Satanic Memphis Murder Rap and Dirty South Hiphop fused with Grime, Bass, and Dubstep instrumentals.
Fuck your political correctness. This is the voice of the otherwise voiceless, testament to the real lived experience of people so marginalised that they literally live outside of society. This culture must be celebrated with sober and deep recognition of the harsh and alienated social realities of racialised capitalism which shapes it. This music must be loved with full awareness and despite of the fact that gangsterism is a blight on African American communities.
After the Black Panthers and other similar inner city Black and Brown Marxist revolutionary movements were systematically destroyed in the infamous "Counter-Intelligence Program" of 1960s repression, organisation leaders framed and imprisoned or murdered by FBI age, this culture of gangsterism which valorises criminality was born. This is the nihilistic sound of revolutionary energy decapitated, confused, mislead, turned inward, causing harm to each other rather than working to overthrow the oppressors.
Musically, complex polyrhythms in the verses replicate the patterns of African drums, and delivered often with a ferocity and intensity that is the ultimate expression of late capitalism. The alienation, anxiety, frustration, rage, and sadness in this music speaks to all of us.
Theorists have described how bourgeois society deprives citizens of both a sense of adventure and of community. 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. 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 being truly alive.
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.
Trap is perhaps 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 powerful 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.
