Atlanta rap artist T.I. dropped the album “Trap Muzik” nearly 20 years ago, lending credence to his claim that he coined the term “trap” — a subgenre that is now the most popular in hip hop. In “Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story,” New York Times music reporter Joe Coscarelli rewinds past T.I.’s 2003 release to tap into Atlanta’s trap roots, telling the story of how music born from the street and drug life of the “Dirty South” has come to give voice to an evolving generation of artists who dominate the charts today.
“If there was a big bang for Atlanta rap, it probably happened during Freaknik,” Coscarelli writes at the beginning of “Rap Capital” as he throws the ingredients into the pot of the cultural boil that gave birth to trap music. The music festival drew 200,000 people to the city in 1994, exploding Atlanta’s nightlife and turning celebrities on to its culture. The South’s network of HBCU’s ensured “upwardly mobile young people were coming to Atlanta throughout the 1990s, ready to show out, spend money and dance when they weren’t busy getting ahead. What they needed was a soundtrack.”
As the demand was building, the supply was exploding. A sector of Atlanta’s youth sought fame to end their predetermined cycle of poverty, drugs and imprisonment. Digging into the institutional structures forcing “young Black men to wrestle generational curses, crippled school systems, incarceration and racism on the way to an improbable destination atop art and commerce,” Coscarelli explains how trap music — through both culture and content — offered a ticket out.
Lil Baby, “a convicted felon raised by a single mother on government assistance” who Coscarelli extensively features in “Rap Capital,” was behind bars in 2015 when he became a father. Refusing to miss out on any more of life’s milestones, Lil Baby threw himself into creating music upon his release and has gone on to become a Grammy-winning artist and voice of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Incarceration also factored into the origin story of Migos, the trio that Billboard credited with bringing Atlanta’s roots mainstream. Discovered by trap pioneer Gucci Mane in 2012, Migos didn’t produce their first number one single until 2017. Their sputtering start was due in part to member Offset’s imprisonment. And Pierre Thomas (aka P), CEO of Migros’ record label Quality Control Music, got his start in the music business to avoid returning to prison.
Yet the need to escape the street life could be cited as the impetus for every regional rap movement since the 1970s. What gifted Atlanta’s microcosm with rapid mainstream access? Coscarelli makes a compelling argument for timing. Technological advancements in streaming music and access to self-promotion on social media introduced a grass-roots element to the music industry, ending reliance on high-profile record labels and big-name producers as young artists scramble to feed “the bottomless appetite for new content from distractible audiences with scroll-happy tendencies.”
Credit: Handout
Credit: Handout
With the foundation of trap established, Coscarelli zeroes in on the years from 2013 to 2020, peppering the text with an abundance of statistics on Spotify downloads, Instagram engagements and Billboard chart rankings for throngs of aspiring artists, as well as copious details on what the artists wear, where they go and who they’re with. “Rap Capital” starts as a story about a city, a movement and its players but loses the narrative thread as it progresses, becoming an overload of information without a clear takeaway for the reader.
Coscarelli asserts trap serves as “America’s principal artistic illustration of both crushing poverty and absurd, unexpected wealth.” It tells the story of extreme highs and lows, of abject destitution and blinding success, of what it’s like to be on a dangerous and glamorous and captivating ride. Yet his narrative doesn’t tap into those elements as Lil Baby, Migos and P experience them in their personal lives.
Perhaps the hundreds of hours Coscarelli spent interviewing and observing his subjects rendered him too close, allowing him to gloss over some unsavory aspects as he compiled his final report. He mentions that in 2019, P was accused of beating and choking his pregnant girlfriend several times but follows up P’s denial of the allegations by recounting his social-media post touting his commitment to fatherhood. Citing the case ended in a settlement, Coscarelli leaves it at that.
While giving credit to women who have been pivotal to the business side of trap, such as Lil Baby’s mother and various musical enterprisers, the female influence is — except a few passing mentions of well-established industry greats like Cardi B and Nicki Minaj — left relatively unexplored in Coscarelli’s compilation on trap music. He maintains that Atlanta rap, along with the genre and much of the country, is dominated by the “straight male perspective” and doesn’t probe much further.
Sesali Bowen, journalist and author of “Bad Fat Black Girl: Notes from a Trap Feminist,” asserts in her 2021 memoir that in trap music there’s an “art to the specific role women play … that of a strategic mastermind set on creating sexual relationships on her own terms.” She provides a persuasive counterpoint that the feminine contribution to trap as a discipline is worthy of deeper exploration.
Coscarelli’s study on trap music contributes an important volume to the cannon of musical journalism. But after documenting an evening he spent hanging out with Lil Reek, Coscarelli writes, “the night, like most Saturday nights in one’s teens or early 20s, had proven somewhat anticlimactic.” An experience not altogether unlike reading this book.
NONFICTION
“Rap Capital: An Atlanta Story”
by Joe Coscarelli
Simon & Schuster
448 pages, $29.99
