Hey – do you love clipping.? Yeah, me too. They’re…amazing. So, I’m excited that something I wrote about their 2016 record, Splendor & Misery has recently been published.
Here’s an abstract:
ABSTRACT: Upon first listen, clipping.’s record Splendor & Misery (2016) is a strange document: an Afrofuturist record that is as much Euro-American avant-garde as it is hip hop. In its swarms of beats, harsh noise, hip hop flow, and gospel it tells the story of an enslaved man lost among the stars. This chapter discusses the admixture of the record’s sound world and considers how the activity of listening is itself mobilized in the construction of the subject’s agency and self-determination. Constitutive of the self, listening also points the way to engagement with plurality and the political. With the void of the cosmos as a stand-in for the existential void of the human predicament—fated to make meaning in a cosmos to which humanity may have no consequence—Splendor & Misery reflects a type of a nihilist perspective that invites the listener to transcend annihilation and engage with the promise of the unknown.
Find my chapter, “Finding Home in the Unknown: Sounding Self-Determination from the Streets to the Void,” in the recently published collection, Sonic Identity at the Margins. Many thanks to editors Joanna K. Love and Jessie Fillerup for putting this all together, and for suggesting helpful revisions of the manuscript. It’s a great collections of essays – check it out.
AJ Kluth 