On the 31st of May 2024, Dos Monos, the experimental hip-hop group formed by Zo Zhit, Taitan, and NGS, returns to the music of the past in order to plunder it. If the American theorist Fredric Jameson defined the pastiche as the cultural strategy of late capitalism, the latest album by Dos Monos will make him turn again and again in his grave.
Dos Atomos, the third album after Dos City and Larderello, released in 2019 and 2022, respectively, represents the second phase of the musical operation by the Tokyo-based group. In a pastiche of popular and avant-garde music from another era (from jazz to noise, from heavy metal to trap, through hip hop and J-rock), Dos Monos is the promise of a future that does not exist yet. In fact, as rapper Taitan in QUE GI, the first single of the album: “全部お前にあげる / 日本の未来も” (“I’ll give you everything / even the future of Japan”).
Dos Atomos, literally “two atoms” in Spanish, but mistranslated as “atoms 2.0,” in analogy with the name of the group (Dos Monos, or “monkeys 2.0,” according to Zo Zhit), is a concept album on the identity of Japan in the post-atomic era. Japan, the nation of the Sun and the hydrogen bomb, is the Asian culture of liberal-style consumerism. But it is also the nation of degrowth communism.
At any rate, Dos Atomos is most of all a bomb on the cultural level: a kind of explosion inside the present. For over thirty minutes, musical genres that are different and sonically distinct are savagely placed one behind the other: press play and fast-forward to get five different songs for the price of one. The group formed by Zo Zhit, Taitan, and NGS does not return from the present to nostalgically regret the past but in order to raid it.
According to Fredric Jameson, the pastiche is the sign of a world changed by endless consumption. In the absence of its “own” history, it is nothing more than a simulacrum, in the Platonic sense of the word: a copy without an original. Or even better, a copy that has looted the very concept of “original.” This is the revenge of the false in hip-hop culture: from DJ Kool Herc’s sampler onwards.
With Dos Atomos, Dos Monos pledges that the future is always beyond beautiful and ugly. By definition, the music of the near future is always barbaric. Such is, for example, the barbarism of deconstructed club, a genre of music popularized at the GHE20G0TH1K parties in New York, defined by the debauchery of musical genres, mixing rap, drum and bass, post-punk, reggaeton, heavy metal, and industrial music together with the sounds of helicopters, shotgun noises and so on, and reproduced in MP3 format on the loudspeakers. But it is also the philosophy of hip hop itself, insofar as hip hop, to quote Kodwo Eshun, is not a genre among others but rather a “conceptual approach” to the organisation of music. Last but not least, the sound of Dos Atomos is marked by the new British avant-garde rock scene, and in particular by black midi, which Dos Monos supported on their European tour in 2022. Black midi drummer Morgan Simpson features in the recording of two songs from the last album, and so does Otomo Yoshihide, the leader of the noise band Ground Zero.
From the United States and England to Japan, the sound of the past, from pop music to experimental music, no longer exists except to be destroyed and sung as such. “Am I cruel? But I say: what is falling, we should still push.” This is, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the “prelude of better players.”
If the music of Dos Atomos is barbaric and even cruel, it is because it is already the music of another present; the end will be nothing less than an explosion.
Dos Atomos by Dos Monos
Deathbomb Arc, 2024
REFERENCES
Eshun, Kodwo (1998). More Brilliant Than the Sun: Adventures in Sonic Fiction. London: Quartet Books.
Jameson, Fredric (1991). Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham: Duke University Press.
Nietzsche, Friedrich (1988). Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None (Trad. Walter Kaufmann). In Walter Kaufmann (Ed.), The Portable Nietzsche (pp. 103–439). London: Penguin.
The original version of this article was published in the Italian magazine Charta Sporca.
Alessandro Sbordoni was born in Cagliari in 1995. He is the author of Semiotics of the End: On Capitalism and the Apocalypse (Institute of Network Cultures, 2023) and The Shadow of Being: Symbolic / Diabolic (2nd edition, Miskatonic Virtual University Press, 2023). He is an Editor of the British magazine Blue Labyrinths and the Italian magazine Charta Sporca. He lives in London and works for the Open Access publisher Frontiers.
Credit for cover: © ADAM Audio
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