i totally get your intention and the evolution of this thread

but i'm also trying to see it from the perspective of outsiders, for instance people who don't really fw sLUms but don't know any of their collaborators

many of them will probably lump them with their collaborators (and/or competitors running with a similar sound) who came up at the same time - just by reading the thread title etc - that's in the nature of association via very few letters/signs. not everyone is willing to do research, which is totally fine (definitely not fine in the case of a journalist though lmao, that's true and goes without saying)

i don't know if i have a better suggestion, i only lurk this thread every once in a while but from what i know it's mostly revolving around (at least that's what it has become i guess) underground artists who came up in the mid to late 2010s doing the new alternative hip-hop sound. so idk, something along these lines would be more fitting

SLUms don't really exist tbh. You could just say "mike, navy, siifu, keiyaa, akai, etc."

everyone that posts regularly wouldn't be confused lol.

there's been this label "Lo-NY" which I think was actually coined by another rym list. I honestly really hate that label lol not just because it reduces this sound to being "lo-fi" (cursed) but also because it tries to claim it to being a NY thing, when the beauty of this network is how inter-regional it is. Yes, NY plays an important role, but still.

still it seems to have caught on enough so that Big Flowers even talked about artists labelling themselves that

another cursed discourse imo is the whole thing of trying to claim MIKE as "hypnagogic pop" ("evok[ing] cultural memory and nostalgia for the popular entertainment of the past (principally the 1980s)") or vaporwave on rym which is total bullshit and like lowkey gentrifying?

underground... some artists in here rly dislike that label too, I think it's actually sorta neutral/ so established it's not negative at least, it's also very vague tho.

Plus it doesn't really get to the bottom of this particular aesthetic. Neither would a very broad label like alternative. This scene got contacts now to Roc Marciano, Ka, Boldy etc who would all be considered underground legends but very few of the artists here really rap about being "street" that much (Sideshow being one exception maybe). Plus it does seem to be a generation thing, the people we talk about here are almost always quite young.

Thematically it's more about personal issues/depression, community, socialism, Blackness in general terms, but also intersectionality, feminism, queerness... it's also lowkey like a whole attitude, MIKE said something about this in the interview with Sideshow which imo you can transfer to the influence of slums in general:

sLUms really started off as a group of friends from different backgrounds and sh*t. At the time we was all in crazy situations, at least at the times because we was young. We really just helped each other out. It was six homies — me, Ruben, Darryl, King, Adé and the homie Mason and we would really just create sh*t. I feel like we introduced a new energy. Low-key just on some love sh*t in the city — I’m not gonna cap, before that I feel like everybody was tryna be a cool guy. It was weird. We low-key made n*ggas loosen up in the hood.

I think there was another quote somewhere about the smiling... that it's really central to this too I feel. Like the MIKE line "grinning through a bunch of bad s***".

So I dunno, that's why I like what the slums label represents, but it's true it needs to be properly contextualized, on twitter some people have started calling it the "slums sound", I don't know if that isn't reductive as well because the sound got expanded so much by so many different people, there are so many interpretations of it already in different genres as well, feels like reducing all these innovations to being simple followers. I tried "slums network" now? Kinda like the word network in this context

edit: some people on rym also tried "slums-adjacent" which imo is sorta alright but also extremely far from catchy

Mavi x Alc song is amazing

Dabbling into political territory I love it

Too much party bullshit in the younger rap nowadays, somebody needs to start thinking outside the box

good looks on the context with these one and a half MIKE quotes fr, making this discussion lively

especially with that context i see why you're holding onto the sLUms association

we're definitely opening a Pandora's box with the topic about artists disliking labels attached to their music - which is one of the reasons why i think the goal must be to find the least problematic label

it's definitely understandable no artist wants to be the "+" of something they were not even originally and most importantly officially a part of

but as you wrote before, this whole thing has become a way bigger movement. NY as a location and sLUms as one collective being a major core or rather catalyst of said movement can still be included

i personally don't feel the label "slums sound" either
"network" is a great term for a label though imo, since it highlights the social connections and aspects rather than deducting to categorisation by similar sound

Nice :) I think I'm sorta happy with this too for now thx for your critique

Another Slauson x Keiyaa show in LA, with exclusive new merch in a collab with Braindead?

More Mavi otw? 👀

Miracle Baby is the greatest song I ever heard.

Zeroh not joining IR because he got vaccinated too late :/

Instead this guy is joining, fiire dance music (mastered by Zeroh)
colloboh.bandcamp.com/album/entity-relation-ep

in other Zeroh news, he and Fat Tony got a feature on this new Jamire Williams single, amazing track!!!

plus more raps otw apparently

Great track. Excited to hear that album in full when its out, sounded interesting.

And man I just love the way Zeroh raps. Desperately need more music from him with that front and center.

Never heard of Fat Tony, but he and Siifu are featured on this upcoming Steel Tipped Dove album. Can’t wait

New wiki gets bnm on pitchfork

They really will guzzle anything related to navy blue at this point

randomly stumbled upon this earlier this year lol thought it's weird but kinda hard

As they should 👆 real

"Plenty of the beats on Half God feel like they could have appeared on any of MIKE’s last few releases, which were also produced by Navy Blue"

???

today! no chill

wrote them and now it's

"Plenty of the beats on Half God feel like they could have appeared on past MIKE releases, which were occasionally peppered with Navy Blue beats."

I don't know if it's that much of a statement now but lol

Im ready

King Carter seemingly implying slums is not dead?

All these dudes have to stay off reddit man smh

yuh