Rap Blog: H31R’s introspective dance music is a minor pang of anxiety

Have you ever been totally faded in the club? Not falling over, falling asleep drunk – glassy-eyed and slow-responsive, nodding along listlessly to the beat, more fatigued than fried. You can reach this plateau sober too, this quasi-nirvana where music bypasses conscious thought and flows neatly to the mind’s ether, a fertile ground for minor epiphanies. It is here, in this hypnagogic cloud, that you might find yourself tightly bound to the tracks as a “Train of Thought” barrels toward you. Nightclubs are escapist by nature, but wherever you go — there you are.

H31R’s synthetic melange of electronic and hip-hop can feel familiar at first blush, a little bit Anz, a little bit Channel Tres. As the eclectic duo’s MC maassai put it in an interview last month, “We’re collectively making a fusion of [music] created by people around the African diaspora [and] claiming our space in that.” But with a bit of focused attention, the incongruities on their November album HeadSpace begin to stack up: the anxiety creeping around the edges of JWords’ production, the tilted introspection of maassai’s metacognitive monologues. It’s hard to know if you should stand up and dance or sit down and reflect.

Those contradictory impulses shine through on “Train of Thought,” where maassai’s rapid-fire musings meet an insistent, escalating beat. “I ain’t eat dinner yet but I’m so full of myself I could skip it yes,” she raps, barreling forward breathlessly. “At times I be up in my feelings but / That only last for a little sec.” A brief pang of self-consciousness soon buried by the knowledge that “the meaning of life is past self.”