Similarly, SoundCloud rap had its roots in the experience of young African Americans trapped in a socio-economic condition of poverty, unstable family systems, gang violence, drug use and juvenile incarceration. It also generated this state through dissociative hi-hats, drawn-out 808 bass lines and haunting synthesizers. 11 At the same time, the music was not only about the trap lifestyle and the general sense of entrapment that encompassed it. Therefore, trap music was deeply connected to the underprivileged community from which it originated. Further, it was in the surrounding neighborhood of the trap, at nightclubs, strip clubs and street corners where the trap music was first consumed. The homemade studios where trap music was made were usually funded by the illegal activities that occurred within the traps.

10 Trap music was both about and generated from the trap. Trap (in the slang of Atlanta’s African American population) is a “typical wooden house from Atlanta’s devastated suburbs, where drugs and other illegal businesses take place, and where a certain lifestyle is practiced.” 9 The word trap also carries connotations of entrapment, where the trap can be seen as a place and a life-style that is hard to escape from. SoundCloud rap took many of its aesthetic cues from trap music, a genre of Hip Hop that originated in the southern U.S. These virtualities become ways of bringing forth the alien in the form of new syntaxes, new meanings, new aesthetics and new modes of being, pushing the bounds of rap and popular music. I present SoundCloud rap tracks as virtualities of aesthetic origination, with rappers and producers playing with the alien, the unknown, the incomputable and the incomprehensible, which are provided to them via cybernetic technologies. Through techniques such as Auto-Tune, mumbling, repetition, ad-libs, triplets, rappers were able to create a radically new aesthetic form that pushed the limits of digital music production and listening.

Following Luciana Parisi’s notion of alien thinking and Kodwo Eshun’s work on Afrofuturism, I see the SoundCloud rap movement as exhibiting a type of alien creativity, existing outside the human but having real effects upon the human aesthetic experience. In this paper I argue that the SoundCloud rap movement of the 2010s signalled not only a crisis of the rap-image (the specific ways in which rap had been traditionally represented and produced), but also a moment of intense aesthetic creativity and experimentation.

Mumble rap autotune online