Future, doof sticks, and the future

It’s hard to conceptualise the year that Future had in 2015. He dropped four albums, which itself is just absurd (that’s Lil B/Chris Crack-level prolific), and each of those was a legitimately significant release. Two of them were number one albums – DS2 being possibly the greatest trap record of the 2010s and What A Time To Be Alive, in collaboration with Drake, putting more eyes on Future than ever before. And the other two – Beast Mode and 56 Nights – formed the second and third acts of Future’s immortal mixtape trilogy. If not for 2015, we never get the origin story of toxic Future. If not for 2015, who else would have paved the way for the tortured trapper to ascend up the charts? It is a year written in rap folklore.

But Future’s 2015 did not happen in a vacuum. The first act of the aforementioned trilogy, Monster, dropped in late 2014 as the precursor to Future’s imperial year. For many fans, it is his masterpiece. Whether or not that’s true, it is probably the most Future album, the one that perfectly crystallises Future’s noxious, entrancing appeal. In its final minutes, Monster presents the most alluring song of Future’s career thus far, ‘Codeine Crazy’.

It's something of a rite of passage for rap fans to discover and then become transfixed by ‘Codeine Crazy’. It took until the depths of the second Victorian lockdown in 2020 for this moment to arrive for me, which feels obliquely appropriate in hindsight. The song is intoxicating by definition, not only because of the way Future raps to evade 808 Mafia’s world-swallowing beat, but also because it is quite literally born of intoxication. Future can’t get codeine off his mind. Every bar is written in purple; it haunts him at every turn: “Fuck the fame, I’m sipping lean when I’m driving / All this cash and it ain’t nowhere to hide it / I’m an addict and I can’t even hide it”. On the hook, Future’s voice rises into a strained falsetto – imitating the high he is driven to chase – and he delivers the song’s ultimate resolution: “All this motherfucking money got me codeine crazy”. The drugs are no longer a means to an end, but the end itself. It is tender and vicious at the same time.

Future was in no way the first rapper to write evocatively about drugs, but in hindsight it feels like ‘Codeine Crazy’ was a new beginning for substance-addled rap in the mainstream. Trap, which as a subgenre was not a new thing (with origins dating back to turn-of-the-century Atlanta), grew meteorically in popularity from 2015 to 2018 and somewhat normalised the emotional intensity that comes with rapping about drugs. This was a pretty fantastic new frontier for rap. As post-EDM poptimist fatigue set in, the mainstream music world began to tune in to a rap world that was moving in the opposite direction – manic, introspective, and at times genuinely harrowing. The dark energy of ‘Codeine Crazy’ bled into the sound of the Hot 100 and made mainstream rap particularly compelling. Many of the releases that went really big around this time are some of the best of their class in recent memory: Rodeo and ASTROWORLD, Die Lit, Culture, The Life of Pablo, Luv is Rage 2, Thug and Future’s various tapes, Without Warning, I could go on.

Then, in December of 2019, just over five years after the release of ‘Codeine Crazy’, Juice WRLD died of an opioid overdose. He was 21. It left the rap world reeling. Suddenly, it seemed a bit perverse how a haunting line like “I take prescriptions to make me feel a-okay” could fall on five billion deaf ears, and ‘Lucid Dreams’ was only one of the many tracks that cried for help while shooting up the charts in the late 2010s. In the wake of Juice’s death, rap entered the 2020s in a weird place. Future and Drake infamously dropped ‘Life is Good’ (a pretty mid track) about a week before COVID shut down the world. Jack Harlow regrettably became rap’s nascent superstar (even if ‘WHATS POPPIN’ was pretty solid). And in hindsight, many of the biggest rap songs of 2020 were infantile TikTok-bait: ‘ROCKSTAR’, ‘Mood’, ‘GOOBA’, ‘Addison Rae’, ‘Blueberry Faygo’, ‘ROXANNE’. Outside of a few excellent releases that year (Savage Mode II, Whole Lotta Red), mainstream rap was running out of steam. If trap was once a dark, magnetic response to a saccharine pop landscape, five years later it looked like a caricature of itself, sapped of the emotional intensity that had made the genre so exciting.

But I’m no rap historian, and this article isn’t really about the state of trap. The idea of a good thing slowly turning into caricature with mainstream exposure – this is how I feel about doof sticks. I went to BTV at the end of 2019 and saw doof sticks for the first time and they were a pleasant, vaguely reassuring surprise. There were always a handful in the dance tent and they were janky but pretty funny. At the time, having never really engaged that much with dance music nor spent much time on a dancefloor, they were actually a little comforting within that intense, shamanic environment. They served their purpose pretty successfully. Since 2019, though, those big festivals like BTV have changed quite a bit. Dance music in 2023 is a hot commodity (Falls, which was historically more band-focused, doesn’t exist anymore), the dance stages are bigger, and doof sticks are very, very much in.

It makes for slightly surreal viewing. Australian festival crowds this year have been overrun with road signage, fairy lights, and enough ket and 8-ball puns to last a lifetime. Videos of Four Tet’s headlining Pitch set are unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The scene is colourful, communal and convivial, but makes me wonder how sustainable it all is. At what point does the motivation for creating a doof stick slip from unbridled creativity into trend-hopping obligation? I’m beginning to suspect we have already reached it.

If it wasn’t already clear, I have a few gripes with the doof stick phenomenon. I worry that they are becoming a necessary condition for festival participation, rather than a legitimate expressive outlet. A box to be ticked, and an unconscious affirmation of the belief that you have to be fucked up to enjoy electronic music. I recognise that’s a very old-man-yells-at-cloud kind of criticism, though, so take it with a grain of salt. I don’t think they actually hurt the festival experience, but I do think their explosion in popularity is a kind of warning sign.

I want to zero in on the word ‘phenomenon’. It feels like this current moment is the peak of a doof stick trend that emerged from a niche and will not go on forever. Doof sticks are essentially an item of fashion, and things inevitably go out of fashion. That’s fine. But when I see a video like this, of Jayda G playing BTV, the critical mass of doof sticks seem to signify something unsustainable about the dance music scene itself. And although I have waffled on liberally in this essay, that point is genuinely significant. Dance music is too important of an underground institution and means too much to too many people to let collapse under the weight of its own hype.

You don’t have to open your eyes very wide to see that the community of DJs is oversaturated. The magnificent Anuraag Bhatia touches on this reality in the third edition of their ‘reforming cynic’ Substack, pointing to lower barriers to entry into DJing in 2023 than ever before as an explanation:

“The barrier to entry to DJing in 2023 is almost nonexistent for those with class privilege. If you can afford a pair of XDJ700s and a mixer, you can easily sleuth out your favourite DJ’s Bandcamp profile and buy 50 cool songs at a dollar a piece, then press the sync button on your Rekordbox-analysed tracks (giving you each song’s BPM, key, and a visual map for each song’s structure) and play a DJ set that the vast majority of people will recognise as somewhere between competent and good.”

Anuraag’s essay primarily concerns the extractive nature of professional DJing within the music ecosystem, but their insights ring true at all levels of amateur DJing as well. Seemingly everyone’s a DJ now, or is at least on the precipice, and yet there is only ever finite space in which to DJ. There is a limit to the number of house parties, clubnights, and bush doofs that time and space may allow. And while there are many new collectives doing exciting work, the proportion of DJs interested in generating enduring support for electronic music is shrinking. All of this means that while there is a lot of cursory interest right now in dance music releases, labels and events, a Newtonian reaction in the opposite direction may well be on the horizon.

It's not just about how normalised it has become to be a DJ. In the last two years, house and techno have reached a level of mainstream appeal not seen since Y2K, when Euro house was topping the UK charts. Fred again.. and Peggy Gou are crossover pop phenoms, ‘Freed from Desire’ is still inescapable, and ‘B.O.T.A’ took Interplanetary Criminal of all people to number one. But pop music is fundamentally trend-driven – not saying that’s necessarily a bad thing – and it would be naïve to expect this kind of buzz around the scene to persist. Festival-grade techno and trance is only getting harder and faster; fatigue has got to set in at some point. It might sound cynical, but I genuinely think that a mass rejection of dance music outside of the underground is about two years imminent.

Electronic music is in a bubble right now that is just waiting to burst. But is that necessarily a problem? I’m not sure. I worry for the health of the scene going forward, but it is heartening that renewed interest in festivals like Pitch and Strawberry are drawing more attention towards many deserving artists. More than anything, I think the hyped-up state of the dance music scene raises important questions about the future for artists, venues and the underground at large. More artists than ever before are investing their careers in electronic music; what happens to those prospects when punters start to react against the oversaturated DJ landscape? Many new club and event venues are being financed by private investment betting on the growing electronic music market; what happens if dance events lose mainstream popularity and the returns don’t materialise? And what happens to all the players in the underground scene – not just DJs, but producers, labels, promoters, record stores – when the scene has to eventually regenerate? This question is especially pressing in an era where artists tend to be exploited by the dominance of streaming services and music journalism is fighting to stay alive.

I don’t know the answers to these questions. Mostly, I just think it’s important that those questions are being asked, so we aren’t blindsided if the scene can’t survive as a mainstream entity. There is reason to be optimistic about the future, though. In the last few years, since pop-rap fell to its creative nadir, the rap world has fragmented. The biggest artists in rap have either removed themselves from the spotlight or carried on releasing work that pales in comparison to their best. Kanye, Kendrick, Drake, Travis, Cole, Wayne, Nicki, Future, Thug – for different reasons, none of them are nearly as essential as they might have been in 2018. Yet regional scenes feel as important as ever and the underground is practically bursting with talent. Hopefully this is the way forward for electronic music. Maybe soon we will hear about friends buying synthesisers and arpeggiators and throwing their doof sticks out the window because they want to make something real.

Sam Gollings

19 January 2024