Will Trap music successfully be integrated into Nigerian music?

We love our Nigerian music. We take pride in our sounds originating from the studios of Lagos, in soired by the streets and released into the air, where they are currently being exported to every corner of the world.

But a lot of these sounds are not ours. They are simply an amalgamation of influences that we have over time internalized, owned and found new ways of appropriating.

Fela Kuti’s Afrobeat, which we all celebrate as a national treasure, is jazz music drawn Britain and the US, and mixed with Highlife from Ghana. Sure we do have a number of root original sounds: the poly-rhythms of Kollington, King Sunny Adé, Shina Peters, and many others, have championed native traditional music. But from time immemorial, Nigerian musicians, as well as developing traditional sounds like jùjú, have always taken foreign music and played it back through a Nigerian filter. From boogaloo and funk to disco and soul, Skepta, Tiwa Savage and Wizkid are continuing an established order that stretches back decades.

Davido earlier captured this on a level, when he was hosted on Ebro Darden’s Beats 1 radio show on Apple Music. “I don’t even call my music Afrobeat,” the Sony Music artiste said.  “I call mine Afrofusion. To me it’s just too different. I can’t tell you it’s Afrobeat, because it’s not.”

“You know the originator of the Afrobeats is Fela. Fela has a sound which I can say has heavy baseline, the Rhodes, brass instrument, [and] the percussion is different. If you ask me ‘Gobe’ is Calypso, Afro mixed with Calypso. But I feel like the Afrobeats is catchy and has caught wave since time. Because I know some Afrobeats songs that I don’t want to call Afrobeats. I call them Afro-Pop or I call Afro Trap. Everything is just still African music.”

Today, we have a lot of these sounds penetrating our music as usual, and we are ingesting, tweaking and playing it back through the Nigerian filter.

Trap music is a huge part of these sounds. Trap music is a genre that is starting to gain quite a bit of momentum through the ever growing sub-genres of dance music culture. Although this new found hype towards trap music, or EDM Trap Music as some may call it, has recently emerged, there is a history behind the origin of the Trap genre that is all but new.

Trap music fist emerged coming primarily from the south of the US, a genre filled with a hard attitude that you can feel in the sound of the brass, triangle, triplet hi hats, loud kicks, snappy snares and low end 808 bass samples that are used when composing tracks. The percussion samples of choice when making trap music are usually originate from the Roland TR-808 Drum Machine.  When speaking of the “originators” in the trap music game, southern rappers like Waka Flocka Flame, Gucci Mane, Young Jeezy, Three 6 Mafia, and Manny Fresh come to mind. As well as some of the iconic trap music producers like Lex Luger, Zaytoven, and up and comer Young Chop.

Trap music has penetrated the Nigerian market, finding a way into our studios and playlists. All the sounds from Future, Young Thug, Rae Sremmund, and many others have constantly fed Nigeria with it. This year alone, Desiigner’s ‘Panda’ rivalled Adele’s ‘Hello’ and John Legend’s ‘All of me’, as the most covered and remixed foreign song of all time.

This advent of Trap music is driven by a growing demography of internet savvy and sonically liberal Nigerians, and it has become a bit-part of what we enjoy now, although from a Nigerian filter. Falz’s hit song, ‘Bahd, Baddo, Baddest’ had elements of it, Ycee’s ‘Sumi’, Lil Kesh and Olamide’s ‘Problem child’. Progressive new artistes are also feeling it, with Milli’s EP “Don’t Ask Me What Happened” is filled with it.

In all of these, the best Nigerian trap that has been played from an indigenous filter has to be Terry Apala’s ‘Champagne Shower’. The young Apala singer, who is inclined to modernize the genre and make it go pop fused it with Trap, and produced what could stand as one of the industry’s best appropriation of it.

But are Nigerians ready for Trap Music?  There are two schools of thought as regards the conversation about the industry readiness for this music. Trap has always existed some way back. But it is the new age media and the tremendous growth of the sound that has resulted in these examinations. The first school believes that people will like anything foreign, as long as you clean it up, fill it with various local elements (pidgin and local lingo) and serve it back. Others believe it will never catch on, due to the innate ‘foreignness’ of the production. At the moment, there are mixed results on either side. The pro-Trap group holds ‘Bahd Baddo Baddest’ as a trophy, an indication that if the subgenre is done right, it has the potential to be a hit. Anti-Trap has a long list of failed trap songs which failed to catch on.

Only time will tell if Trap will properly be incorporated as a staple of our music industry. These are still the early days.