I want to focus my discussion this week on Jesse McCarthy’s “Notes on Trap” because it opened my eyes to my long-time under-appreciation of trap, and its articulation of our generation’s America. My personal taste centers around music of the seventies and sixties, and I think that’s partly because I appreciate the historical periods from which this music was produced. For a long time, I’ve dismissed modern music, failing to recognize that we are presently living in a historically significant moment. In this frame of mind, trap music is a hollering, a crying out- of black souls on the black experience in the current state of our country.

James Baldwin said, “People evolve a language in order to describe and thus control their circumstances, or in order not to be submerged by a reality that they cannot articulate.” Through the lyrics we feel artists pushing against the circumstances deemed forceful, inescapable, or in some cases, changeable to them. It’s a sort of reactivity to one’s surroundings. Thus, an artist’s lyrics tell us a lot about the circumstances in which the music was produced.

When Sam Cooke sang “A Change is Gonna Come,” he was expressing an acknowledgement of a difficult past and hope for the future – within the context of the America he lived in. McCarthy says there is a similar trope present in today’s trap music. It’s still an acknowledgement of all the damage and pain. But it’s no longer dainty, polished, and polite. Trap music advances one step forward in the context of today’s America, where enough is enough. McCarthy exemplifies Rae Sremmurd’s echoing etherial lyrics. Simply said, “I ain’t living right.” People are still suffering. Instead of A Change is Gonna Come, something has to change. At the same time, trap also acknowledges an ownership of what black America should be. A commonality in artists is the idea of, “Yes – this is luxury, and despite white societal standards, I’ve earned this.” It’s not “Do I deserve this?”  It’s “I deserve this, and even more. ” It’s what McCarthy describes “the ideal of a supremely luxurious attitude toward luxury,”  which is a direct pushback from the continual oppression of black Americans. Trap “believes in its own power,” which makes it so irresistible.

“TRAP IS THE ONLY MUSIC that sounds like what living in contemporary America feels like…It is the funeral music that the Reagan revolution deserves,” McCarthy asserts. It’s weird to think retrospectively from the present, but we are living a historical moment similar in magnitude to the sixties, but without the veneer of nostalgia and the wisdom of hindsight. Trap is born directly from this time and truly representative of this moment.

In light of these readings (and watching the presidential debate last night), I was also thinking about the “controversy” surrounding current protests. I heard our current president speak of protesters burning houses, robbing stores, and killing people. I questioned the validity of his statement but there was part of me that believed this. This destruction, after all, is portrayed on the news. For a second it made me consider: is this the right thing to do? Are these protests  getting out of hand?

But as Angela Davis posed- who are the violent ones? Thousands of black Americans have been killed,  many severely injured by police brutality, sisters and brothers dead or living in fear for their lives and of those they love. Who is enacting the real violence here?

The protests/riots are chaotic, but I’ve come to realize that this commotion is one that needs to be made. Today, we look back at the March on Washington as commendable and historically significant event. But citizens in 1963 were largely disapproving of it at the time. According to a NY Times poll, less than 25% had positive opinions on the event. At the time, it was radical, unstable, worrisome. But fifty years later, the idea doesn’t sound so radical anymore – this part of the work that has to be done. Anything worth protesting for is going to be radical- or else it wouldn’t be a protest.

The current moment we are living in is one of major historical significance, and it is simultaneously defined by and represented by trap music.