J. Baauer’s star is rising, which was evident when he played the Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, this month.
When the police showed up at the Fool’s Gold Day Off party this month, it wasn’t completely clear why. Sure, the lines for the event, held in an empty lot behind City Winery, in TriBeCa, had been long for much of the afternoon, but not evidently rowdy. There were some loose cannons: at least one person climbed a 20-foot-high fence and jumped over, only to get netted by security and removed.
Maybe they were nervous about the performers. Or make that the day’s final performer, the Bronx rapper French Montana, the most street-oriented artist on a bill of open-eared D.J.’s and rappers. In a show of force rarely seen at dance-music events in New York, but more common at hip-hop events, police officers gathered outside as the event was already thinning out, and then, during the set of the rapper Danny Brown — performing just before French Montana — shut it down.
The symbolism was heavy, as if aesthetic borders were the thing being policed. Truth is, though, certain wings of dance music have become a safe space for interactions with hip-hop, in so much as hip-hop is still at all considered unsafe. Record labels like Fool’s Gold and Mad Decent, which are hybrid by nature, have always had hip-hop in their DNA but release music of various stripes. And increasingly electronic music producers — not the mainstays of crossover dance music, but a younger generation more indebted to the Internet — are making music that straddles both worlds.
That’s the case with Rustie, from Scotland, who performed on Saturday as part of the Warm Up 2012 series at MoMA PS1 in Long Island City, Queens. Last year he released “Glass Swords” (Warp), an elegant album that in places — especially on “City Star” and “Cry Flames” — sounded like it could have come from a Southern hip-hop producer like Lex Luger. In this he has a lot in common with Hudson Mohawke and Lunice, similar-minded producers who recently released a thrilling collaborative self-titled EP as TNGHT (also on Warp).
At MoMA PS1 Rustie didn’t seem sure of which side of the debate he wanted to land on, so he chose both. He started out light, with disco-influenced house music, and bits of the house music classic “Coffee Pot (It’s Time for the Percolator)” by Cajmere. Later came some 2 Chainz and some Usher, and, toward the end of his set, a drill-bounce remix of Rick Ross’s grunting “Hold Me Back.”
Similar juxtapositions took place all afternoon at the Fool’s Gold event, which included D.J. sets by #BEEN #TRILL and Flosstradamus. Again there was no shortage of 2 Chainz vocals, and Flosstradamus especially connected the dots between current (mostly Southern) hip-hop and various dance-music styles.
In other words, it was a way to listen to hip-hop without actually having to listen to hip-hop. This segment of dance music is becoming a mediated space that’s beginning to recall, in effect but not style, the nu-metal of the late 1990s. That scene, for all its gauche music, served as an important and underacknowledged bridge between hip-hop and the mainstream, getting it in ears of fans who might not have sought it out directly.
The relationship between hip-hop and its hybridizers is less jarring, but still relevant. Rightly, there shouldn’t be a high wall, if any, between hip-hop and dance music. Both family trees trace back to disco and other, earlier, common roots. And in recent years forward-thinking electronic musicians and D.J.’s have been working on both sides of the line, or trying to. Girl Talk has been dicing up hip-hop as part of his pastiche D.J. sets and albums, making it as benign as any of the rock and pop he works with. In 2010 Mad Decent released “Free Gucci,” a collection of dance remixes of Gucci Mane songs. (A decade prior, Kid 606 was doing the same to N.W.A., much more aggressively and creatively.) There’s also been more subtle interplays, like that of the codeine-influenced (and extremely undanceable) post-dub of Salem. (These sorts of consonances underpin Pitchfork’s often good “Selector” video series, in which rappers freestyle over a beat made by an electronic music producer, who is often borrowing from hip-hop.)
Earlier this month, in the small hours of a Sunday morning, the rising talent Baauer played at the Glasslands Gallery in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, following a set of buoyant New Jersey club music by DJ Sliink, and mystifying, skeletal dubby post-footwork by Om Unit. Baauer’s bass was firm, and isolated in a way that felt rigid. Every couple of minutes vocals from a hip-hop song would cut through — ASAP Rocky’s “Goldie,” Trick Daddy’s “Nann,” Lady’s “Yankin,” the Slim Thug verse from Mike Jones’s “Still Tippin’ ” — but in each case, they were getting clobbered.
Baauer’s own breakthrough single, “Harlem Shake” (Jeffree’s/Mad Decent), works in similar fashion, building off the low end of Southern hip-hop, but also alluding to New York party rap like the Crooklyn Clan. It’s not nuanced, but it has complexity.
Much of that went out the window during his D.J. set. A couple of hundred fans, mostly men, were dancing intently, arms twitching in the air. Onstage Baauer was surrounded by several people doing the same; the one most studiously losing his mind was wearing a Slipknot T-shirt. It was a totally safe space.
