Life in the Trap
On a train going through the Czech Republic, random young Swedish travelers enthusiastically told me of their love for Trap music. Kids in Ho Chi Minh City are turning the fuck up to Trap. Vice magazine has made a documentary about Trap music and the ghetto streets from where it came.
“Trap” used to be slang for crack-houses where dealers “trap” their clients, as well as the business of selling cocaine, as in the “trap game”. By the mid-2000s, the word had come to also refer to underground Southern Hip Hop about drug-dealing, from poverty-stricken neighborhoods in cities such as Houston, Memphis, and Atlanta. Related to and often interchangeable with Crunk and Dirty South, some of the earliest, biggest, and best proponents of this sound are Three Six Mafia, UGK, Geto Boys, Lil Jon, and Master P. Later came artist/dealers such as T.I., Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane, and Waka Flocka Flame, who further defined the genre, and consolidated its now classic signature elements of distinctively slowed down boom-bap, extended bass lines, frenetic 808 hi-hats, ominous synths, sluggish and menacing rap, and of course lyrics about gangsterism and thug-life.
Triple 6 Mafia — from video for “Break Da Law” (1993)
But the term did not gain over-ground notoriety until a new electronic offshoot came on the scene. This was largely an instrumental, polished, beefed-up, and very bassy version of Trap: an over produced and bro-ified overground mutant of ghetto music with the black voices often omitted or consigned to mere decoration, made for rich kids to blast in the new cars daddy bought them. New EDM-Trap is entirely based on the musical structure and sound of Southern Gangsta Rap, but grafts onto this template the machine muscle of Bro-Step, stadium Electro-Rave sound effects, and often the epic emotional moments of commercial Vocal-Pop.
As I hear this cartoonishly pumped up sound of sublimated aggression quickly spread and blow up all over the world, I think of the slums in US cities where black lives are cheaper than cocaine, and don’t matter at all. As I look at the biggest EDM-Trap Artists in the world today(nearly all white) making millions, I think of prison sentences, of broken families, of single mothers raising kids alone on minimum wage jobs. As I watch videos of Trap parties in stadiums full of students drenched in tequila “raging” hard, I think of the impoverishment, marginalization, and criminalization from which this music comes.
These are the thoughts on my mind as I witness the music of people neglected, robbed, tortured, and exterminated by mainstream society stripped of its original context, reduced to meaningless swagger, and even becoming soundtracks for the corniest Disney-Pop: perfectly retrofitted for mainstream society. Gavin Mueller in Jacobin Magazine makes a good point by calling New School EDM-Trap “adult contemporary for the prosumer age“.
“By dispensing with the rapping, EDM-Trap effectively silences the black voices that kept the style connected to the stories of the American lumpen proletariat. It’s the auditory equivalent of kicking out a poor family so you can live in their classic brownstone.”
But I also love Trap music, both the original Dirty South variety, and even a very discerning selection of the new school, for some of the same reasons that rich white kids do. Here I would like to defend this vicarious consumption: many critical theorists have extensively described how bourgeois industrial society deprives citizens of both a sense of adventure, as well as of intimate social connections within closely knit communities. To people locked into a predictable life of school, employment, and retirement, their everyday existence a dull cycle of work, consumption, and sleep, the life of the criminal is the exact opposite, and captivating in ways their own lives can never be. This is why suburbanites mimic the style, language, attitude and posture of inner city gangsters. Similarly, listening to Trap music reproduces a feeling of danger, of intensity, of life and death urgency, and allows people who live safe and boring lives to briefly approximate a feeling of adventure.
Hood music is also a narrative of clandestinity, of trust, of honor, of unbreakable familial bonds, of real friendship and real enmity with very, very real consequences — a sense of true community which the comfortable classes entirely lack. When a real loss of agency and immediacy is assigned to the middle and upper classes, whose existence consists of tedious complacency and suffocating security, it of course isn’t morally wrong for them to try to fill this emptiness. This is why in ultra-wealthy and squeaky clean Zurich, Switzerland, a city with virtually no crime, there is a popular club-night called “Trapped”, with themes such as “Prison Break”, where Djs play only Dirty South Hip Hop songs about incarceration.
Additionally, there are concrete reasons why this music has such world wide appeal, and resonates with youths everywhere. Trap is maybe the most direct reflection of our times, where young people face grim personal prospects in a diminishing job market, amidst escalating economic, political, and environmental crisis. Trap music exactly mirrors the coldness, meanness, brutality, abjection, dehumanization, and desperation of late capitalism. Extending what Young Jeezy said about the rap game being the same as the trap game: the trap game (selling drugs) is a microcosmic facsimile of macrocosmic capitalism. Reality in the hood, a vicious cycle of addiction, suppliers, gangs, crime, police, and prisons, all part of a system designed to sustain this process, is a perfect miniscule model of reality around the globe, a larger vicious cycle where bourgeois states administer political and physical violence, destabilize resource-rich regions, manufacturing terrorism, while arms dealers make trillions, and corporations exploit the global South, devastating the natural environment. Trap music comes from a visceral experience of survival on the love-less streets, but is a mirror image of the world at large: a neo-Darwinian nightmare in its rawest form.
Baauer pumping up the crowd
Mainstream white appropriation of underground black music is nothing new, but at this historical juncture, “Trap” uniquely takes on a much bigger significance, and becomes a perfect metaphor for capitalism itself. “Trap” encapsulates both capitalism’s ruthlessly competitive aspect as well as its alienating effects, where consumers are completely disconnected from the context, origin, and meaning of cultural products. From the same Jacobin piece cited earlier: “listeners… don’t always understand the history or sociology of their genres. They don’t have to: when music becomes a commodity, it can travel worldwide, as all commodities do, severed from any knowledge of the conditions of its production. Genres cease to be grassroots social worlds, and instead become something more like brands: mere sonic surfaces rather than deep historical processes.”
We are all locked in this perverse consumer capitalist trap, where the art of society’s victims provide an outlet for the frustrations of those who benefit from, but are at the same time stifled by, the same system of victimization. It is not necessarily a problem in itself for middle or upper class people to enjoy or take part in the culture of the disenfranchised, because both groups are caught in the same trap, only positioned at opposite ends. There is a certain amount of responsibility for those of us who do, to, at the very least acknowledge the disenfranchisement, the inequality, and the tragic social circumstances the music came from. We should try to connect the hidden dots and gain a degree of understanding of the racist, oppressive, and exploitative realities that gave rise to Trap Music. Further, we must strive for ever deeper awareness of how this systemic trap called capitalism robs some of us materially, the others spiritually,and allow such understanding to inform the life decisions we make.
