The legacy of trap music in Argentine music: What remains of its heyday?

Why is no one talking about trap anymore? The genre, if it ever consolidated beyond a style, is dissolved into sonic clichés and folkloric signatures that an AI can easily reproduce. The movement, if it ever cohered at some point before the pandemic, is dispersed among single-person corporations that divide up their audiences and interconnect like luxury condominiums across artificial lakes: collaborations between artists are increasingly less movement-driven and more about commercial speculation, while the leaders—Duki, Cazzu, Bizarrap , Wos, CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso —seem to want to distance themselves from the label in their ambitious plans for global conquest. Only YSY A and Neo Pistea remain as guardians of a temple with fewer followers, and whose faith has retreated to the underground, far from the controversy it once unleashed. Few now claim trap, the fascinating and feared new rock & roll. And yet.

Toward the end of their journey in the brand-new El ritmo no perdona (Rhythm Doesn't Forgive) , journalist Camila Caamaño and historian Amadeo Gandolfo pose the question: At what point are we in Argentine music, and what role does trap, its latest young eruption, play in it? What has happened since its scandalous emergence until its normalization?

It's hard not to agree with the disenchantment that hovers throughout the book. Little remains of lyrical irreverence and musical subversion; the self-fulfilling prophecy of fame and money is left, at most, with the gamer mystery of unlocking levels: what new record will the metrics break, how high will the upward curve of views and plays go, even if no one notices the songs. If trap arrived to destabilize an autoimmune ecosystem of music where youth didn't recognize themselves, what panorama has it left in its place, and what does its fate mean?

Caamaño and Gandolfo suggest reviewing the chronology and early protagonists of trap to find answers. The journey is long, yet short; it's a spiraling history of a few years (2016-2019 as the genesis, with aftershocks until 2023) in which a small group of young men and women broke the logic of the music industry and imposed a new order with iconoclastic ambition.

In this review, the milestones: the invisible legacy of the pioneers of national hip-hop in the 1990s, the unforeseen effects of schooling with the internet, the YouTube factor, Spanish-speaking connections with Spain and Central America, and the verbal fencing of freestyle battles as steps on a mountain that, at one point, had crushed Muhammad.

To the surprise of even those in the music industry, trap music took on the core of pop music: youth. And it did so with its own unique toolbox, combining community resources and marketing, face-to-face contact and digitalization, entrepreneurship and movement mystique with an aggressive music that upset parents and resonated with children. Trap was new and sounded dangerous; it disdained local tradition, eschewed technical correctness, and promised to sweep everything away.

What was trap rebelling against? According to the authors, the organizational and discursive collapse brought about by the Cromañón tragedy was followed by a period in which the resistance and collective battles that had been voiced in rock chabón were silenced. For Caamaño and Gandolfo, starting in 2004, there were ten years of retreat into a micro, almost domestic sensibility, captured in indie songbooks. While this observation perhaps deserves more depth (what meanings are there in these approaches to the personal as political after a humanitarian disaster like Cromañon?), it does serve to reflect on the generational gap between a 40-year-old rock musician and a 16-year-old boy.

Trap, then, would reintroduce the conflict of being young. And it would do so in the context of drastic changes and accelerations brought about by the widespread use of the internet and its languages ​​as a microclimate for connections. It was also a labyrinth of new values ​​about what it means to be an artist, notoriety, and success, which would be translated into trap's scandalous lyrics: money, sex, and substances, all fast. Trap knew what it wanted, and it wanted it now: enough money to immediately satisfy what the economy of an unstable country never provides. And with it, accelerate the changes that collectively cannot achieve.

From there, we must understand the emergence of the two archetypes of trap: the "artist" (a new type of vocalist, who follows the lineage of hip-hop MCs and freestylers but is also the protagonist of a narrative that exceeds the musical and can expand without limits) and the producer (not only a sound curator, but a composer with the notoriety and autonomy to work with more than one artist).

In Argentina, the names that embodied these figures were Duki and Bizarrap, two young men whose stories would significantly intersect. First, in the El quinto escalón freestyle competitions (self-organized improvisational skill battles), where Duki launched his legend of unstoppable evolution, and Biza first demonstrated his strategic perspective by editing videos that expanded the influence of what was happening in the scene via YouTube. Later, as the duo that popularized the BZRP Music Sessions (iconic recordings in Bizarrap's bedroom-studio that began as niche content and reached global scale). And today, as living proof of the promise of self-produced success, even at the cost of critical acclaim.

Caamaño and Gandolfo conclude with a paradox: the once unbearable sound of trap is now the norm and standard, but its bastions don't claim victory. It's a conquest without a flag, an advance that reordered the landscape of pop music in Argentina but was better assimilated by the industry than by the artists. Rhythm Doesn't Forgive is an attempt to address this lack of historical narrative, a difficult task that is just beginning.

The book's journey makes it clear that the most interesting thing about trap isn't the music, but rather the way it captured an era and became the spearhead of the latest evolution of the music industry: an ecosystem where the circulation, consumption, and validation of music have been profoundly transformed. Trap artists and producers came to update a stale system and impose another: a network of rapid and continuous consumption, where the work is merely one of the nodes in a multiplatform deployment that ranges from the fictional intimacy of Instagram to the overstimulated epic of packed stadiums.

For Caamaño and Gandolfo, who know and follow the subject with passion, the dissolution of the trap revolution is a disappointment palpable in the book and encouraged in their exchanges. Yet, they find in its offshoots—RKT, perhaps the truly indigenous dance genre; the post-trap of Swaggerboyz—winds of a new era.