fbpx

Letters

Letters from Issue 33

Trapped

Dear Editors,

I’d like to respond to Jesse McCarthy’s writing on the relationship between the trap, trapping, and trap music in “Notes on Trap” (Issue 32) by way of an anecdote. I know some trappers. In the car with one in Atlanta, as we drove from deal to deal, stopping occasionally to measure weight and count bills, we listened to Future’s album FUTURE. The trapper told me this was his favorite album to listen to while trapping because he was trapping and Future was trapping.

There’s a tautology implicit in his words. Trap music is trapping and trapping is trap music. Whenever someone asks a trapper to explain how trapping as an action (the closest yet totally inadequate synonym being dealing) relates to trapping as a musical genre, the tautology continues. Some might take it as an invitation to explain trap, but I think trappers know what they’re doing when they answer this way. They’re not saying, “If you don’t know, now you know,” but, “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.”

McCarthy’s essay is at its best when it takes this refusal to explain for granted, understanding that trappers control just how much of trap we can know for their own purposes (safety, profit, and so on). That is, the essay shines when it inhabits the discourses of trap to better understand the subject at hand (an encounter in a store, for instance). The essay seems weakest when it fails to take the limitations of our ability to know trap seriously. At these moments, McCarthy offers definitions and analyses in terms external to the genre and makes claims about the generalizability of trap. For instance, “All these blocks, all these hoods . . . are effectively the same.” Never once did I feel, on that ride down Old Nat, that anywhere else in Atlanta, let alone the world, was like the south side. Thinking back on that moment now, I still can’t say that I know the south side so much as that I know what a trapper showed me of his life. Taking seriously our inability to know anything other than what the trapper lets us see while still caring about those who find themselves in the trap is what seems, to me, both most thrilling and most urgent about trap. I wish only that McCarthy took the limitations of our knowledge seriously throughout.

 — Elias Rodriques

More from Issue 33

Issue 33 Overtime

The question of who gets to live, and how, has always been the realm of politics.

Issue 33 Overtime
The Korean Peace Process
Issue 33 Overtime

He behaves like a man who believes that history is not over, even if established ways of picturing historical change on the…

Issue 33 Overtime
Rededication
Issue 33 Overtime
Everybody Knows
Issue 33 Overtime

An American who leaves for war never leaves America. The war that is America, rather, comes to the American.

Issue 33 Overtime
Conversations with Bongjun
Issue 33 Overtime

Children are malleable and must be cultivated carefully and deliberately, like plants.

Issue 33 Overtime
What Good Is Love?
Issue 33 Overtime
The Painful Sum of Things
Issue 33 Overtime

Zimbabwe is a place whose writing cannot but be both global and ambivalent about globalization.

Issue 33 Overtime
We Can Still Think Our Own Thoughts
Issue 33 Overtime

Maybe this is how Great Men read books: like boys.

More by this Author

Issue 16 Double Bind

Art mostly expresses class and status hierarchies, and only secondarily might have snippets of aesthetic value.

Issue 38 Death Wish
November 4, 2008

I remember the New Yorker “Talk of the Town” when the first rumors of the Lewinsky scandal came out.

September 20, 2004

To borrow Wilde’s phrasing once more: at one time we wealthy had the rack, and now we have the press.

Issue 8 Recessional

To buy credit protection on US government debt now costs you more than to buy credit protection on Campbell’s Soup!

Issue 8 Recessional

The first intellectual consequence of the economic crisis was to undermine neoliberalism as the age’s default ideology.