Social Death and Trap Music

Although the idea of social death is not new to me, I found Cacho’s Social Death convincing, accessible, and smart. When I thought about bodies that are often criminalized and devalued, I immediately thought in terms of geography and how geography can often shape value to certain bodies as well. Specifically, I am referring to the US south and how it is generally viewed as disposable to the rest of the nation. Visions of the South often are compared to tropes of trash, where its people are poor and backwards, and its food garbage and unhealthy. A construction of the contemporary South that is indicative of Cacho’s argument about social death is the rap and rappers of the “Dirty South.” The work of Dirty South rappers is produced in response to their marginalization by other rap centers. Their work often resists, embraces, and appropriates the stereotypes that have stigmatized them. Like the gang members that Cacho discusses, rappers are also criminalized in body and being. Cacho highlights the “spatial disablement” of contemporary gang membership in impoverished communities of color: “Believed to be subjected to their natural and man-made environments, people of color are represented as products of environments that are identified as the cause, rationale, and evidence not only for a population’s inability to access political and economic equality but also for its vulnerability to state-sanctioned violence” (Cacho 73). The South is itself abject to the rest of the nation as southern rappers are abject to the larger genre of hip hop. Additionally, the spaces where southern rappers originate is often wrought with abject poverty and violence. As such, Cacho argues that this “condition” of spatialized violence becomes naturalized and rationalized as to why these bodies are devalued.

Admittedly, although not all Dirty South rap music is conscious-driven, there are many Dirty South rappers like UGK, T.I., and Rich Boy, whose careers in the rap game all embody the intersectionality of identities which are viewed as disposable, including the poor, black, male, southern rapper. However, these rappers are consciously reminded and aware of their disposability and strategically employ this alienation as part of their identity as rappers. Where there was previously no such nationwide rap narratives of the South, Dirty South rappers continue to create spaces where they can give voice to the dispossessed and attempt to control their own narratives.

One such space where Dirty South rappers engage in discourses surrounding the criminalization of black male bodies is “the trap.” The term “trap” in a southern rap context refers to an actual place where drug deals are made. These places, usually abandoned buildings in impoverished neighborhoods, where so called “the trap” because there was only one way in and one way out. This was to ensure that the underground drug rings were regulated. Not only can physical spaces become the trap, but Southern rappers used their music to refer to their lives as being trapped in a life of drugs and violence. Many of the songs illuminate the psychological and social prison that Dirty South rappers inhabit, as a result of not seeing many other options for their devalued bodies other than a life behind bars or an early violent death. Trap music is a genre where Southern rappers voice the disposability of black men in the American judicial system while simultaneously acknowledging their own internalization of their fatal demise.