Cardi B’s recent astronomical rise to fame alongside the mainstream establishment of Migos and Future have firmly established trap music as the definitive sound of mainstream hip hop—but you didn’t need me to tell you that. Several recent trends have become especially prominent, such as the sampling of live instruments and drums; see Migos’ “Stir Fry” and Future’s Mask Off, the “ayy flow,” and, of course, autotuning one’s vocals, as popularized by Future. The whole genre is constructed to exploit and highlight a song’s hook. Perhaps this explains its incredible performance across the charts, but it also explains its proliferation.
In 2017, Future released 4 full length studio albums, all longer than an hour, all filled with celebrity features and all to popular and (largely) critical acclaim. For a mainstream artist, who doesn’t necessarily need to release that much music to maintain his status and income that is an almost unprecedented amount of music. Future even displaced his own album from the number 1 spot on the Billboard rankings—HNDRXX and Future were no. 1 and 2 on the charts respectively. Future was the first artist to have back to back albums go to no 1 in consecutive weeks since Simon and Garfunkel in 1968. In an age where music consumption has been almost completely democratized via streaming, this is an absolutely astonishing feat.
Future isn’t alone though—it seems he has set an impressive precedent for other mainstream trap artists. Young Thug, somewhat renowned in the industry for not spending enough time in the studio released the highly ambitious Beautiful Thugger Girls and also had time to create his mixtape with Future, Super Slimey. Despite vowing not to make any music for an entire year due to his brother going deaf, he has managed to release an extremely polished single in “MLK” and a tidy little EP, Hear No Evil featuring Nikki Minaj, 21 Savage and Lil Uzi. Migos, despite sticking, rather strictly, to under an hour for all of their previous mixtapes, released Culture II, to enormous success at the beginning of the year, which clocks in at nearly 2 hours. The sensational Without Warning featured Migos’ member Offset with 21 Savage, who himself has released somewhere in the region of 3 hours of music for 2017. Considering that the average trap song lasts around 3-4 minutes this is a phenomenal number of tracks and reflects not only the staggering demand but the immense work ethic that it takes to achieve mainstream success in this genre.
Its easy (and in my opinion, downright offensive) to discredit trap music as an entire genre. People accuse trap of lacking cultural and musical worth because there is so much of it being made so quickly. It's proliferation leads critics to wrongly believe that anyone can make it and its formulaic structure lends itself to mass, unthought factory–like production. My retort to this is simply that while there does seem to be a great deal of success and demand for the industry, it is extremely hard to break into trap’s elite. What bars most is simply that they don’t produce enough material to keep up with the likes of those mentioned above. Where Frank Ocean can get away with releasing an album every few years for people to be obsessed over, Trap music is built on a model of complete proliferation. To be big, you have to be everywhere. And for that to be the case, one needs a staggering quantity of music to stay fresh. Additionally, the constraints of the genre, which is relatively barebones in production, prompt an enormous amount of creativity within such a small space. It reminded me of a Jack White interview, where he describes the inspiration for the White Stripes famous drums, guitar and voice. He stated that having endless direction and resources has often overwhelmed him. Restricting himself to a set formula has forced his hand in terms of creativity. I think the same of trap music and the true titans of the genre are unbelievably impressive in this aspect. Not only do they create enormous amounts of material but have to stay fresh and keep up with trends along the way. It is the exciting genre at the moment and anyone who says it “all sounds the same,” in my opinion, hasn’t listened to enough. There’s no real excuse here dude, there’s so much of it.
