While trap music, an increasingly popular form of southern hip-hop, has been known for its infatuation with wealth and money, its songs also show a strong if unorthodox spiritual current, writes Rachel Bomalaski in the journal Anthropology of Consciousness (online in October). Trap emerged from the American South’s urban centers in the late 1990s and 2000s, but has since spread throughout the world. Bomalaski sees the songs of such prominent trap musicians as Georgia rapper Pastor Troy, Kevin Gates, Gangsta Boo, and Young Thug as mixing and injecting everything from “unorthodox Islam,” Christian prayer, “the divine feminine,” and indigenous beliefs into their music. Apart from the lyrics, the melodies and especially the beat of trap is said to generate a dreamlike state and feelings of transcendence. For instance, in the 2023 song “Goddess from Houston,” rapper Monaleo evokes a “dream space,” with its crackling and hissing sound, where she “reveals her truth: ‘God is a woman/God is a lady.’” Kevin Gates’s “uncanny and contrasting timbres reflect his syncretistic practice, where Islamic prayer, indigenous beliefs, and Voodoo coexist,” Bomalaski writes. She concludes that the trap genre expresses “repressed spiritualities, particularly those rooted in African American and syncretistic traditions,” and a sense of “mourning for the South’s lost religious pluralism.”
(Anthropology of Consciousness, https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/journal/15563537)
