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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 sort typically reserved for established tastemakers like Beyonce. It’s a fun track. You’ve heard it playing somewhere even if you don’t know it by name. What you may not have heard is Young Thug’s 2013 single “Danny Glover.” While hardly ubiquitous, the song made a splash on rap blogs and was an early hit that helped propel Thug towards his rarely-contested title of trap music’s reigning maverick. It is also a fun track.
The story might be that it’s an homage to Kodak Black’s “No Flockin,” but “Bodak Yellow” sounds much closer to “Danny Glover.” The hook that kicks in around the one minute mark in each is nearly identical, the lurching space-synth melody that drives them both can’t be but a couple of notes removed from each other, and even the cadence of the rapping itself is disarmingly similar: since “Bodak” moves at a faster tempo Cardi has to spit quicker, but she elongates vowels similarly, harmonizing between the bass thuds in clear imitation of Thug.
