some of the comments appended to Andrew Ryce's Trap article at Resident Advisor tickled me:


Sheeeit! another subgenre raises its head..... like a blackhead going full on pustular.

I have Now Thats What I Call Trap, on MOS in heavy rotation......

Andrew ,The Guardian will be contacting you soon as the UKs go to expert on North Americas hottest new scene.Please contact Idris Elba for the documentary vox pop.

I call bs on a bs article, about bs tracks, played at bs festivals by bs jocks but then again, I am 43years old.

To the editors, please stop infantilising this site! the interweb is brimming with digital faeces, why do you feel the need to contribute?

Smilies and Trap music Fuckever!
Leave this stuff to Sherburne and Reynolds, if and when it does develop.......digital drug noise is so nineties

and more sensibly


Trap def. has its qualities if you don't have a problem with stupid, full on and energetic dance music. I must confess that I sometimes like the idea behind it all more than the music itself, but I can't deny there are som really cool trap(y) stuff out there.

Someone compared the trap movement with UK hardcore back in the 90s. I would even go as far as comparing it to the first wave of house music in the 80s. The raw energy is there, the young age and background of the producers, the cheap equipment (or probably illegaly downloaded), the uneven quality of the output and the movement around the music. There are of course differences but I still see it as very much the same thing.

and




I'm a long-term junglist and trap 4 me is 'hiphop finally got dancemusic'. I enjoy every bit of it. It's got the same fire and badness as raggajungles amen tear-out's. Music does no have to be serious. Fck the haters- move on. Let's mash in some more jungle in this soup + ragga and distored sound of hardstyle and that will be be gold.

the article itself raises a lot of interesting issues:

is this the first time that a genre has emerged that is like a slightly-distorted-mirror-image of an already existing genre, on which it is fully parasitic, right down to having the exact same name as the original genre? (at least drill 'n' bass was a nomenclative tweak on drum 'n' bass). A para-genre, existing besides the real-thing but without really interacting with it.



is this the first time that underground dance music has so totally followed the lead of commercial mainstream black music? because trap, or trap-py styled street rap, is about 60 percent of what you hear on stations like LA's Power FM, from artists like Tyga, as also picked up on for certain tracks by Nicki Minaj and Rihanna

the other thing (as per the previous post about the frozen idea of "contemporary" in sonics across the musical spectrum) is this question of  how different it really is from all the Dirty South rap of the early 2000s or even late 1990s -- something Ryce points to without necessarily intending to through  his description of Lex Luger's production style as "like a satanic Mannie Fresh"

I listen to Power FM regularly in the car and often hear things that make me go "oooh, that's cool,"that's modern sounding , "oh yes yes yes, it's 2012, for real". But then recently I heard something that made me really go "ooooh gosh": it felt  so advanced, so strange and off-kilter in its groove structure.

It took me about half a minute before I realised it was Ludacris's "What's Your Fantasy" -- one of my favorite street rap tunes of the early 2000s! Released in September 2000 in fact, twelve years ago...


Still and all, it's good stuff, the real-deal original trap, and the secondary-parasitic internet version of it - not retro but nowtro


shame about the lyrics, yes, but then if the sound is in a sense arrested, then you'd perhaps expect the social consciousness to be equally retarded