There’s been a fair amount of hand-wringing in recent years regarding the apparent demise of youth counterculture, especially when it comes to music. Where is the soundtrack to teenage rebellion? Or at least the kind of thing your dad would be mildly reluctant to stick on in the car? Florida’s Gazzy Garcia is at the forefront of a movement that should shut those complaints down – although his garbled, monotonous rap may elicit a few other gripes.
The 18-year-old belongs to a scene sometimes referred to as SoundCloud rap: a cohort of extremely young artists who found fame on the internet with staggering speed. Like his peers, Pump writes lyrics that cover the standard gangsta rap topics – drugs, designer clothes and disparaging attitudes to women – but do so with an emphasis on mindless repetition and a post-ironic sense of the ridiculous. Rather than drawn-out melody or experimentalism, his lo-fi tracks prioritise instantaneous, hook-driven appeal, making them perfect fodder for streaming playlists and attention spans shot to pieces by social media.
If there was ever any doubt who Pump appeals to, this evening’s feverish crowd – a sea of topless young men taking a night off from their A-level coursework – eradicates it entirely. Pump himself spends most of the gig half-naked, too, standing in front of garish graphics that help to clarify which of his indistinctly mumbled singles he’s currently performing. It takes Arms Around You, his dance-pop collaboration with the late XXXTentacion, and his crude, quirky Kanye West duet I Love It, to hammer home just how greyly devoid of melody Pump’s other songs tend to be. His belligerent stage presence isn’t exactly joyful to behold; he spends an inordinate amount of time barking orders at the mosh pit, repeatedly commanding the audience to “open this bitch up” so he can get close, but not too close, to his fans.
It is hard to ignore the similarities between SoundCloud rap and the first wave of punk: the sonic simplicity, gleeful inanity and sense of transgression (most of these rappers have well-publicised legal troubles). But whereas punk shocked on a musical level, Pump’s distorted, bass-heavy rap just feels banal. Yet his career clearly can’t be judged exclusively on musical merit. Pump has placed himself at the vanguard of the most distinctively youth-oriented subgenre in a generation. For that alone, his insouciant take on rap tradition deserves some begrudging admiration.
