The debaucherous lyrics in Trap Music, also called Turn Up Music, has been the calling card of parties and get togethers amongst peers in recent years, with production and voice resonating with everyone present in the room, satiating the pores in the body with the bass that rains down and reverberates throughout the room, making bodies' moves and smiles form effortlessly. Trap music, being a subset of Rap, has a rapper, or in more recent days an autotuned singer, slipping words from their tongue that aren’t necessarily supposed to be the focal point of the record. Nevertheless, one quick look at lyrics from trap songs will bat some eyes, if for anything, because of the facetiousness and vapidness of the lyrics.
“Ni*ga tryna run them bands up
F*ck a bitch with my hands up
Lil Quay f*cked the Xans up
Kinda hard to understand us,” 2Chainz raps in one of his songs.
“Twelve more hours left for us in a day
(Call your friends and let's get drunk)
I've been drinkin' all day, I've been floatin' all day
(Call your friends and let's get drunk),” Travi$ Scott sings/raps in one of his songs (I’ll come back to this one).
“Trapped out the bando, got tools like Rambo
Got bird like Birdman, got white like Lindsay Lohan
Made a hundred stacks off the pots and pans
On the corner serving grams, my niggas be on the block hard” Migos raps in one of their songs.
Another look, when the lyrics become words on a white page, takes these things (that an actual person wrote down) and puts them into a different perspective. Trap music revolves around drug induced activity, sexual proclivities which usually include threesomes & erotic pleasure while inebriated, expensive alcoholic beverages, material gains, illicit work experience involving selling drugs, and much more.
These things are normal to the environment these people grew up in. Part of the reason, at the very basis, that these lyrics may appeal to someone is because it is a reality for a lot of people, yet, through media coverage and misinterpretation of lyrics it’s become marketed, by both the listeners and the artists themselves, who can misinterpret their own lyrics, as lyrics to “turn up” to; lyrics that hold no weight whatsoever and only play one of many parts in an amalgamation of items which form to make a trap song.
If you really took looks at these lyrics you’d say to yourself, “Well shit, this is actually the perspective someone has in this world/Someone who is living and breathing my air has first-handedly seen these things.” There is an aura of sadness to this trap music as the lyrics detail different coping mechanisms, one of which is the creation of a trap song. In this embellished environment where people will overlook the lyrics, making a trap song is a great way to bury your emotions while having people ignore them and turn up to it instead; because most of the time people really don’t want their issues acknowledged.
“Lil Quay f*cked the xans up/kinda hard to understand us,” alludes to drugs as a mechanism to cope with the hardships of the world, but why is it that these things now create an aura of comfort and animation when played? If Kendrick took those same two bars, tossed a slow trumpet and percussion in the background, the meaning would slide across the spectrum and instead become a ballad of the struggles. Toss the same lyrics over some heavy bass and you have trap lyrics instead.
Music has been a vehicle for emotion for as long as it’s been in creation. People have poured their souls out over instrumentals for the longest time and to see people still doing it today is absolutely no surprise. But when the coping mechanisms are masked behind the veneer of a trap song it raises my eyebrows, because things that are melancholic and rugged to begin with are now glorified and sang by drivers across the world heading out for the evening or driving to work in the morning. It also speaks on the way the black community may address mental health issues; while that is another topic in and of itself, depression & anxiety are often snubbed and classified as “nonexistent” by many people in the black community, which is odd considering that the criminogenic and tragic environment that plague many black communities must foster many mental illnesses that, because of this norm, will go unnoticed. To succeed in the machiavellian environment many ghettos face it’s almost a necessity to not show that you’re fazed by it, otherwise people will take notice and take advantage. “Don’t let them see you sweat.”
Travi$ Scott’s “Maria/I’m Drunk” is actually one of my favorite songs. While placed in an eerie album that, at the base, is a trap album, the instrumental and lyrics are very haunting, more so than any of the other tracks. To classify it as a “trap song” is almost weird, because the piano melody in the background makes sweat somersault down my neck and chills tiptoe down my spine. The piano literally sounds like being drunk.
The lyrics which accompany it, “Twelve more hours, left for us in a day/I been drinking all day/I been floating all day,” has an air of disparity and depression, yet debaucherous enough that the meaning can be easily overlooked in favor of another meaning. I almost see it as a call for help; the title of the song(s) (the first minute or so is actually “Maria” and the rest, which is what I’m speaking of, is called “I’m Drunk), while being two different songs, looks at first glance as if the speaker was calling to someone saying that they’re drunk. “Maria, I’m Drunk” sounds like the 2AM dial everyone has made at least once in their lifetime, and the echoing lyrics in the background “call your friends and let’s get drunk” is almost inviting someone in your world of hopelessness, debauchery and depression. The point I’m attempting to get across is that this is still classified (by some) as a “trap song,” and classified by most (including me) as a song to get drunk to. The meaning, the production, are all ignored in favor of accepting an easier to grasp meaning: that these songs were made solely for the purpose of getting intoxicated to, as opposed to being a plea for help or a ballad of past hardships.
A song previously unmentioned is “Trap Tears” by Raury, one of my favorite artists. While at the production level the song is very Trap influenced, the lyrics combat the notion in a heartbeat, instead attacking the very things that are glorified by other artists.
“Mama cryin', can't survive
She lost her mind, she's stressin' out
She needs to pay bills
Son took her money, daughter hungry
Bought the shit, there's no refunding
She's high still
He owes the gane, they gave him weight
But he was weak, he has a week
Or he will be killed
And papa died, he used to trap
His son's a man, but men don't cry
Unless they're trapped tears.”
The last two lines encapsulate the feeling I previously mentioned, where your pain must be kept behind a veneer of hardened skin and you must keep your tears “trapped,” which is also a reference to “the trap,” the general name given to environments which contain a lot of drugs, sex and alcohol. The previous lines show the brutal life the character of the song is currently living and the extent that his activities go in order to make ends meet.
“No nothing new can happen to the trap
We think it's cool and harmless too
Yes look around, you might just be trapped”
And these lines, which close out the song, circles the argument about how oblivious we’ve become to these ideas. Ideas which can be one rapper’s socially conscious message and another’s ticket to fame in the trap music realm. It also shows how people who are in the trap themselves may still be prone to obliviousness, as the structure has become so normalized it’s simply viewed as another facet of black culture. In reality, there is a harsh realness to everything these rappers say, and the lyrics are a commentary on how people go about coping with these formalities.
Good to remember that the trap is called “the trap” because no one gets out of it.
