Weekly Flavours [Trap] [001]

With the advent of the Internet, our attention spans are fleeting at best. With a global means of collaboration, dissemination, and communication, music evolves more quickly than ever, with witch house gracing our headphones and club floors one week, seapunk the next. That's not to say there's no staying power to any of this music, but copycats are likely to arise more quickly with accessible production methods at everyone's disposal, and we're much more inclined to seek out the next big thing, whether we're conscious of it or not. In our Weekly Flavours feature, we'll be covering the big thing of the moment for your listening and learning pleasure. Don't sleep, because you never know — in a month we could be covering something totally different.

Trap

Damn Son Where'd Ya Find This? Real Trap Shit. WHUT. Ratchet. Trippy.

These are some of the terms you may have heard in the past half year. Yes, they are in reference to what people have come to know as trap music. Trap is the most recent wave to surf the hype alongside dubstep that will lead us on into a new elbow-throwing, booty-clapping era of dance music.

While hip-hop, particularly OG Trap (Young Jeezy, etc) originally drew in a more urban crowd, the new wave of trap music has been influenced by a predominantly white male demographic as far as production goes. Bringing the styles of real trap music into EDM has created more growth than anyone has seen since dubstep first hit the Americas.

Trap music got its start down in the dirty south (Texas, Georgia, Florida) over a decade ago with originators like ATL's MC Shy D. The concept of offbeat kicks, chopped-and-screwed vocals, and 16th note to 32nd note high hats is most definitely an artifact that has been dusted off and injected into the new methods of dance music production. As a result, dance floors have never been sweatier than the year 2012 and I don't see any signs of slowing. 

Acts like Flosstradamus, Heroes X Villains, Baauer, gLAdiator, UZ, DJ Sliink, Swizzymack, Westside Schmucks, and many others across the country have recently turned this world's dance music scene upside down. Guess it's just how we do things in the trap.

Throw Bows (rage to this):

Trippy Mane (chill to this):