EVERY GENRE PROJECT - April 4 - Lowend
Genre of the Day - Lowend
Album of the Day - I’m Certified by Certified Trapper (2022)
April 4, 2024
It’s hard to see some of the benefits of the SoundCloud era of rap because the smoke of the platform’s most famous cropping of colorful, unserious, so-called “mumble” rappers like Lil Yachty, Lil Pump, and Trippie Redd is only beginning to clear, with these artists either fading into obscurity or making complete stylistic pivots. SoundCloud and subsequently TikTok’s underrated benefit is just how much they revolutionized the spread of regional rap scenes. A city’s sound is no longer relegated to mixtapes circulated around the region with the low potential of finding an audience elsewhere: they can catch on like wildfire anywhere, as I noted in my drift phonk article and its origin in Memphis rap winning over Eastern European producers.
It’s always a treat when I get to look at something that came out in the last couple of years, because rather than a complete retrospective like most of this column, I get to observe something in its evolution. Lowend is one such genre. It’s a subvariant of Milwaukee rap (what even goes on in Milwaukee?) with major jack and bounce influence. While it was pioneered in the early 2010s, its fast-paced, distinctive sound clicks well with the zippiness of TikTok’s preferred dance styles. Lowend’s simple but effective beats take inspiration from twerk music, with the notable use of handclaps to drive the rhythm and make it more danceable. The beats aren’t particularly ornamented. They lean towards a simplicity that allows emcees to push the beat rather than being boxed in by it.
Another benefit of tuning in to these regional scenes is that the lack of label varnish and sleek production allows for a feeling of organic fun. The scene these songs originated from shines through more easily. A quick look at the album covers of top lowend albums on RYM reveals the casual, Internet-driven nature of the genre. Given this amateurish nature and the brevity of the songs, many lowend artists are pumping out tons of mixtapes per year. Steeped in a long tradition stemming from the 2000s—Soulja Boy was putting out hundreds of songs on Myspace before “Crank That” took off—a lot of lowend rappers eschew typical release patterns and favor a DIY, maximalist attitude.
Certified Trapper has become one of the icons of lowend for this reason. He’ll put out nearly anything he makes, with 32 mixtapes sitting pretty on his Spotify just from the past three years. Not only is he a prolific releaser, he produces his own beats to polarizing effect, not content to waste precious pennies on YouTube beats. This mass-release attitude leads to little regard for what one would call mixing, but it makes his music refreshingly off-the-cuff and lends a personal touch. It’s also symbolic of the fact that Milwaukee lacks much of a music industry footprint. Up-and-coming rappers in the scene have to be innovative and scrappy to make their name. His delivery is casual, and his raps are braggadocious without losing the overt sense of fun and energy created by the handclap-heavy beats, with a minimal touch on other flourishes. The 21-track mixtape is rife with laugh-out-loud lines, ranging from questionable romantic justice (“I’m in a relationship with all my hoes / So it’s fair!) to mildly offensive bars that still elicited a giggle out of me such as on “50 on 6” in which he spins a tale: “Pop a n****, he was coming out of Starbucks / Gay ass n**** had a Frappuccino in his cup.” There’s a lack of self-seriousness that defines a lot of major-label rap that stakes lowend as a stimulating new variant in the rap canon.