The Trap

What it takes to make it in hip-hops new capital

- Jack Hamilton

Nayvadius Wilburn, a 38-year-old Atlantan who performs under the name Future, is one of the great musicians of the 21st century. Future is often classified as a rapper, but he is really an all-purpose vocalist, a man who sings, chants, rasps, yelps, and growls, frequently through Auto-Tune. In Future’s music, that vocal processing software becomes less a melodic device than a textural one, blurring the boundaries between human and machine, embodiment and alienation. He makes songs about women, drugs, cars, guns—not exactly groundbreaking subject matter— but much of his work is tinged with self-loathing and low-grade dread, reveling in hedonism and excess while warily staring down the existential emptiness of the morning after, if not the night itself. That Future’s music does all of this and manages to be hugely successful— his latest full-length release, I Never Liked You, was the eighth album of his career to top the Billboard charts—makes him even more remarkable.

Future’s music also showcases the current hallmarks of the southern-born, Atlanta-dominated subgenre of hip-hop known as trap, which now permeate nearly every corner of popular music: rattling digitized hi-hats; booming sub-bass; keyboards forging lush, woozily surreal harmonic backdrops and melodic lines. Auto-Tune itself is a tool that’s been prevalent within hip-hop for about 15 years, key to the experimentations of Lil Wayne (New Orleans) and Kanye West (Chicago), and one that has been voraciously adopted by many Atlanta rappers besides Future. It’s used, for example, in music as disparate as the spacey avant-gardism of Young Thug and the earworm Top 40 smashes of Lil Nas X.