Trap

Trap is as much celebrated as it is stigmatized and criminalized. It evokes the obsessive rap of artists such as T.I., Young Jeezy, Gucci Mane, Young Thug and Future, Atlanta hideouts and prison, as well as the snare drum trills that have become a staple of hits by Miley Cyrus and Ariana Grande. Trap has thus evolved from a trend specific to the rap scene to a repertoire of techniques and affects that now attract pop and electronic music artists the world over.

This collection was compiled by seeking out those who had already written about this musical genre, this sensibility, these scenes as they had crystallized in rap since the early 2000s. For the time being, it follows only some of its manifestations between the United States and Europe—leaving out a number of voices and countries, including our own—but it brings together critical essays that enrich our experience as rap fans by looking at the conditions of its emergence and circulation, the lives embodied or staged in its productions, or the daily lives of the artists.

This book focuses on stories of imprisonment and escape, relaying the ambivalence of a music that is rooted in various scenes and communities (local, diasporic or media-based), but is often removed from these contexts, at once linked to everyday life and spectacular, claiming authenticity while constantly inventing new forms, uniting a wide audience while remaining a terrain of conflict, when it is not simply criminalized. As such, Trap reflects the intensity of this music as much as the problems it poses. The book often returns to the joy and despair that accompany the relentlessness of scavenging, dealing and making music, but also brings out the part played by spending, excess and unproductivity. Although we have also been careful not to limit ourselves to this prism, his particular point of view undoubtedly consists in hearing in the morals and affects of American trap music the direct and indirect resonances of prison capitalism. In addition to its aesthetic successes, this is also what makes trap music speak to us, even when it depicts situations that are far removed from us.

Last but not least, Trap exposes what is heard in this music by people who listen to it with passion, and who are generally busy writing literature, writing for the press, conducting human science surveys, or doing social work. Above all, this book lets us read what they feel and think when listening to a trap made music, a music made trap.