BEST NEW TRACKS: BORN DIRTY - FACE FT. G PERICO

House music and hip-hop are rarely mentioned in the same sentence, at this point. Hip-hop generally speaks to an inner city experience, sounding like endless pavement, lowriders crawling the urban jungle like predatory jaguars. House music has become more of a lifestyle accessory, in the 21st Century, calling to mind white sand beaches, with the balearic current, and pop-up sneaker shops, in the knackered house or deep house iterations.

Hip-hop and house were once much closer cousins, crawling out of the same warehouses, parking lots, bars, and basements of Chicago and other American cities. You could say they were both Born Dirty. It's appropriate the twin currents should reconvene on this new Hip House banger from London's Born Dirty.

BORN DIRTY - FACE FT. G PERICO

Very few EDM genres play it straight, at this stage of its musical mutation. "Born Dirty" takes house music's bubbling synths and breezy, disco-like rhythms and pairs them with a Teflon flow from rapper G Perico. This style might've been called 'Ghettotech,' at one point, with its low-slung Miami basslines and frantic, chopped vocals, owing an allegiance to Chicago's footwork/juke scene, one of the main threads that would be woven into Trap music.

It's worth noting that both the terms 'ghetto' and 'Trap' reference how difficult it is to escape the gravitational pull of marginalized communities. In less than 3 minutes, Born Dirty smash the glass ceiling and bring real, raw, immediate music from the streets to the wider world, thanks to their affiliation with Fool's Gold records. We Are: The Guard look forward to hotter, sweatier house music and the continual refinement of rap music!

J. Simpson occupies the intersection between criticism, creativity, and academia. Based out of Portland, Or., he is the author of Forestpunk, an online journal/brand studying the traces of horror, supernatural, and the occult through music, fashion and culture. He plays in the dreamfolk band Meta-Pinnacle with his partner Lily H. Valentine, with whom he also co-founded Bitstar Productions, a visual arts collective focused on elevating Pop Culture to High Art.