In the mid-aughts a wave of steely-eyed southern rappers introduced hip-hop fans to a new piece of slang: “the trap.” Used narrowly, the term refers to a place where drug deals are made—say, an open-air drug market in a blighted city neighborhood. But it can also be used in a broader sense to describe the drug trade itself, as well as the particular psychic state—a blend of paranoia and megalomania—that tends to accompany long-term employment as a dealer. These rappers were so single-mindedly focused on the minutiae of the cocaine trade and the dealing life that fans and critics grouped them together under the rubric “trap rap.” For a time commentators used the term as shorthand for Everything That’s Wrong With Hip-Hop These Days.
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Not surprisingly the elements that were once Luger’s idiosyncrasies—especially his reliance on clusters of fast or slow triplets to create a frisson within a beat—have been widely adopted by rap producers looking to replicate his fantastic success. Those idiosyncrasies have also slipped through the border between hip-hop and dance music, which is becoming increasingly porous in today’s highly networked music world. Over the past year or so the result of this cross-fertilization, broadly referred to as “trap music,” has gripped the EDM scene—though some commentators, including David Drake of New York-via-Chicago hip-hop blog So Many Shrimp, resist describing it as a hybrid. “It might be more accurate to suggest that instead of a single genre called Trap, there are two separate genres of rap and dance music, both of which have gone through ‘trap-‘ phases,” he wrote for Complex last month.
Partly Chicagoan DJ/production duo Flosstradamus have been mixing dance music and rap music for years, so their recent transition into trap was a natural one. Their take on the style involves wedding deep, syrupy beats to the blown-out, ecstatic sounds of Dutch hardstyle techno. Tracks such as “Underground Anthem” have helped make Floss one of the most popular acts in the trap scene—it has more than 300,000 plays on SoundCloud, and the different videos of it on YouTube add up to another 100,000.
Chicago DJ and producer Million Dollar Mano, who includes a bit of trap in his music’s laundry list of influences, posted on Twitter in September, “Black producers make trap and its ‘HOOD’ or ‘ghetto’ white culture vulture dj makes it and its ‘groundbreaking’ ‘tasteful’ & ‘amazing.’” Drake goes further, offering some advice for trap-music fans in his Complex piece: “Trap music is fun, but listeners should be educated on the history of where the music comes from, and give respect to the innovators of the form, learning (via Google) about the pioneers (T.I.!), the sobering social contexts (drug dealers!), and the branded cultural trends (sizzurp!).”
