“Bitch, look at me: I’m a work of art”: Ideas to understand (better) the trap phenomenon

Although journalistic criticism and university professors have not always wanted to accept it, the genres (literary, musical, performative …) are constantly changing. In the case of music, the traditional patterns, ranging from pop to bachata, through rock, punk or reggaeton, have opened their borders and have spread through the new styles of the 21st century.

In this context, between the marginal and the canonical, from the slums to the millions of views on YouTube, the phenomenon of trap seems to have become one of the most important movements on the current music scene. Its influence has spanned all cultural levels, being valued as an art “of the street” –the inheritance of rap– at the same time that it monopolizes minutes in television programs, specials in magazines and, now, academic research.

The fusion of the trap

The trap has expanded the use of the creative word and has included audiovisual media within the prestigious culture. While more traditional figures such as singer-songwriters today aspire to legitimize themselves as artists and therefore resort to consecrated forms (the poetry), the ragman does it like creator and he risks with experimental forms, low-cultural by convention, hybrids, repulsive. It is not about entrenching oneself in the unpleasant or marginal, but about renewing the vision of the artistic, overcoming the petrified structures. And thus advance at the same pace as technology, society and generations millennial and Z (we do not know where, but they advance).

Those new figures They also take advantage of the cultural ascent to revalue certain aspects of reality that differ from what is socially accepted. They reappropriate more “classic” styles, such as singer-songwriters, copleras or flamenco. But they always maintain a position that demonstrates both the artifice and the communicability of the activity. performative.

It might seem that The Zowi O Yung Beef they are trivializing social problems. They say a lot “bitch” and “bitch”. They constantly sexualize and objectify women. They extol the marginal power of the street. C. Tangana and Rosalía they appropriate Hispanic (and Latino, incidentally: the eternal struggle for appropriationism remains open), sometimes without explicitly marking the stale machismo they hide or the cultural origin from which they take it. They are, arguably, the paradigm of the politically incorrect.

However, in the whole of its performance, they submit precisely to that artificiality and base their “poetics” on ambiguity and an irony that gratifies the wishes of the viewer. Thus, they claim the artificial character not only of the words but also of the communicative situation of the “new” work of musical art: based on the contrast between eccentricity and understanding.

And this also transforms the attitude of the receiver. It forces us to place special emphasis on its effect, on its audience and its relationship with reality, since it makes the performance –In another time, a thing of extravagant artists and elitist art fairs that the average subject could not and was not interested in understanding– an element of our day to day life.

Between the crisis and the business

The definition of the rag phenomenon as superficial also hides an economic-social reading. The pure, apparently depoliticized or even anti-progressive enjoyment, the insistence on perreo, the accumulation of common places and the sum of the new topoi neighborhoods are a symptom of the desperation of the young Spanish generations (Ernesto castro He already spoke of the spirit of the 15M, tired by the passage of the years) and in turn they are an index of the serious problem that this despair supposes.

Undoubtedly, in the trap phenomenon there is some marketing, but also something avant-garde. There is a market and aesthetics, advertising and art. You have to sell yourself and get gold. This idea can be shocking to the more traditional minds. The work is no longer work, it is transmedia; and art is no longer art, it is fully mixed with mere storytelling.

In this way, we can define trap as a transmedia genre, performative and friend of the ironic and pluri-interpretation. These traits are not an original creation of the rags, far from it. Many readers may have thought of Andy Warhol (for example) while reading these lines. And they are right. But creativity is generally a matter of disposition and relationship.

The rags have known how to radicalize and emphasize the existing media in the 21st century. They have played with the system and against the system. And so they have achieved some of the most interesting reflections in recent times on reality and realism, the art of marketing and the autonomy of art, the twisted and hyperconscious use of already established cultural codes, experimentation and the constitution of a figure. distinctive authorial, identity and Spanish …

But those are topics of another article. For now let’s take some time of enjoyment and analysis with the memes of Cecilio G, the artificial interviews with C. Tangana and the ambiguous way of understanding the art of (our Kanye West and Kim Kardashian) Yung Beef and La Zowi. We just need to give them the benefit of the aesthetic doubt. “I have all the tricks to cajole you. Bitch, look at me: I’m a work of art”.

Laro del Rio Castañeda, Predoctoral researcher in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature, Oviedo University and Guillermo Sánchez Anointed, Predoctoral researcher in Theory of Literature and Comparative Literature, Oviedo University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. read the original.