Trap is hotter than ever. From Georgia natives 21 Savage and Lil Baby to St. Louis squabbler Sexyy Red (whose braggy “Pound Town” brought the trap energy to a new generation on TikTok), the music has infiltrated popular culture, dominating the charts. And the fans fill up stadiums to see Latto and Playboi Carti eradicate the stage. The music’s popularity isn’t dying down—Future and Metro Boomin’s provocative 2024 tune “Like That” is double Grammy-nominated. Where did it all start?
It was written in the stars but felt so good in the trenches: T.I. was destined to channel the streets’ swag into an unflinching classic. When he jingled the cool-posing hook to “24’s,” the hit on 2003’s Trap Muzik, the Georgia griot itemized the game’s illicit spoils and turned out trap’s addictive inaugural anthem. The dope-boy flows and warm 808s set the unbeatable standard for all other trap joints. Sure, Shawty Redd produced a proto-trap hit (Atlanta rapper Drama’s 1999 missive, “Left, Right, Left”). But T.I. delighted and roused—allowing fans to luxuriate in those goals—with spectacular, corner-tight quips, whose limitless oomph relates the tenor of trap.
When Big Boi, on OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious,” said, “And now you in the trap, just trapped,” he was referring to the streets that very few low-income Black Americans ever escape. The loaded label (designating setting and sub-genre) means that the turn-up comes with all that is decidedly terrible. In 1998, when Big Boi observed his folks’ travails, Atlanta rap generally criticized (or looked past) the drug game, leaving little room for the gut-seizing gusto later shown by Young Jeezy. Jeezy’s bellicose 2005 mixtape, Trap or Die, added another dimension to the “Black experience” OutKast spoke about back in the late Nineties. But a block-confined term couldn’t inspire when crack had skewered Atlanta just a decade prior; notably, representation seemed more important in the Nineties than coke-spattered oaths, even if they tilted toward a big escape that Big Boi anticipated. It was now the time for unflinching reality, confronting the lifestyle as it was for those who lived it.
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But trap music evolved once again. On his debut album, 2005’s Trap House, Gucci Mane affected a comedic, screwball sensibility that took the music in a loopy new direction. He’s something like a villainous social butterfly, cooking up crack while he compares himself to a hoofed mammal before languidly confessing that he doesn’t have a bank account. Migos’s baroque drug visions and Young Thug’s jangled jests originate with Gucci Mane. Gucci fostered their careers, introducing their music to a younger, whiter mainstream populace. With a wider appeal, there were some pop-friendly compromises.
Trap’s near ubiquity makes it also skew generic, seeing that there are now trap Kidz Bop records, not to mention trap yoga classes, both of which have taken the focus off the aggression that made the music an uncompromising mixtape mainstay. Those dire socioeconomic conditions are still ever-present. Young Thug’s recent RICO charges suggest that there is an all-too-real environment that informs his blunt lyrics. There’s still a bright side to trap, as newbies like Lazer Dim 700 and Karrahbooo suggest a stoner-trap sensibility—lyrically rash but sonically sedate—that looks and feels like the future we can’t wait for. Freedom is what’s in store in every teeming verse.
