So for this week’s column, I’m taking a look at some very good recent releases, albums or mixtapes that all qualify as underground rap but which approach the genre from different angles, with different values. It’s a lot of different sounds, growing in a lot of different places, many of which have little to no overlap with one another. But right now, rap’s underground is more of a nebulous thing. There is good Rawkus-type music being made right now, for sure. The phrase “underground rap” tends to evoke the late-’90s Rawkus Records phenomenon, the cerebral form of New York rap that arose as a reaction against a previous generation’s excesses. Underground rap is having an absolute golden moment right now there is so much good music out there that even someone like me, whose entire job is to take stock of this stuff, can have trouble keeping up. The pure omnipresence of trap music can get a little bit oppressive, and from a certain light, the rise of, say, Playboi Carti can begin to look like the death of everything you love about rap music. Sometimes, that even leads to rap-sucks-now end-times talk. Still, there’s plenty of old-head grousing about “mumble-rap,” about the new generations of kids who have forsaken their values and adapted completely different skill-sets. The trap backlash is nothing like the disco backlash even if it were physically possible to detonate Rae Sremmurd streams in the middle of a baseball stadium, I don’t think anyone would do it. 2″ is our “Miss You”? None of this matches up very well, but it’s still a fun game.) And as with disco, there are a lot of people who really, really hate trap. (Lil Wayne is our Diana Ross? “Father Stretch My Hands, Pt. As in the disco era, aging stars are scrambling to catch up, to either find some foothold or to forcefully reject everything that’s happening, and that’s having mixed results. Desiigner is our version of whoever sang “Disco Duck.” Like disco, trap is party music, with its own values and its own drugs. Future and Metro Boomin are our Nile Rodgers and Chic. As with disco, there is good trap music and terrible trap music. It’s built around a very specific aesthetic blueprint, right down to its drum pattern, with skittering 808 hi-hats instead of four-on-the-floor bass-drum thump. Think about it: Trap is an absolutely dominant commercial force. It’s our late-’10s equivalent of what was happening in the late ’70s. This is a complete bullshit occurs-to-you-in-the-shower thought, but bear with me here: Trap music is our disco.
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