Drips and Drops

nothing sounds quite like an...

A friend of mine who shares my affinity for electronic music (and who’s knowledge of it greatly exceeds my own) recently wrote an essay for this blog in which he made the case that “trap,” the fusion sub-genre stemming from EDM, dubstep, and southern rap, is a legitimate and not entirely shitty enterprise. His thesis is that 99% of trap (I believe his figure was 99.53%) that comes out these days is crap, but the other .47% is pure gold, and with this gut statistic I generally agree, though perhaps my own figure would be closer to 90% (and falling) – with the avant-garde comes a lot of emulation, and the internet becomes a veritable landfill as a profusion of music surfaces only to be promptly buried by more. Anyway he asked if I would write on the subject myself, insofar as I am the greater authority between us (I can’t convince him otherwise), and I reckon I can say a word or two in support of his argument.

I grew up on a healthy diet of underground rap and instrumental hip-hop, and dismissed most else. My tastes in this realm have trended over the years from old school (Gang Starr, Das EFX, The Pharcyde) to alternative (The Roots, Blue Scholars, People Under The Stairs), followed by a shift to electronic music via dubstep (Big Gigantic, Skream, Flux Pavilion) to house (Ramadanman, Blawan). Somewhere in there I always had a guilty pleasure for the likes of Ace Hood and Meek Mill, and their genre. There was something about it that just satisfied, and it served as an outlet for a part of me that doesn’t much see the light of day. I am in every way not the sort of person who you would expect to listen to someone by the name of Ace Hood, believe me. Here’s me: quiet, socially inept, understated in temperament, attire, and pursuits, outdoorsy, politically aware, from Princeton (yes, that Princeton). And yet, it is so.

Cut to March 2012, when another friend of mine (who goes by the name Dream Logic, his work can be found here) played me a track by Baauer, then just another local DJ in Brooklyn, called “Rollup,” his remix for another group I’d never heard of, Flosstradamus. He showed it to me with not just a little sarcasm, if I remember correctly, but it was unlike anything I’d ever heard. The kicks were like a punch to the gut, the snares a slap in the face, the staccato vocal stabs mesmerizingly simple and on point. And the cough. The cough. 

Since then I’ve pitched head first into the world of trap, and the sub-genres it itself has spawned. I don’t follow every single blog to keep abreast of all the up and coming artists (God there are so many…), but I’ve sifted through enough raw data to have an idea of what makes something good, and beyond that progressive and innovative. This is of course a subjective matter, but I’ll give it a go. Here is what I look for in an artist, generally, and in no particular order:

Originality – I share my (essay writing) friend’s opinion that if it hasn’t been done before, do it. So what if it’s no good, throw it at the wall and see if it sticks. Flosstradamus ushered in the trap wave with their remix of Major Lazer’s “Original Don,” stripping down the original and laying an unadorned dirty south rap beat on it. They took the “drop” (do I still need to put that in quotes? I feel like that’s common parlance now) from dubstep and combined it with the southern rap they’d been listening to for years. The remix is clean and gets to the point, as it were. This is one of the foremost capacities of good trap: its ability to remove superfluous elements and use the ones it chooses sparingly to get to the head-nodding, I-just-ate-a-lime ooooh face-inducing point. 

Versatility – My favorite producers are ones who dabble in a variety of styles (though not the case with Hucci, who does his thing so well that I’ll make an exception, though he is expanding these days). The foremost example I can think of is Mr. Carmack, who is pushing trap from the hip-hop side; an instrumental hip-hop producer who is pretty much eradicating the need for that title, constructing his beats with intelligent composition (his track “NASA” is the only one I know of to use the Lydian scale for a spacey intro and then, like headlights coming out of the fog, drop into the nastiest trap beat I’ve ever heard). 

Percussive creativity – My favorite thing to listen to is the interaction between intricately coded (sequenced) hi-hats, kicks, and snares, the way they weave in and out of each other, the little frills here and there that send chills down my back. Oftentimes this includes what’s left out as well, the perfectly placed gaps where something cuts out, only to come back in off-kilter and throw the balance of the track somewhere else, if only for a moment, before resuming the forward stomp. (Editor's Note: This song blew out my headphones and I didn't even care. Trap is a real place.)

Kicks – Hard-hitting, overdriven, strategically placed (again, often sparingly) for maximum impact, pitch-bent to serve as a bass line, and seemingly bottomless. Trap is bass music at its core, relying mainly on kicks. If you’re listening in headphones, they should surround your dome and make your feet tingle. Good kicks: Hucci, ƱZ, Carmack. 

I still love all the music I used to listen to, and I’ve always listened to a good deal of non-hip-hop/electronic music on top of all that. Most of my desert island music would not be trap, as it happens, but it has a hold on me unlike anything else I’ve listened to. It satisfies more things at one time for me than any other genre I can think of, because with a bit of prudence you can make good trap in just about any style, and people do. You just have to know where to look.

Will Flemer appreciates canoes, mesas and Martha and the Muffins. You can find his work here.