Trap emerged from the Atlanta Black underground as a futurist rebuttal to retromania

Evidence

While retromania infected mainstream music, the clearest source of artistic innovation yet again emerged from the Black underground. In Atlanta, a nascent hip-hop subgenre called trap rejected seventies’ grooves of the past for a minimalist sound. Defined by the tik-tik-tik of drum machine hi-hats, crunching snares, and chest-thumping 808 kick drums, trap music was the sound of the city: the streets, the drug-production factories, and the strip clubs. The genre’s leading voices—including Gucci Mane and T.I.—had come up in Atlanta’s drug trade. Some saw rap as the next step in their financial strategies rather than as an artistic calling. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 391

Categorization

• XREF: Core to Marx’s mechanism: innovation keeps emerging from the margins even amid mainstream omnivore monoculture — key to the reader’s counter-case about the era’s actual signature.