In Dreams Begin Crowdsourced Bangers: Welcome To 'Hit Em' Summer

I had a dream about a nonexistent genre, then people online made it real. (Song Diary #4)

Aug 02, 2024

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It started in a cabin in the woods. We were staying in my friend Steve’s guest house, way up high in a redwood forest on a ridge in the mountains overlooking the California coast. Neil Young used to live down the road, and it is beautiful, peaceful, and quite remote. Wifi works, some apps work, but you can’t make cell calls or get texts. The nights are dark, with little light pollution, and the stars blaze.

I went to sleep and had a strangely vivid dream, one seemingly at odds with the pastoral setting. I woke up at 6:14 AM, grabbed my phone and tweeted:

Then I went back to sleep for another hour. When I woke up again I had breakfast, did some editing work, and didn’t really think about my dream. But then I noticed, to my delight, that the tweet seemed to have struck people. 100 likes. Then 200. Then more. 500. 700. I started to blush and to feel slightly surreal as more and more people picked up the idea of “hit em,” a genre that didn’t yet exist but maybe could and should. Mostly I got on with my day. We went to dinner with friends in the city, watched some of the Olympics.

By the time I was home, things had gone mildly viral. Thousands of likes. But that wasn’t all: some people were actually creating “hit em” music, posting links to Soundcloud pages on which, yes, music in 5/4 time at 212 beats per minute with crunched out textures was rolling and rattling and slithering into vibrant, distorted life. One of them, by Alex Reed, is already for sale on Bandcamp.

It’s hard to comment on a genre that barely exists, or exists only on the networked pathway between my dream and all these people — a mix of friends and random strangers — who are now making “hit em” tracks. The sheer speed of 212 bpm lends them all a similarly frenzied quality, but the formal fact of 5/4 puts a tricky fork in the spokes. The time signature, so lithe and elegant when Brubeck and co. play “Take Five,” tends to evoke a shopping cart with a broken wheel when plunked unceremoniously onto the digital grid of a sequencer. But smart producers can make it work, and in the process stamp the tracks with their personalities. “Hit em” strikes me as a “group form,” with no one in charge but everyone contributing, my arbitrary constraints binding the tracks together even as they spin freely in every direction.

So far, some participants have built frightening and nightmarish juggernauts of gabba kick drum madness. Others have made tetchy footwork responses. And others have added melodic swoops and glides. Ominous intros abound. Some people have gone for the distortion and crunch factor in the textures, while others have ignored that part in favor of cleaner lines. “Hit em” feels open for business, constraining but not overly so. Of course, I am biased here: it’s my dream music.

But how personal does that make it? Dreams may be the royal road to the unconscious, but there are roadblocks. In my case, my dream was a far longer and more lavish and spicy affair than could fit in a tweet. Truth be told, the “hit em” girl was just one guest star in a weird constellation that also included: an attempt to talk to my friend Max Eilbacher from the band Horse Lords (in the dream he was busy fixing a piece of hardware and couldn’t talk to me); a gothic encounter with my own grave (which was covered in slime); and a very NSFW conclusion, which involved a handsome redheaded stranger with lots of freckles who asked me to [REDACTED] his [REDACTED]. None of that felt portable to a tweet. What seemed portable was the girl at the rave and her oddly particular mention of a new genre.

Our psychic lives are made of what surrounds us: sometimes, the deeply personal turns out to be a shallow social puddle. When I consider my dream and tinker with its components, I wonder if I wasn’t influenced by the internet. In the days before I had the dream, people I follow on social media had been sharing promotional hype for a party in Los Angeles with DJs I like (including Kavari and Baseck) and a grindcore band called Sulfuric Cautery on the bill. I was impressed by the lineup and more impressed by video clips of Kavari DJing. Because the microphones on smartphones are often blown out by loud signals, the little clips and party footage people were sharing were often both extremely fast and extremely distorted. Was my desire to be at this party the unconscious source of the dream? FOMO + YOLO is a helluva drug.

If dreams are wish fulfillment, then the awkward truth may be that even when I’m staying in a beautiful cabin in the woods away from everything, some submerged part of me longs to be at parties where cool people spin weird forms of fucked-up sounding electronic music. As of this writing, my original “Hit em” tweet has over 13 thousand likes. It’s been viewed over four million times. New tracks keep getting uploaded, and a compilation is already in the works.

I want to encourage people to keep going, and I want to thank the mysterious girl at the center of it all. “Hit Em” may have been my dream, but it was her idea. ✹