Generator close listeners have heard me play this song out a bunch and now it’s out-out, a 140/70 bpm slab of ice produced by 10.4 Rog, and a warning shot for Stas THEE Boss’s major event “S’Women 2” album, allegedly out soon. I love how the song is delicate and heavy, and fun to blend with more upbeat music.

I may have had something to do with it being released, since Hollis came to the last Generator and I DJed the song as usual and was yelling about “drop it!” And now a few weeks later, with an Erik Blood mix/master, it is dropped.

“3rd Wave” harkens back to Seattle philosopher Charles Mudede’s “wave theory” of local hip-hop, which he wrote about in The Stranger alt weekly, which is probably now America’s last alt weekly. All these artists come from that Seattle scene, although now Stas is PDX, Hollis is NYC, and Rog is LA.

About the waves: First Wave was Emerald Street up to Mix A Lot, Second Wave was Mix A Lot through Tribal Productions up to Oldominion and Blue Scholars, and Third Wave was basically 2009 Seattle’s indie sleaze/gallery rap/DIY/Millennial optimism, featuring acts like THEESatisfaction (Stas’ old group, first Black women on Sub Pop), Champagne Champagne, Mad Rad, They Live and Hollis’ group Canary Sing.

I’ll add myself to the Third Wave as a writer, since I was active with my Seattle Times music blog back then, keeping up with all the music, doing things like live-streaming interviews/performances on the homepage using JustinTV, pre-Twitch activities.

I remember the peak Third Wave event was the 2009 “Beard Off” which was at the Funhouse punk bar, featuring Champagne Champagne vs Mad Rad in NBA Jam style basketball outside on the terrace, with Macklemore as the referee. Loser had to shave their beard off. I can’t remember who lost but it was probably Mad Rad. Cops were trying to bust people for smoking weed out back, making them sit shamefully on the curb, because it was still illegal then. Macklemore was both Second and Third Wave — the wave theory was a little blurry.

That event goes to show how the Third Wave was more than music, it was about hanging out, together, feeling like new things were possible. It was a lot of different youngish people being like, we aren’t old heads, we are new, Obama is President, and we represent change. Musically the change, locally, was about fighting segregation in Seattle which was always a very segregated city.

If we’re keeping it real, the major 2009 Seattle rap event was actually Shabazz Palaces’ debut CDs, and they weren’t really part of the wave, they were way above it. As a theory, the wave theory is limited but useful for chronological shorthand. I tend to prefer a tidepool analogy, to describe how Seattle music scenes are disconnected but sometimes overlap, but that framework doesn’t really account for time. Maybe the wave theory is the most durable one we’ve got.

You could probably say Fourth Wave was Lil Mosey and the Raspberry Hills clothing brand, and we are now in the stale yellow light period of the Fourth Wave, awaiting the fifth. Probably the Fifth Wave is happening now and I don’t know about it.

By now, the instagram users among us have maybe seen the Faire La Flex carousel which purported to give us a quick and dirty Seattle rap history. That shit sucked. The wave theory, for all its vagueness, is better. Shout out Mudede, always with the macro view.