By WILLIAM BRANDHORST
Have you ever heard a song you liked and asked what genre it is, only to find that the results that show up when you search the name of the genre are pretty different from what the genre actually entails? This happens constantly to those I talk with about the music I like. I mention “breakcore,” and when they say, “Oh, what’s that?” I have to explain in excruciating detail what I am talking about, lest they assume I am some sort of failed-normie peon who sits down after a long day of getting angry in my head about internet drama no one cares about and listens to Sewerslvt or BLKSMITH.
I am forced to do this, every single time, because what people are conditioned to think breakcore means is not breakcore at all, but instead a jumble of different genres like ambient jungle, drum and bass, and hyperpop, which all happen to use amen breaks from time to time. If you don’t know what an amen break is, it’s that “boots-boots-cats-cats-cats-boots-cats” drum sample that’s secretly in a fifth of all DAW-produced music these days.
These genres use fast, repetitive drum samples alongside flowing synthesizers or other instrumental leads to create a smooth yet gently rumbling pace, almost like the music is a car ride down a long, scenic highway. In stark contrast, the actual breakcore genre is centered around heavily chopped-up drum samples over a wide range of instrumentals, ranging from classical instruments to abrasive noise, often utilizing dynamic time signatures and other measures to dynamically alter the music’s flow.
Breakcore is less like a smooth ride and more like a fistfight or running through a trench under machine gun fire. However, if you search for “breakcore” online, you will find a lot of ambient jungle, drum, and bass before you come close to finding an authentic breakcore track.
I recently told someone I liked breakcore, so they searched it up on their phone right in front of me. After a couple of seconds of scrolling, what I can only describe as (incoming brain rot for 11-year-olds warning) American Psycho edit phonk wept from the phone speaker. I was also internally weeping as I scrambled to try and correct the matter and find an actual breakcore song for her. It took me almost 45 seconds of sifting through search results to find anything since I couldn’t remember a song name in my phonk-induced panic.
Why is it so difficult to find real breakcore? Well, many musicians have become serial mis-labelers of their music as breakcore, including, most notably, hyperpop musician Odetari, ambient jungle producers BLKSMITH, TOKYOPILL, and Egofear, and a wide range of underground jungle and drum and bass artists looking to grow their music using platforms like TikTok and Instagram.
Furthermore, several exceedingly not niche music genres have started to be falsely labeled breakcore for algorithmic reasons; people like fast music with repetitive amen breaks, and other clueless people have tricked them into thinking that type of music is called “breakcore.” As an unfalsifiable, purely anecdotal elucidation of my already largely unfalsifiable argument, when I searched “breakcore” on TikTok, I did not hear a video that included an actual breakcore song for twenty-one posts. Twenty-one!
Ironically, three of them complained that people don’t know what breakcore actually means while also presenting songs as “examples of real breakcore,” which were also not breakcore. I performed the same experiment on Spotify, which gave me 50 or so playlists; I looked through all of them. Out of hundreds of songs, maybe eight could be considered breakcore.
Spotify playlist makers have no idea what breakcore is, but can you blame them? Finding real breakcore is challenging unless you know what to look for.
In all honesty, this is a microscopic problem that negatively affects a very small number of people. Still, the ascendency of mass content creation (especially for profit) has made a mess of what was once easily discernible and freely found. Everything from basic news information to niche music has become rather inconvenient to find, either suffering from the oversaturation of unrelated junk or outright obfuscation and mislabelling, and there is no better example of both of these phenomena than breakcore.
Leave a Reply