An Oblique History of Trap
For “wellness,” naturally, is no cause for complaint — people relish it, they enjoy it, they are at the furthest pole from complaint. People complain of feeling ill — not well. Unless, as George Eliot does, they have some intimation of “wrongness,” or danger, either through knowledge or association, or the very excess of excess. Thus, though a patient will scarcely complain of being “very well,” they may become suspicious if they feel “too well.”
-Oliver Sacks, The Man Who Mistook His Wife For a Hat
It’s like the person seeing it and not the person doing it is always able to translate it and raps a little better […]Somebody watching it, you’re in the trap though, too. It dangerous just being in there. If the feds kick it in everybody’s getting the same charge. They got a right to talk about the same shit, too.
-Sonny Digital
I. The Play Don’t Care Who Makes It
“Bodak Yellow” seems as good a place to start as any. The following is not a reflection of Cardi B as a performer, who is wonderful, or the quality of her music overall, which is superb. This is about both a larger and a smaller thing than that; this is about trap music’s very own blood vessels.
“Bodak Yellow” was released in 2017 to extraordinary commercial success and unanimous, intense critical adulation of the…
