Under a Street Halo: Night Bus and the Commuter Soundtrack
Apologies for the extended, somewhat unexpected hiatus/silence on my part. I’m in the midst of a few things — some negative but ultimately inconsequential, some positive in ways I can’t wait to elaborate on — but I’ve got some plans to get things going again here shortly. In the meantime, please enjoy this piece from the Pop Conference archives: a presentation I made in 2014 on the concept of “night bus” as a vibe-turned-genre-or-vice-versa.
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In an August 2009 review for the website The Line of Best Fit, critic Angus Finlayson tackled the debut album of indie-pop band The xx with all the enthusiasm of a self-conscious skeptic. The advance notice of so-called “glo-fi” bedroom-ambient acts like Neon Indian, Washed Out, and Toro y Moi had already started to become A Thing in earnest, and by the end of the year it would be coined “chillwave” by Hipster Runoff’s trendsetting-slash-trendeulogizing Carles and snarked at in countless blogs’ “The Decade in Doomed Microgenres” listicles. In his attempts to set The xx apart from mere hype-cycle product, Finlayson dropped an interesting phrase about their London bonafides: “location plays a vital role here; beyond the usual pap about ‘night-bus’ music – as if our capital was the only conurbation to provide nocturnal transport – there is definitely something of The Big Smoke about this album.” Aside from the common practice of connecting music to city in something more (literally) concrete than just likeminded scenesterism, that passage not only hints at the idea of an evocatively named microgenre, but declares the talk around it to be worn-out and superficial.
Whatever “night bus” meant as a trend, a group of messageboard users, some of whom were actual musicians, started working towards their own definition. The board 'Hipinion’ started a number of threads around summer of 2010 toying with the idea of a “night bus” aesthetic, though the origin point thread reads more like chan-board injokes or Hipster Runoff comment threads than anything an outsider could fashion into an easy lineage. Case in point: it originates with a thread started by somebody with the handle “swag motherfucker” and an avatar depicting notorious junk-software/spyware purple ape mascot Bonzi Buddy. The thread was originally titled “night bus” before being edited after the fact to highlight the announcement that hardcore band Orchid had one of their albums reissued on blue vinyl. The thread was started in July 2010 and summarily given the off-topic retitle sometime in or before October 2011, a lifecycle datestamped from quasi-meme beginning to mainstream-attention end.
From tenuous beginnings, the thread’s users gradually start assembling their own idea of “night bus” music’s theoretical structure, and there are already a few notable pieces of the chassis on the first page – particularly sparse, heavy, yet subtly melodic tracks by first-wave UK dubstep artists like Benga & Coki and Burial. But there are also acknowledgements that the Rolling Stones’ “Moonlight Mile” and “Under My Thumb” are essential night bus, as is 50 Cent’s “Ski Mask Way”. There’s a mood of late-night rumination there, but no chronological or genrebound throughline. As the thread progressed, the participants went from wondering whether “night bus” was a real thing or not to building a collective notion of what it could encompass: screwed and chopped hip-hop, dim streetlights, The KLF, “the inexorable journey thru desolation,” Smokey Robinson’s “Quiet Storm” (already a genre catalyst in its own right), hard liquor, Future Sound of London, the manga 20th Century Boys, Lil B, Japanese RPGs, Michael Mann, and all kinds of neo-noir/cyberpunk/urban dystopia scenarios. Where messageboard dicking around ended and enthusiastic canonization began doesn’t seem to matter, but the realtime unfurling of this exercise in microgenre deconstruction at least managed to hit on a few important signifiers. Important enough that some nine days after the thread started, “swag motherfucker” suggested that “this thread needs to be moved to members only so ppl cant jack our shit”.
Instead, the products of that thread went public, and soon enough, night bus went from a collection of loose, largely personal signifiers to a known quantity presented to a wider audience. Music critic Chris Ott hastened the transition from messageboard in-joke to potential buzz-brand fodder when he collected many of the board’s suggestions, blended them into a continuous mix, and posted Night Bus Origins Perfect Dream Collection Volume One to his blog Shallow Rewards. Beneath the jokey otaku-baiting title, the word “origins” jumps out like an ownership claim, a distillation of the group’s collective ideas into a planted flag. But the mix is only loosely identifiable as anything more stylistically cohesive than a run of good luck on shuffle mode – the commonalities are mostly dependent on a vague feeling of late-night weariness, with the likes of Massive Attack and Four Tet mixing with Gang Starr and the aforementioned “Moonlight Mile”. If you tried passing the music itself off as meant to spearhead a trip-hop revival, it might be a more convincing sell; as anything meant to document “night bus” it’s more a snapshot of a niche moment than a future movement. Further mixes followed from other members of the board over the months, but by September night bus had its biggest moment in the spotlight with a mix made by a known name in electronic music production. Montreal producer CFCF’s genre-canonizing Do U Like Night Bus?, hosted by fashionable NYC trend-forecast bible The Fader, streamlined all of night bus’s messy, intangible mood-setting waypoints into an easily identifiable blend of dubstep, R&B, Southern-leaning hip-hop, and other downtempo mutations of synth-heavy pop and dance music. What was lost in eclecticism was gained in a deep focus on a consistent aesthetic with a stylistic grounding. As time wore on, Hipinion gradually declared the genre dead and let the bloggers sift through the remains. A few strong compilations still surfaced, like the ones offered by the Tumblr Stay Glued – including 2011’s CFCF response Yes, I Do Like Night Bus, Night Bus or Bust, and The Rise and Fall of Night Bus – which strongly associated the night bus sound with the bass music and “post dubstep” diasporas. But the novelty had faded, codification set in, and another microgenre – one largely created to point out the absurdity of microgenres – staggered into the grave. Or at least into bed, fully clothed and eight hours away from a hangover.
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In June of 1989, science fiction author William Gibson published a piece for Rolling Stone that made it clear just how seismic the portable music player actually was. The article, titled “Rocket Radio,” cut through a few paragraphs of anxiety concerning the encroachment of over-elaborate technology with this memorable observation: “The revolutionary potential of the D-cell record player wasn’t substantially bettered until the advent of the Walkman, which allows us to integrate the music of choice with virtually any landscape. The Walkman changed the way we understand cities. I first heard Joy Division on a Walkman, and I remain unable to separate the experience of the music’s bleak majesty from the first heady discovery of the pleasures of musically encapsulated fast forward urban motion.” Even after 25 years’ worth of technological advancements and shifts in musical genre and taste, that inspiration is still churning up new ideas of how we listen to music in our own personal spaces, how those personal spaces are affected by larger public spaces, and how the interplay between those spaces subsequently dictates new ideas in the music itself.
It’s an idea as old as the concept of ambient music. Little of what makes Eno’s Music for Airports compelling is lost when you listen to it while traveling locally on foot. But the fundamental meaning does shift further away from the idea of music meant to subdue the stresses of an airport terminal’s human traffic and its sense of transitory mid-journey rootlessness. Everything that gives music the direct emotional impact you’re supposed to feel once it makes its way out of the confines of the recording studio is fairly mutable, and even if it’s engineered to sound best in certain contexts – the treble of '60s Motown sounding pitch-perfect through the AM band on car radios, or the cavernous echo of dub rising up beneath the skies of an outdoor soundclash – those contexts don’t always coalesce into something readily definable until somebody makes a point of defining it.
In many major cities with a heavy public transit presence, the return-trip commute has gained a context of its own. The feeling of waiting for a bus or a train home after a long night of partying is one of the most distinct experiences for partygoers and clubbers who can’t or don’t want to shell out for the more expensive taxi cab and haven’t brought along a designated driver. For the most part, people in this scenario who have their headphones in have traditionally listened to whatever they want – music that attempts to maintain the energy swell of a live show’s final encore, or distract from a feeling of crashing on the way down from the night. But there are specific emotional qualities to the wait and the ride home that certain strains of music have spoken to clearly for years now. And in the late aughts and early teens’ rush to codify genres, the attempts to pinpoint these qualities have laid bare just how tricky yet important it is to try and center a genre around a mood instead of a scene.
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In a 2009 post on her Tumblr 'Britticisms’, writer Britt Julious posted a brief playlist of music that, in her words, “seem to only work during that time between 'being out’ and 'being asleep’”. In other words: on the way home. The songs – including Telefon Tel Aviv’s “Helen of Troy,” Kleerup’s “Thank You for Nothing,” and Chromatics’ “I Want Your Love” – were generally mid to uptempo, heavily indebted to synthpop and Italo disco, and featured an undercurrent of yearning, loneliness, and neo-noir brooding. This predates the Hipinion thread, and while it doesn’t have doesn’t have the exact same origin points or aesthetic as night bus, it does help point to a distinctly universal sense of what feelings that pseudo-genre attempted to evoke. The two states implied by night bus – a state of moving, and a state of emotion – deserve to be looked at a bit deeper.
First and foremost, we’re centered around a primarily urban means of traveling music here. For most of the postwar era up to the beginning of the 21st century, pop music’s connection with travel has typically meant driving music, a lineage that’s run through everything from the Beach Boys to UGK and shifts accordingly depending on era, region, time of day, and so forth. Deep Purple’s pedal-to-the-floor proto-metal “Highway Star” and Kavinsky’s slow-creep Ryan Gosling backdrop electro “Nightcall” are both archetypal driving songs – just in different gears, behind different wheels, and on different roads. Rock and its automotive ties are all about freedom, the freedom of youth and liberation and being able to go where you want and do what you want on the spur of the moment.
Public transportation, meanwhile, is all about schedules. It’s about waiting. It’s about knowing where you want to go but having the route to get there be more or less out of your hands. (As Greyhound put it: “Leave the Driving to Us.”) And when you listen to music on the bus or the train, it’s not via the easy option of the drive-time radio station, with the flow of familiar pop hits and overly exuberant commercials. It’s typically through your own portable device, with your own choice of music, where the cocoon of sound you get in a car – a shared space when passengers are involved – closes in to the pure one-on-one privacy of headphones. The philosophizing about using music to shut out the outside world has been going on for decades now, but Gibson’s observation still applies, regarding how the self-contained music experience is used to mutually enhance both the soundtrack and the feeling of traveling – in this case, traveling without control.
Now, factor in the “night bus” context. Traditionally, the night bus is popular with clubbers and partygoers and revelers who are returning from a city’s entertainment district back to their homes. They’re too drunk to drive, too broke to cab, and too far to walk, so on the bus they go – or, just as likely, on the train, in cities like New York or Chicago or London. The city passed through on the way out is drastically different than the one seen on the way in – the darkness of deep night only seems to make the lights brighter and the emptiness of most shops and offices stand out more significantly. If you’re on one of these buses, coming back from a show, and you’re buzzed, and you’re you’ve got your headphones in, odds are you’re alone. And if you’re alone in a fluorescently-lit rolling cage with nothing to do but listen to music and stare bleary-eyed out the window, the feeling of moving through an urban space you are a bit more visually invested in than usual can create a very specific feeling: I am here, and I am alone, in a city that is far bigger than I am. That combination of solitude, isolation from ambient sounds, a heightened visual awareness of your surroundings, and an altered mindstate gradually fading back into sober reality facilitates a deep-focus listening that night bus is engineered to heighten.
So how’d the genre-hopping, mood-over-everything approach of the Hipinion definition of night bus veer towards a more confined space centered around post-dubstep? Well, the easy answer is to jump back to 2006, when Burial released his self-titled debut album on Hyperdub and set the stage for a new wave of bass music. Like most dubstep artists, Burial’s music is deeply informed by decades’ worth of urban London music tradition, taking the basis of 2-step garage house and weaving in elements of dub reggae, R&B, hip-hop, and ambient. The urban London that Burial’s music evokes is a dark, dank, concrete-lined space where brutalist shopping centers and '60s-modernist tower blocks slowly decay under a constantly foggy, overcast sky – a Clockwork Orange gloom where the most color comes after the sun goes down and the lights come on. And while there’s a certain implicit sense of fluorescent-lit concrete atmospherics to his music, it’s made more explicit by the titles he gives two tracks on this debut: “Distant Lights” and “Night Bus”. Both of these tracks are engineered and produced to make deep bass and sweeping melodies feel like they’re coming from faraway destinations, luring listeners closer through a haze that sounds halfway between natural rainfall and digital static, with human voices manipulated into artificially distorted yet still emotive states. Burial would make this association with late-night restlessness a bit more explicit with future titles – “Near Dark”, “Shell of Light”, “Homeless”, “Street Halo”, “Loner” – joining the pantheon of dubstep’s similarly evocative late-night mood-setting titles like Benga & Coki’s “Night”, Plastician’s “Walk in the Carpark”, Skream’s “Midnight Request Line”, Kode9 & the Spaceape’s “Neon Red Sign”, Distance’s “Night Vision” and “Koncrete”, and so on.
That leaves some space for a few compatible styles to become streamlined into this milieu and find similar contexts. Cloud rap – the floaty, stream-of-consciousness vibe put forth by artists like “based” rapper Lil B and his frequent collaborator, producer Clams Casino – fits in the mix, often as a more bucolic and brighter counterpoint to the gloomier side of night bus. Cloud rap’s origins are significantly steeped in Southern hip-hop, so the source material of that production, ranging from vintage Three 6 Mafia to DJ Burn One’s stream of mixtapes, is a good fit. And then you fit in the adjacent genres – the hazy after-afterparty swoon of indie-friendly R&B auteurs like The Weeknd, Jeremih, Miguel, and Bilal; the post-dubstep vanguard of melodic, soul-infused acts like James Blake and Forest Swords, contemporary ambient like Tim Hecker and Emeralds – yet now we’re getting away from genre again, back towards mood, towards something more formless and difficult to wrangle into commonalities of a scene.
And that’s where we get to the final, deep irony of “night bus”: no musician or even mixtape creator has really succeeded in setting out to make pre-defined “night bus” music and captured anything even close to a shared experience. That’s because night bus isn’t supposed to be a shared experience. it’s an idea based around the ineffable, meditative solitude that comes through traveling with your own mood-enhancing soundtrack, which, thanks to the decentering effect of widespread internet communication, only gets more subjective and undefinable the more names you bring into it. You set about explaining this context and then – it’s gone, you’ve reached a destination and you have to disembark. But it’s hard to fault people for wanting to find out just how they can visualize their own soundtracks to a night left to reflect on their own. We all get off at different stops, take different lines, transfer across routes and try to sit somewhere we won’t be hassled. Out of mass transit comes individualized culture – a line between communal celebration and the solitude of sleep.