It is the soundtrack of the dissocialized subject that neoliberalism made. Trap is the only music that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like. Nigga: as rhythm, a trochee (from the Greek for running, at root a runaway) coursing through the verse marking soundings, like a heartbeat the nasal occlusive a vocal withholding, a negative that releases into a velar plosive, a voiced relief as person, a real one as word, a neologism indigenous to the American crucible, the umbilical cord of blackness: raw, intimate, original, word as bond. “I’m spittin’ fire like an arson / Hop out the Lam and don’t park it” From the SoundCloud backpacker to the superstar trapper, the ideal of a supremely luxurious attitude toward luxury. The “Go-yard” bag, the “Phi-lippe” watch, “the Lambo” supercar pronounced like a Creole dish, every accoutrement of inaccessible lavishness smashed into pinball frenzy, a world where everything is always dripping, VVS diamonds are always dancing, every swatch of color given the player’s ball touch, the planet WorldStarHipHop, a black satellite circling around a diamond white sun where the Protestant work ethic is always being converted into its rhythmic opposite, “You get the bag and fumble it / I get the bag and flip it and tumble it” (Gucci Mane feat. Brands of old-world “foreign” opulence sound better in the escaped slave’s mouth. skrilla, paper, green, gwop, currency, stacks, bands, bundles, racks, currency, fetty (confetti), ends, dead presidents, bankrolls, $100,000 in just two days, fuck-you money, fuck up some commas, money long, run up a check, fuck up a check a master signifier in falling bills, floating, liquid, pouring down on bitches in the proverbial rain, exploding like cold fireworks, screen-printed or projected onto surfaces human and otherwise, occasionally burned, often tossed into the impoverished streets left behind, kids trailing the whip their arms outstretched, often bricked up in bundles held in a grip, or cradled to the ear like, say, a call from the highest authority in the land, or fanned out in a masking screen, or caressed, the cold frisson of Franklin morbidly displacing the erotic potential of sexual attraction.Īn attitude toward luxury. I just wanna get that money - flip that moneyĪ. ( Criminals’ ), any hiding-place for stolen or illegal goods, etc. Often applied to anything by which a person is unsuspectingly caught, stopped, or caused to fall also to anything which attracts by its apparent easiness and proves to be difficult, anything deceptive.Ī concealed compartment spec. Trap, some definitions from the Oxford English Dictionary :Ī contrivance set for catching game or noxious animals a gin, snare, pitfall: cf. Trap is an extension, a ramification of that vocabulary of radicalized homelessness: people creating a living out of a few grains of sand, hustling, sweeping anything that can’t compete out of the way. A statehouse of language for a stateless people. The pleasures of dialect, hotly pursued by the holders of capital, the clout chasers of Madison Avenue, enclose a self-referential universe, a house of belonging in sound and word.
calls “motivated signifying,” the inside joke that’s on you before you know it, the razor wit - always the weapon of the underdog. It’s stuff like this that makes up what Henry Louis Gates Jr. Howard “Sandman” Sims had a standing gig at the Apollo for decades as a tap performer who would “sweep” failing acts off the stage. Treat these niggas like the Apollo, and I’m the sandman It is only in his music, which Americans are able to admire because a protective sentimentality limits their understanding of it, that the Negro in America has been able to tell his story. Snare rolls crescendo in waves that overmaster like a system of finely linked chains snatched up into whips, cracking and snapping across the hull of a dark hold. The hi-hat, pitched like an igniter, sparks. The beat, when it drops, is thunder, and causes the steel rods in whatever you’re riding to groan, plastics to shudder, the ass of the seat to vibrate right up into your gut. Numb the pain with the money, numb the pain with the money I almost lost my life when I was trappin’ Sometimes I really can’t believe this shit happened They are the music of an unhappy people, of the children of disappointment they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of misty wanderings and hidden ways.
0 kommentar(er)
