Bedroom Beats and B-Sides: Instrumental Hip Hop & Electronic Music at the Turn of the Century

272 pages
Text(s) by Laurent Fintoni
21.6 x 13.9 cm
Language: English
Softcover
Publisher: Velocity Press
2020

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 and B-sides, Laurent Fintoni details the rise of bedroom producers at the turn of the century through the stories of the instrumental hip-hop and electronic music scenes that made this rise possible. From trip-hop, illbient, and IDM to leftfield hip-hop, glitch, and beats, 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 and over 100 interviews, the book tells the B-side stories of hip-hop and electronic music from the 1990s to the 2010s, exploring the evolution of a modern beat culture from local scenes to global community via the diverse groups of idealists on the fringes who made it happen and the external forces that shaped their efforts.