Trap music traded compositional sophistication for immediacy and perceived authenticity

Evidence

The Atlanta trio Migos became synonymous with trap’s ascent, popularizing the triplet flow, a rapid-fire delivery that quickly made older “boom bap” styles of hip-hop sound outdated. In rap, the paradigm most certainly shifted. Trap was hardly obsessed with compositional experimentation (the labels culled backtracks from an endless number of anonymous grunts who pumped out commodity beats), but its immediacy made it feel more authentic than rival sounds. Sharing a spirit with punk rock, songs were often created in twenty minutes. “If they really take their time on it,” Migos’s DJ Durel said, “they’ll take forty or forty-five minutes” on a track. — W. David Marx, Blank Space, 392

Categorization

• CANDY: Songs created in twenty minutes — forty-five if taking their time — is a fun shareable detail.
• SHARE: The commodity-beat factory behind trap (anonymous grunts pumping out backtracks) and the 20-minute track creation is exactly the kind of detail a hip-hop producer friend would relish.
• XREF: connects to: A band’s inauthenticity can itself be its genuine artistic material. — Mark Fisher (edited by Darren Ambrose), K-Punk: The Collected and Unpublished…, 1052; All music either embeds or disrupts habituated behaviour patterns