Review Summary: First Mythz
They’ll make a coming of age series set in the early 2010’s, eventually. Our stunted culture is still so stuck in a blind reverence for the 80’s (although sentimentality for the 90s and even noughties is starting to seep in at the corners) that it might seem far off. But it’ll happen sooner than you’d think. Eventually the alluring but ultimately cold comfort of nostalgia comes for every era, giving those who lived through it a window into a time they now think was better and those who didn’t a window in a time they might dream was better.
“A man of the moment”, BBC host Pete Tong says at the end of Rustie’s
Essential Mix, broadcast on Radio One on April 7th, 2012 but preserved for historical purposes on Youtube and Soundcloud. A more apt phrase might’ve been “a man sitting on the precipice of something”. His groundbreaking first record
Glass Swords had come out half a year earlier, a technicolor swath of electronic music that met at the intersection of dance, pop, and hip hop. This mix fleshes that palette out into something more digressive, sprawling, and ultimately greater. It’s a euphoric 90-odd minutes of music—a realization of things that were there but also coming and would eventually pass.
It starts with faint human laughs that eventually meld into (I think) the laugh of the Great Fairy from
The Ocarina of Time. The Zelda allusions often pop up as transitions between the songs. It might seem a bit hackneyed now but it should be noted that this was a time where the language of gamers and egirls and whateverthe*** else hadn’t yet been fully integrated into our shared lexicon. A piece of Rustie’s own jeweled, 64-bit inspired electronica emerges, which then fuses with a J Dilla inspired hip hop instrumental, which then transitions into a snippet from TNGHT’s not-yet-released beat “Goooo”.
That triptych kind of represents the formula Rustie utilizes here: joyful but too nerdy to be danceable electronic stuff, of-it’s-time hip hop, and songs that portend the short lived microgenre “trap” (not to be confused with the hip-hop style- it’s basically just music that fuses those former two categories). Bauuer’s NY rap-meets-rave number “Harlem Shake”, which pops up about a third of the way into
Essential Mix’s runtime, provides the best example of this. That song seems like a novelty hit now, but at the time of it’s inclusion here it was pre-release and seemed like truly revolutionary stuff. I think if you’re able to jettison all the context it still holds up.
It’s impossible to listen to
Essential Mix and not get a sense of the sheer glee Rustie is feeling from playing all of his favorite songs back-to-back-to-back. Coincidentally, this also happens to be some of the greatest *** of its time. Clams Casino's legendary instrumental “I’m God” transitions into Juicy J’s delirious “Geeked Up Off Them Bars”. Rustie’s own “Hover Traps” rubs elbows with Big Sean’s pool party classic “Marvin Gaye and Chardonnay”. And later, Drake’s Kanye homage “Lord Knows” is followed by TNGHT’s “R U Ready”, which would eventually be sampled by West himself on
Yeezus's "Blood on the Leaves" later that year. At the risk of repeating myself, these juxtapositions are continually reflections of not only where music is at, but where it will eventually go. But crucially, the choices never feel academic—they flow seamlessly.
Rustie would eventually get to work in all of the worlds he was enamored by. He would go on to produce songs by Danny Brown, whose frenetic, glitchy
XXX bonus track “Witit” gets a spin in the mix’s final third. He’d put out a more hotly anticipated, mainstream leaning record called
Green Language. Most would agree it didn’t quite live up to the vision that
Essential Mix sets forth. A year after that he’d put out a more esoteric collection,
Evenifudontbelieve, and then Russell Whyte would disappear from the public eye, citing mental health and addiction issues (I’ll spare you the bit about the tension of music this life-affirming coming from someone struggling to live). Fittingly, a new bit of unreleased Rustie called “Tararia” would pop up in TNGHT’s own Essential Mix 7 years later.
To some extent, the utopian musical future that
Essential Mix gestures at never really came. Many of the aforementioned “trap” acts would gain popularity in the short term but struggle to adapt their sounds as the 2010s went on, and the general pulse of popular rap would largely turn in a more lo-fi, alternatingly downtrodden and angry direction. But by the same token, Rustie’s influence would persist. You might hear it in hyperpop and the work of more mainstream facing acts like Charli XCX. Hell, you can throw on a couple cuts from Doja Cat’s last record (I’m thinking of “Payday”) and hear the Rustie in it. But I guess that’s probably the most obvious problem with nostalgia. It supposes that time functions as a bunch of discrete blocs when it’s really much messier—leaving certain bits behind but bringing others forward, continually overlapping onto and mirroring itself in ways we often can’t even recognize. Was Rustie “a man of the moment”, like that voice in
Essential Mix’s waning seconds says? Yeah, probably. But maybe also of forever.
