Clyde Moop’s Wavy Lab Vol. 1 is a love letter to the classic ’90s sounds of Detroit’s ghettotech scene, a genre that started in the city’s dance clubs but cross-pollinated with electronic styles as varied as house, techno, UK garage, jungle, hip-hop, and R&B. The music was loose-limbed and lewd, with fast, four-on-the-floor rhythms and hedonistic, often raunchy lyrics. Moop’s album pays homage to pioneers like DJ Godfather and DJ Assault as well as innovators such as the Surgeon and Gary Chandler, all while putting a new spin on their sonic template.
“Booty Party” opens on the sound of a Vuvuzela, and with its strangled timbre, it’s as if the air horn were being squeezed through a speaker too small to handle its stadium-sized frequencies. Similarly, the hand claps that come in shortly thereafter feel dusted with white noise, and the synthetic brass squalls punctuating the track are more ominous than regal. If it weren’t for the layers of breakbeats and a voice declaring “We’ve got to smoke a whole lot of weed,” you might not think this were an ode to ghettotech. But it all becomes clear when the MC starts repeating the song’s title midway through.
If the touchstones of Clyde Moop’s work reflect ghettotech’s celebration of the posterior, then Dante LaSalle goes one step further and sees the mass consumption behind ‘dat ass.’ The #CoOwnaz-affiliated artist has produced a remix and directed an accompanying video for “Booty Party” that distorts the original’s propulsive strut into a horrorshow trip, as if strung out on dirty club drugs.
LaSalle’s video is just as warped, with found footage pulled from sources as far-flung as grab-those-goods game shows like Supermarket Sweep and Nickelodeon’s Super Toy Run, news reels of robbery and rioting throughout the world, and shots both fictional and factual of people burying loot or digging for it in the ground. The conflation of pleasure with pillage (“take what’s yours”) comes vividly alive in this disturbing montage of revelry and rioting, materialism and merrymaking.
Here’s what Dante LaSalle had to say about the remix and the video: “I got the fundamentals of my remix down in a hostel in Barcelona at the tail end of tour dates in the fall of ’14 — that’s the source of the street sounds in the remix. The relentless wash of motorbikes and scooters on the street below had the same booty momentum. I interpreted “Booty Party” to be a bunch of modern day pirates celebrating their recent take, and when I got home and began mixing down the remix we witnessed another brutal Black Friday in this country — the marriage seemed obvious. I wanted to cut this video to feel as full of momentum as my first raves as a kid in the late nineties and Wavy Lab Vol. 1 in general.”
Next week, Detroit Music Magazine will premiere Clyde Moop’s Wavy Lab Volume 2 Phase 1. In the meantime, check out the premiere of the video for Dante LaSalle’s remix of “Booty Party” below: