You used to want to stay away from the trap: an abandoned house where drugs are peddled. As OutKast’s Big Boi explained on 1998’s SpottieOttieDopalicious, it was the absolute last resort for employment: “The United Parcel Service and the people at the post office / didn’t call you back because you had cloudy piss / So now you back at the trap just that, trapped / Go on and marinate on that for a minute.”
A decade later, though, those trapped in the early noughties drug trade spoke up for themselves. It was initially sold as a southern revival of the west coast gangsta rap (they initially invited comparisons to NWA), but according to these rappers, their music was the byproduct of their (and OutKast’s) native Atlanta being a crack-cocaine town, a lasting result of the Reagan-era “war on drugs”.
Little did they know that trap would have a lasting influence itself. The stories were alluring, bellicose and, perhaps most importantly, different from the triumphant tales of excess coming from New York and Los Angeles in the early noughties. The sound’s dramatic synthesized production would eventually cross over to EDM and even pop, though not without controversy. It evolved from an Atlanta street-level movement to a global phenomenon, but it has its roots in the south’s segregated past.
In 1932, Atlanta became the first city to have a public housing project. In 1995, Atlanta became the first city to demolish all of its projects in favor of mixed-income housing. Local politicians and real estate developers pushed for this change to spruce up the city’s public image, with the 1996 Olympics approaching. The Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) stressed that it had the well-being of residents in mind: “Public housing was warehousing the poor without providing hope of any kind for a better life.”
While the hills of Atlanta project Bowen Homes were colored purple for OutKast’s B.O.B. video, TI’s 2001 debut album I’m Serious offered a grittier look into the drug trafficking within its confines. Like Jay Z and Nas early on, he rapped from the perspective of a dope boy who felt some remorse about his career choices.
In 2005, with help from play at Atlanta strip clubs and nightclub airplay, Jeezy became its first superstar: his Def Jam debut album Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 went platinum in its first month. He argued that the trap opened doors, not closed them: “I used to hit the kitchen lights / cockroaches er’where / Now I hit the kitchen lights, there’s marble floors er’where.” His weathered rasp dared you not to believe him: the self-proclaimed Donald Trump in a white tee.
Jeezy had a handful of shirts printed to promote TM101, featuring three stacked spheres that looked like a snowman. When students started wearing bootlegged versions, school districts promptly banned them. “All of these things help to convey the impression that engaging in these behaviors using drugs is normal and that drugs might help you be successful or sexy or something,” said Dr Gilbert Botvin, director of Cornell University’s Institute for Prevention Research Center.
Jeezy, Gucci Mane and TI – all black men in America, and the holy trinity of trap – were often asked if their music glorified what gangsta rap seemed to before. “I don’t rob or sell dope, I don’t do anything illegal anymore,” TI told Ozone in 2004. “But if I had to choose between selling dope or my children starving, guess what I’m going to be doing? It’s not realistic to expect someone to make that choice.”
That choice wasn’t necessarily made easier once Atlanta tore down its public housing. The alternative, vouchers, offered no guarantees: people with a criminal background often didn’t qualify, while landlords viewed them suspiciously anyway. Atlanta alt-weekly Creative Loafing found that a large majority of the displaced settled into 10 of the city’s poorest Zip codes; a Georgia State University professor found that “the people being affected are almost all poor African Americans”. The type of projects Jeezy and TI were rapping about featured on shows such as The Wire and most notably True Detective, during the one-shot scene in season one where Matthew McConaughey’s Rust Cohle drags a suspect through a housing project.
Pill, who would eventually sign to Rick Ross’s label Maybach Music Group, wanted to show what life in these areas could be like. In 2009, he released his Trap Goin’ Ham video, which starts with Pill stirring a milky liquid in a metal pot over the stove – what’s presumed to be the basis of crack. Later he stands on the block, handing off goods as a woman lights up a pipe. This was on Atlanta’s Edgewood Avenue, nearby the Martin Luther King Jr Center for Nonviolent Social Change, where Jeezy filmed his My President is Black video.
Hip-hop blogs caught on to Trap Goin’ Ham, then the New York Times. Pill caught flak for the video’s imagery. He insisted, though, that the point wasn’t to glorify like Noisey Atlanta would six years later. (It, too, opens with someone cooking crack – this time, Snow on Tha Bluff star Curtis Snow.) “It seems as though our city and our people place no importance on our community any longer,” Pill said. “These are the places you never visit. These are the places that hip-hop claims to care about.”
Gucci Mane would release The State Vs Radric Davis, one of his most commercially successful albums. TI and Jeezy were appearing at the BET awards. With the spotlight on trap, Pill made a brutally straightforward statement about why that music exists, when even Jeezy avoided rapping the word “cocaine” altogether.
Soon the subgenre’s production crossed over to EDM and pop, while being stripped of its sociopolitical context. The producers who often backed trap rap’s big three boasted distinct styles. DJ Toomp picked up where Dr Dre left off with G-funk for TI, though the producers who came after him mostly abandoned analog sounds. San Francisco transplant Zaytoven supplied Gucci Mane with oft-cheery, chiptune-like beats. Jeezy’s founding producer Shawty Redd is why so much trap sounded like it sampled John Carpenter, whose skeletal electronic arrangements haunt Halloween.
Now, there may be just a few constants in what is considered trap production: an 808 heartbeat, bass, and rapid-fire cascading percussion fills. Drumma Boy (Gucci Mane, Rick Ross, 2 Chainz) has argued that feel is important, too. “Trap is a lot like trance music, but it’s southern trance music,” he said to DJ Mag. “And most trap has scary music or some type of ambience [sic]. Sometimes it makes me think of The Twilight Zone. It makes you feel like you’re in a dark dungeon, like you’re in the trap itself.”
In 2011, however, Waka Flocka Flame’s Hard in Da Paint introduced listeners to Lex Luger. His beats in those songs are grandiose, as also heard in Jay Z and Kanye West’s H.A.M. with its urgent strings and operatic voices. So began trap’s gilded age: EDM’s Rustie and Hudson Mohawke played Luger’s songs in their sets. Flossatradamus, Baauer and UZ (“Uzi”) borrowed from his production. Some of the music that resulted from this crossover would be dubbed trapstep (a term which thankfully hasn’t stuck).
Luger’s maximalism had inspired dance parties thrown mostly by white people. Producers sampled lyrics and borrowed references about crack houses and the crime that surrounds them, not to mention the name itself. “For many people, trap is a way out of a mundane life,” UZ once said. It also resulted in one-off Cake, where a dead-eyed Lady Gaga raps and a disembodied male voice, likely producer DJ Shadow’s, says: “I’m posted in the trap, strapped with the AK.” This was glib trap appropriation.
EDM and hip-hop continues to overlap. Some ways are more meaningful than others, like when Just Blaze toured with Baauer; or Steve Aoki toured with Waka Flocka, or when A-Trak formed Low Pros with Lex Luger. But this was also only the start of how trap would get out of the hands from those who still associated the word with “crack house”. Trap was a style now, to where Katy Perry’s 2014 single featuring Juicy J, Dark Horse, was labeled as such.
As pop became trap-minded, hip-hop at large started paying closer attention to the subgenre’s new class of stars. The reason why wasn’t the subject matter, or what they rapped about, but how they did it. This isn’t new, per se; if anything, the development proves that the word-happy Gucci Mane has had made an impact on hip-hop (despite repeated jail sentences). Thanks to the sheer number of stylists, though, trap would become more abstract than before.
In 2012, two new trap rap stars emerged. 2 Chainz became Def Jam’s hottest new signee not for his depictions of drug dealing, but for punchlines that land like dad jokes. Meanwhile, Future’s transition from old moniker Meathead was cemented not with his signing to Epic, but with songs where he sounded like an Auto-Tuned drunkard. Once they became major-label commodities, even weirder upstarts arrived – the bluesy Rich Homie Quan, trap mathematicians Migos and rap game Flubber Young Thug.
Often these rappers use trap tropes as means by which to toy with flow, cadence and actual singing. These experiments caught on, the biggest success being when Drake gave his best Migos imitation in his Versace remix, launching countless others. “I don’t know who created it, if it was Future or Migos, but all them niggas sound the same,” Snoop Dogg said on his talk show GGN, before he pantomimes the trio’s wheezy triple-time flow.
Lately, however, such ubiquity hasn’t translated to platinum sales like for trap rap’s original superstars. As Guardian columnist Ben Westhoff did recently, you could argue that boldfaced names borrowed trap’s latest stylings for their own gain. Major releases like Drake’s If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, J Cole’s 2014 Forest Hills Drive and Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly have also steered clear from the bando. Their high album sales hinted that listeners wanted substance, not borrowed style. (It’s not all grim for trap though: Future recently scored his first No 1 album.)
So where does trap head next?
There is Sweden’s Yung Lean, who borrows from US cultural references like Gucci Mane’s off-kilter flow for kicks, it seems. There is also a burgeoning trap rap movement in Russia. “After all, from tsarist regimes to corrupt communists to Putin’s military plutocracy, the country is no stranger to astronomical wealth gaps, apathetic rulers or a lack of upward mobility,” Andrew Friedman writes for FACT. “Russia has the rime, isolation and lack of opportunity that created the trap in the first place.”
On 25 July, Jeezy celebrated TM101 turning 10 with a sold-out concert in Atlanta featuring TI, Kanye West and Andre 3000. Big Boi even stepped out for a rare photo op – that is, Jeezy next to OutKast. People were there for nostalgia’s sake, remembering how it felt when trap was just getting started. The big three still matter, just not as much as before: TI is a mainstream star, though one of his two more recent hits relied on Young Thug’s starpower; Gucci Mane is more of a cult favorite now, with his endless stream of free mixtapes; Jeezy’s most beloved album is still his first.
The latest trap song to hit it big, Fetty Wap’s Trap Queen, sounds nothing like what anyone else had done. As Taylor Swift knows, the main source of its appeal hasn’t been its setting, but its exuberance (“I’m like hey, what’s up, hello”). On 8 August, the 1989 superstar brought the Paterson, New Jersey, rapper out to do Trap Queen together, which meant she actually had to sing “I be in the kitchen cooking pies with my baby, yaah.”
If Swift thought for even just a second of how lucky she is not to know what that’s like, then trap has done its job.
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