So, today the conversation is about hip-hop and the state of hip-hop, specifically trap. Because, once upon a time, trap dominated hip-hop. Trap was the name of hip-hop. Trap and hip-hop were, you know, at one point, one and the same.
You’re talking hip-hop, you’re talking trap, you’re talking Migos, you’re talking, like, let’s be real, you’re talking Thug, you’re talking Rich Homie Quan, you’re talking anybody that was out 2015, you know, you’re talking trap. Even trap R&B, you’re talking Fetty Wap, you know, you’re talking trap. Trap dominated hip-hop, period. Everybody hopped on trap.
Travis was a trap engineer, you know, Kanye had to move to trap eventually. Drake, he started on some nice slow R&B stuff, moved over to trap expeditiously. Trap was the sound that was taking the world by storm. And then, maybe 2017, in my opinion, the last best trap album was dropped.
And that was Thug and Future, Super Slimy. That was the last best trap album of all time, as far as I’m concerned. Now, in hip-hop, nobody’s making real good trap music no more. Even Thug, who once started, you know, Trap Basics, this guy was everything trap.
This guy lived in Reef Trap, to make a song with Post Malone on Camila Cabello? Like, what world are we living in? That’s not making sense. That’s not the trap I know.
We’re not playing that shit in trap, no way. Post Malone in a trap? Maybe. Camila Cabello?
Get the fuck out of here. We’re not playing that. Respectfully. But, this has been manufactured by the music industry.
It was… Trap was gentrified. And because of that, trap broke down into so many different segments. Because everybody sounded the same, and nobody sounded good anymore.
And in the underground, we’ve been getting some different types of trap. You know, there’s Chief Keef Trap. That sounds completely different than Playboi Carti Trap. You know what I’m saying?
But it’s all trap. So, in that time, we’ve gotten artists like… Let me go to my music library. Okay.
We’ve got… In trap, there’s been so many ups and downs. You know? But…
We’ll sort it by year. Gucci Mane in OG in Trap 2009. You know? He was a trap pioneer.
He’s out of Atlanta. Thug? He’s out of Atlanta. Future?
He’s out of Atlanta. So, it’s looking like Atlanta is a harder trap. Migos? They’re out of Atlanta.
You know? Versace? That’s a song by Migos. They featured Drake on that.
Drake tasted that real trap. Drake tasted that real trap music. What did he do? After dropping Take Care, what did he do?
He dropped nothing was the same. It’s hip-hop. Don’t get me wrong. But he tasted trap and he wasn’t going to go back.
You hear trap drums? Trap 808s? This was nothing like Take Care. It’s more composed and put together.
Maybe some trap elements on Take Care. It wasn’t to the level of what it was on Nothing Was The Same. From there, you see trap everywhere. Bobby Shmurda, 2014.
Shmurda, she wrote. That’s a big movement for trap. He dropped Hot Nigga. That’s a big movement for trap.
We get some trap anthems. Collard Greens, Schoolboy Q. Kendrick Lamar, that’s 2014. Trap is building up.
Chief Keef, we spreading. Oxymoron, Collard Greens, that’s West Coast trap. That’s California. Chief Keef, we’re all the way in Chicago.
Chicago, nigga. From there, trap really blows up. We have Drake and Future. What a time to be alive.
2015, a big moment in trap. Very big moment in trap. From there, trap goes mainstream. Boom.
To Pimple Butterfly Drops, we got some real hip hop trappy beats. We got 2015, Trap Soul, Bryson Tiller. 21 Savage pops out. Dip, dip, you know?
Back in Atlanta. Then we have Rodeo, Travis Scott, 2015. I’m telling you, this is big. You have Drake’s trap mixtape.
If you’re reading this, it’s too late. That’s 2015 as well. Trap don’t stop there. 2015, boom.
DX2, or DS2 Future. You thought it was done? No. Dark Sky Paradise.
Believe it or not, this song, or this album, had some anthems on it. We can’t pretend Blessings wasn’t an anthem. We can’t pretend I Don’t Fuck With You wasn’t an anthem with E-40. Major songs.
Barter Six Drops. And Doug is primed for his trap run. He’s primed for his critically acclaimed world… His critically acclaimed trap world domination world tour.
Here we go. Drake Drops Views, 2016. This was different. This was a slow trap.
This was an R&B trap. This was a trap song? No, this was a Canadian trap. This was a really cold winter trap.
The Life of Pablo Drops. Wow, Kanye West had no choice but to hop on trap. His last album before this was… It was My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy.
The most interesting beats known to man. Like, devoid of real… It was… You can’t say anything bad about it.
It was so rich. It was not trap. It was real music. It was like…
The essence of music was poured into that album. It superseded trap. Couldn’t call it a trap album. But here we have trap album, The Life of Pablo.
Then we have… Shrem Life 2. Shrem Life 2. Swang.
It was warming up. It was warming up. And boom, Black Beatles. That started trends worldwide.
Everybody was doing the mannequin challenge. 2016. We see trap in one of its first gentrified settings. DJ Khaled and his major key album.
This was a hyper-saturated trap. This was the beginning of the end. It couldn’t get any bigger. How big could you get it?
I don’t know. You just got to get it really big. We had Jay-Z and Future. Nas, Kendrick Lamar, Bryson Tiller, Chris Brown, Kodak Black, Future, Rick Ross, Jadakiss, Travis Scott, Lil Wayne.
These are big hitters in trap. He’s trying to make the biggest trap album of all time. And I can’t lie. Those songs went hard.
But damn, how much harder could you get? That’s the real question. How much harder could you get? Gucci Mane, Freed.
He drops the return of East Atlanta Santa. Now, I don’t know what to tell you. But this was a more complete package than a man. This is not.
This is not. Actually, let me talk about everybody looking deluxe. See, all through Gucci Mane’s prison time, he was dropping music. He was dropping music.
It’s like he never left. He had them hard drives flooded with tracks. There was not a year he was in prison, and he still wasn’t dropping music. From 2005, all the way up.
Let’s see. All the way up to 2016, even when he was in prison, he had music dropping. These were songs featuring Young Thug, Richie McQuown. Quavo, Waka Flocka, Rich the Kid.
All while he’s locked up. That’s how big WAP was. Chief Keef, Pee Wee Longway, Trinidad James. Young Dolph, R.I.P.
Young Dolph. Make sure you pay respects to Young Dolph. 100 shots, nigga. But, yeah, these are big hitters, you know?
And then when he’s finally released out of prison, his first album. I think this is one of his first albums ever to even have a deluxe version. That’s how big it’s supposed to be. He had the song with Drake back on road, and it was like…
WAP lost the pressure. I don’t know. He was too… I don’t know.
He had it in him, though, but that pressure wasn’t there. He had shit to come back to. He didn’t have to grind. He didn’t have to work for this.
He’s the king of trap. And he drops WAPtober. And it was alright. He drops The Return of East Atlanta Santa.
That was pretty interesting. Trap holiday music. I can mess with that during the holidays, but I don’t know if I’m going to listen to it in the middle of May, you know? Drop top WAP.
Maybe a couple of songs on there, but it was short. 38 minutes. I need an album. You’re an artist.
I need an album. He does it. 2017. Mr.
Davis. He does it. In my opinion, that’s the peak. He reached his peak.
That was 2017, October, I believe. He reached his peak. So, we continue on. We’re going to talk about Super Slimy.
That same month, October. Super Slimy, Future Young Thug. That’s… That’s the absolute peak of trap, period.
We’ve had Young Thug albums since. Oh, I didn’t even talk about Young Thug’s run. His immaculate run. So, like I said before, we had Barter 6.
That was Young Thug 2015, Barter 6. He wasn’t… He had something to prove. He dropped Young Thug, Richie McQuown.
He dropped Trap Zeus. And then he’s warming up. Here he goes. Takes his launch from mainstream.
Boom, I’m up. Only nine songs. 38 minutes. That was dropped February, 2017.
2016. Take into account when the peak of trap is coming, you know? How can you claim to top, you know? This is one of the last great trap artists.
You know, he doesn’t have much time. The same 2009. Right after February, boom, March 2016. We got Slime Season 3, this time with eight songs.
And it’s 10 minutes shorter, coming at 28 minutes. An amazing display. We’re not done though. The True Colors, Peewee Longway, Migos, Young Thug, and Richie McQuown album comes out.
That doesn’t count. That’s disqualified from the running. Talking about personal albums. He drops his self-titled album, Jeffrey.
Yeah, he was wearing a dress, supposedly with an AK underneath it. That’s why he had to wear the dress. That’s what he’s told. That’s what he’s told the world.
And boom, Jeffrey. August 2016. 10 songs, 42 minutes. And from these three albums, we’ve got heavy hitters.
I can name every single song on each album and still can’t pick what’s better. But we got F-Cancer, Hercules, you know? King Troop, you know? My Boyz featuring Trouble Rallo and Dirk, you know?
That’s just, I’m up. Then we got Dippin’. We got Herbie and Drippin’. We got Memo, you know?
We got Digits, you know? Horses Don’t Stop, They Keep Going. Or Hustlers Don’t Stop, They Keep Going. Which one is it?
You decide. You decide. On Jeffrey, he got Wyclef Jean. He got Guwop.
He got Pick Up The Phone with Travis Scott. That was a trap anthem. Pick up the phone, baby. Everybody and their mom was singing that song.
That’s 2016. That’s middle of the summer, 2016. Pick up the phone, baby. For the next 10 million years, everybody’s telling each other, pick up the phone, baby.
And then he dropped Beautiful Thugger Girl. This was a cherry on top. 2017. He was feeling a bit experimental, but listen to this.
Why, in his last 10 years of making music, does he just now start feeling experimental? What does it say about the future of trap when Young Thug is dropping a country album right before the best trap album of all time releases? Super slimy. The future of Young Thug is not trap.
The future of Young Thug is slime. Trap is dead. 2017. Because what happened was Young Thug was supposed to release Slime Language.
We thought it was a solo album. Supposed to be, now that he’s successfully gone mainstream, we’re getting that high quality music from Thug in a full hour long set. And we got 51 minutes, but it was a collab album with so many features and so many people. It was just so much going on.
It wasn’t a slime language that I was told to be saving up all this hype for. He drops, you know, drops just a little, a little EP, the on the run EP in 2018. I was cool, you know, six songs, 22 minutes, you know, it wasn’t that full hour long track that I was waiting for from Doug, you know, 2019 comes, he drops so much fun. Original album with one hour and two minutes.
This was the first full hour album, studio album that I got from from Doug and I was disappointed, I can’t lie. I was, I was fucking disappointed. He dropped the deluxe, I was even more disappointed. It’s like they just throw artists on here.
The label just, that’s what I’m telling myself, the label just throws people on here to get more streams and sales. It’s not real music no more. They dropped Slime and Me and that was dead in the water. Slime and Language, you can’t believe you thought you could do another one after one.
And it was, it was bad. It wasn’t trap, it wasn’t, it was a mess. Then he dropped Punk. With the album artwork being good, the title was Punk.
This is not trap. This, these are out-of-the-world beats. And I’m not saying these, these are out, I’m just talking about trap is dead. I’m not saying these albums are bad, but it’s not, it’s not that hardcore trap, you know, I was raised on.
Trap I know is dead. Not one album dropped after that that was a good trap album. But all the albums that dropped after that were still good albums. They might have been influenced by trap, but they weren’t trap.
No. Years 2018, now we’re talking the beginning of, of Afro beats. No, not to yet. But UK, UK rap featuring a lot of African artists is slowly heating up, but we’re not there, we’re not at the peak of Afro beats.
But we have some heavy hitters. 2018, A$AP Rocky released his album, he was never known for trap, he was always on his psychedelic, psychedelic beats and he was sending out shockwaves, everybody try something different. So for that we got a lot of different stuff. Drake kept it similar to his old stuff, you know, R&B.
But here we go. Apart from that, 2018 we got Slime Belief, Cross Me by The One Only, Young Boy Never Broke Again, NBA Young Boy, 38 Baby, you know, Lil Top, you know. A.I. Young Boy, you know.
Lam Stanto, you know. Young Boy, 2018. This is not trap, but this is, this is a different type of music. It stems from trap, but it ain’t trap.
You know, you have UK trap. It’s trap, but it’s not trap. It’s not Young Thug trap. No, it’s not.
But they still call it trap, you know. You have Quavo, he’s dropping his albums, not quite trap no more. He dropped a solo album, it wasn’t really trap. Go back to the UK, Petty One, you know.
He’s dropping, he’s dropping some trap stuff, but it’s like a UK trap, not trap. All Heroes Wear Capes, this is big in hip hop. This is big in hip hop. You know, overall hip hop, Metro Boomin, you know, a goaded trap producer.
Don’t question his pen, don’t question his fingers, paws, don’t question him, period. But this is more hip hop, this is like a fuller hip hop sound. His beats are still like trap beats, don’t get me wrong, but it’s like, it’s more than that, just that raw trap, you know. I’m talking about Young Thug, but Young Thug, I didn’t talk about Lil Uzi Vert much, but Lil Uzi Vert was one of the pioneers in experimental trap from those original Marimba or xylophone or bell bass beats that he was rapping on earlier in his career.
They evolved and evolved, evolved into like a more rock centric and electric music, electric type of trap. This wasn’t the same beats as Young Thug. It definitely weren’t the same beats as Chief Keef or Lil Durk on those, you know, Chicago drill beats, which is different than a UK trap beat, which is different than a, you know, or a Chicago trap beat or drill beat. They call them the same, but actually no, there is a type of drill beat from Chicago and there is a type of trap beat from Chicago.
You know, drill became its own subculture within trap, you know, but even New Paddock, you know, we got Trippie Redd and his experimental albums, psychedelic albums, but there were also trap influence and they were big in hip hop. He did his thing with 6ix9ine and it was big in hip hop, but this trap was different. We were here for it, but it was different. This is 2018 and then there’s a great void in trap, till a little baby comes.
2018, harder than ever. These are big names in trap. King Von, big name in trap, but these are all like these experimental trap artists, you know. Now, I don’t want, maybe it was, I don’t know if it was after Playboi Carti dropped Die Lit, which was in 2018, May 11th, my birthday, actually.
I don’t know if it was around that era that we reached the… that day. Astroworld dropped… …
I guess after … After Pop Smoke died, there was nobody to claim that King of New York stuff. Future solidified himself as the King of Trap. That was 2020, you know.
Durk was… Durk was… Their farm was dead at this point. Durk, he’s the King of Chicago, allegedly.
He runs Chicago. And everybody’s, you know, complacent, ready to experiment. We get Return of the Take, finally, from Lil Uzi Vert, and this is March 13, 2020. And I’m telling you, it’s nothing like the original album.
It’s… Final version was so different that when he dropped the 8th song, the 18th song, the original album, he released … He released 14 extra songs. 14 whole extra songs.
A whole 43 minutes on the on the deluxe. You know, 14, 43 minutes, this is like this is like Luv is Rage album territory. … To make up for how different the album was, because his fans wasn’t eating up that new music that he dropped.
They wanted the shit that they were waiting for, respectfully. Nobody wanted to listen to those low-quality ass snippets. … So then…
… Drake drops Dark Lane demo tapes, thinking he gonna do another, like what he did with … Nothing was… This is too late, and it didn’t work.
He just dropped some music, and I say it was like a splash in the water. … Wasn’t until me personally, I say … 2020 …
2020 May. Let’s go 2020 May. … No, no, no.
… Lucki’s Drop was almost there, but we’ll go with actually no. … 2021
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