This Compilation Is a Dream
Four months after the invented genre “hit ’em” first hit, a new benefit compilation chronicles a sound that sprung from one man’s subconscious.
At a time when good fun can be hard to come by, in music or otherwise, the ongoing saga of hit ’em has been a rare unalloyed delight. If you’re just catching up: Back in July, Drew Daniel—a wonderful electronic musician and writer who you might know as one half of Matmos or the guy behind the Soft Pink Truth—tweeted about a dream he had. He was at a rave, and a girl was telling him about the parameters of a genre called “hit ’em”: “5/4 time at 212 bpm with super crunched out sounds.” The tweet blew up, and people started taking it as a prompt, making tracks that conformed to the rules the dream girl laid out. Hit ’em became an actual genre of sorts. Daniel’s dream came true.
Four months later, Tabula Rasa records is releasing Thank You, Dream Girl., a 27-track hit ’em compilation featuring the likes of Machinedrum, Matmos, Galen Tipton, Eprom, and a host of lesser-known names. All proceeds will benefit the Musicians Foundation, an organization that provides direct financial support to musicians in need.
I bought it this afternoon and haven’t even heard the whole thing yet, but still feel compelled to encourage you to check it out. Aside from the appeal of the origin story, it’s just cool to hear the ways that so many different producers choose to interpret one brief but quite specific set of guidelines. A few early favorites are Alex Reed’s “Hit ’Em Dreamgrl,” which turns the compilation’s title into an anthemic hook and backs it with furious jungle breaks; Guinnessik’s “London Hammer,” which splits the difference between ’ardkore rave and hardcore punk; and especially Jetski’s mindblowing “Hardcore Hit ’Em,” perhaps hit ’em’s greatest hit—which, for me and perhaps others, gave the first inkling that this could be something bigger than a social media lark when it first appeared in the responses to Daniel’s tweet.
I think part of the fun of hit ’em, for producers and listeners alike, is that the rules are pretty unusual. 5/4 is a tricky time signature to work with in any genre (I can think of two famous examples where the artist named a song after the meter as a little pat on the back to themselves for pulling it off). But it’s particularly tough in dance music, because its uneven groupings of beats can give the music a feeling of being jerked back and forth between two distinctly different rhythms instead of settling into one groove. And 212 beats per minute is just really, really fast, so fast that it can be hard to actually dance to. It makes the 150-175 zone—in which notoriously hyperactive genres like footwork, jungle, and gabber often reside—seem placid by comparison.
So hit ’em forces people to get creative, to figure out how to make music that still hits, so to speak, while conforming to ground rules that might as well have been designed to trip it up. At the same time, other than “super crunched-out sounds,” which could mean anything, the only directions are about tempo and time signature; everything else about the music is up for grabs. Take two adjacent tracks on Thank You, Dream Girl.: Jane Plane’s wistfully melodic take on hit ’em sounds like hyperpop; DJ Cheesepizza’s thuddingly minimal version comes across like a demonic take on Jersey or Baltimore club.
The more you think about hit ’em, the trippier the whole thing becomes. What subconscious flotsam from Daniel’s waking life is now manifested in these 27 frantic tracks? Had he recently gotten a phone call from a friend in New York? If someone had reached out from Las Vegas that day instead, would hit ’em’s fans all be trying to learn how to dance to tracks at a truly time-warping 702 bpm? Give Thank You, Dream Girl. a listen and ponder these mysteries and more. Whether you love the music or not, you probably haven’t heard much like it—unless, of course, you’re dreaming about the same clubs as Daniel.
