Literary swamp bitch

2025 Mix 22: Trap Daniels vs sunshine snap, Kate Nash yells at transphobes, Zee Nxumalo reps Spongebob, and light Brazilian pop to indulge my cravings

Morgan Wallen briefly alit on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 last week, only to be dethroned by Alex Warren on the following week’s chart. This added to the crescendo of fretting from music critics in my orbit, who have been putting out increasingly urgent hand-wringing treatises about Wallen and What It All Means. Personally, I think the Warren success is much weirder than the Wallen success. I’m no country scholar, but Wallen seems to me like the obvious beneficiary of leading the first wave of country music to sound globally contemporary in many years.

Wallen’s success makes sense to me because he’s the country star who “won” the sound I’ve jokingly dubbed Trap Daniels (after Eric Harvey’s PBR&B). As I’ve written about before, once you take off in your own lane in the monsterverse, it’s very hard to shift the inertia. As soon as I listened to “Last Night” I understood that country music had finally arrived as the last genre on earth to join pop music’s broad adoption of ’10s trap beats. Once it did this, more of it traveled, no right-wing global heel turn necessary. (That may also have happened, but I’m dubious.)

This posed a few questions for me. What accounts for the long delay between the introduction of what we’d recognize as today’s trap beats and their total global takeover? When did the rest of (non-country) pop music absorb trap beats and why? And then, why did it take country so long—and, given how long it took, why did this actually work rather than sounding hopelessly passé?

Trap beats have a long history, but a relevant endpoint (to be reductive about it) is the standardization of rap production conventions that eventually took the scrappy drum machine sample beats of Dirty South rap in the ‘90s and, over time, ironed out all of the bounce—either literally, in the sense of the New Orleans genre, or figuratively, in the sense of a more rigid and less syncopated feel. By the ‘10s, trap beats, especially those influenced by Chicago drill, moved at a menacing plod and featured some specific sonic elements, like the persistent hiss of random hi-hat rolls.

I think of this development as the emergence of hard trap. If you’re annoyed with my many neologisms, you could refer to it simply as “drill,” but I think it’s important to separate the conventions and palettes that transferred over to pop music from the specific development of Chicago drill as a genre. “Hard trap” gets across how rap music abandoned the rubbery and inviting feel of previous trap beats and started lurching in lockstep.¹

I suspect that stiffening and slowing the beats down in this way made them more suitable for other pop forms entering the streaming “vibes era.” The almost militaristic regularity, with off-kilter ratatat hi-hats throwing in random textures, could more easily adorn ponderous, sadder, or dreamier music without accidentally turning it into dance music. You could write a real downer and still thread a relatively hip beat through it, which happened with emo-adjacent Soundcloud rap but also with pop and singer-songwriter material using some of the same beats.

Hard trap was in full swing in rap music by 2012, but in 2013, you still hear pop stars struggling to incorporate these elements. I immediately think of Katy Perry’s “Dark Horse,” which switches awkwardly to a trap beat for its Juicy J feature, or Miley Cyrus’s “We Can’t Stop,” a colossal mess of a song whose Mike WiLL Made-It beat forces sloppy, almost indie-ish drumming into something like a trap pattern.

It isn’t until about 2015 that you really get the full complement of hard trap tropes showing up all over the place. There are the obvious candidates who seem like a natural fit, like Rihanna with “Bitch Better Have My Money,” and also non-obvious ones like Lana Del Rey on “High by the Beach.”

What this gradual adoption of hard trap in the pop mainstream reminds me of is the explosion of keyboard technology following low-budget prosumer innovations in the early ‘80s. By 1983, analog keyboards that required programming were rapidly being supplanted in pop music by digital synthesizer models with presets made possible through FM synthesis (Holly Boson has a good rundown of this technology in a Pop Could Never Save Us episode about the 1985 charts). This led to popular, and often overbearingly cheesy, sounds from synths like the Yamaha DX7 flooding the pop charts, giving much mid-80s pop its uniquely plasticky character.

The “Yamaha DX7 moment” isn’t as obvious to me in the wider adoption of trap beats (there might be one, but I don’t know what it is). My semi-educated guess is that there is probably a confluence of technologies: (1) cheap DAWs being used in increasingly formulaic ways by producers without other studio experience,² (2) cheap bluetooth headphones connecting to new smartphone technology (the signature hi-hat hiss sounds awful, but its oppressive flatness fits the playback), and (3) popular sample packs and production templates becoming more widely available. Trap was only one product of this technology confluence, which also led to the explosion of dubstep and pop-EDM.³

It’s not surprising that hard trap didn’t transfer to country music for a long time—most of the styles from this era didn’t, including dubstep and EDM.⁴ There was the rise of so-called “bro country” in the mid-’10s, which mimics the braggadocio and cadence of rap, but without many actual trap beats. The overriding bro country production norm at the time was hideously chipper sunshine snap, a lightly hip-hop-indebted beat built on very loud, reverbed snaps that “hook you” like a wedgie might. It’s overbearing to the point of being didactic, like instructions for clapping properly on the 2 and the 4 for people suffering from rhythmic congenital amusia.⁵

What you find in 2013 country are the same growing pains crossover attempts that were happening in pop music: the “Cruise” remix with Nelly by Florida Georgia Line has a few trap sound elements, but it’s still very much of the sort of uneasy hip-hop/country Frankenstein that has been a feature of country for decades.

My inner Occam’s Razor says that the success of “Old Town Road” in 2019 was, despite the song’s fraught relationship with country radio, still a proof of concept for how completely you could let trap beats take over the production of a country song—the guitar twang even gets you some bounce back in the picture. (Some of the music that followed was likely being recorded around the same time, though, so it’s hard to know for sure.) Whatever the reason, by 2020, you see dozens of country songs importing hard trap seamlessly after lots of prototype fits and starts, like Sam Hunt’s “Body Like a Backroad” in 2017. That song is still built on sunshine snap, whereas almost everything else on the eventual album it appeared on, Southside in 2020, is more directly trap-influenced.

Country was late to the party by five years compared to other American pop, but globally, hard trap beats were also finding their way into K-pop and other non-US pop scenes at the same time. So the template finally clicked—Wallen joins the monsterverse as the representative of the newest sound of modern country music, which, even though it is technically pretty “old” at that point, still signifies around the world.

It may be that country is also signifying something other than basic pop interoperability, but I’m skeptical. If I were to make a more political judgment of why it traveled when it did, I would tie it to A-pop theory: a more comfortably hip-hop-oriented country music may have been the sonic Trojan horse for newfound American regionalism abroad, with the cowboy being something close to the default costume of the US in global imagination. This has long been true, but the sounds of 21st century country have sometimes seemed stubbornly difficult to absorb in other countries. Trap Daniels meets the rest of the world halfway, maybe for the first time since…Shania Twain? (This is where I’m out over my skis. Spurs?)

And hey, speaking of cowboy costumes, I did get that new A-pop installment up, about Eurovision and the impending(?) vacuum(?) of American pop centrality. It’s a weird one, still working a bunch of ideas out, but if you haven’t read enough words from me yet, there’s a few more for you.

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Previous 2025 Mixes

Tidal || YouTube

1. Kate Nash: GERM
UK

I sort of appreciate that most of this blistering anti-transphobia song in the wake of a horrendous UK Supreme Court decision is Kate Nash just reading off statistics like a term paper someone has to prove wasn’t generated by an LLM, but I don’t think it’s a coincidence that the best line is a simple, effective “you fucking idiot.”

2. Reyna Tropical: Cartagena (Slyvan Esso Edit)
US

I believe this is the first double appearance of the same song on my mixes—I featured the original “Cartagena” last year, but really enjoyed this Sylvan Esso edit from a remix EP.

3. Rusowsky f. Las Ketchup: Johnny Glamour
Spain

This already went all-the-way-pop compared to the Spanish producer’s experimental past with the Rusia-IDK collective. Las Ketchup is just the icing on the cake, but sometimes you really want the icing.

4. Adrian Quesada f. Angélica Garcia: No Juego
US

I have never knowingly heard a Black Pumas song, but I know they really exist because I keep seeing a used CD of one of their albums in a music store I frequent. This is a Black Puma, apparently! But I’m only here for Angélica Garcia.

5. Sofi Tukker f. Seu Jorge: Bread (Butter Version)
US/Brazil

Didn’t expect Sofi Tukker to go so smooth, but their light Brazilian pop re-work of their album Bread from last year (the new one’s Butter…get it??) is really taking advantage of my debilitating bossanova weakness. Love the way Seu Jorge’s appropriately buttery baritone pairs with Sophie Hawley-Weld’s Europop-ready soprano.

6. Westside Gunn f. Doechii: Egypt (Remix)
US

Still haven’t figured out why Westside Gunn is the one underground-sounding hip-hop guy that doesn’t just send me running for older albums in my CD rack, but on this one I’ll hand it to Doechii, self-described literary swamp bitch of this week’s title (sorry if I have flagged your email spam filters with that one, it couldn’t be avoided).

7. Ro$ama f. BigXthaPlug: Microwave
US

I do know why this is the first BigXthaPlug feature I’ve finally stuck on a mix, though. Big annoying synth horns and even worse microwave beeps!

8. David Armada f. Nolais: Plenty
UK

Something between dnb-pop and Jersey club-style party music from a UK producer, lands a bit closer to PinkPantheress than I’d prefer, but that also includes song length, so we’re good.

9. E1and: Russian Roulette
Taiwan

My youngest is very into this song so I have very gingerly, and not entirely accurately, described Russian roulette. I tried to focus more on regular roulette, which thankfully seems to be of more interest anyway. They were pronouncing it “roo-lay,” and when I corrected them, they informed me that this is in fact how E1and was pronouncing it at that very moment, which I hadn’t noticed at all.

10. Denden: Padtal
France

Really not doing my due diligence on Francophone rap and pop this year. Part of me envies Jonathan Bogart’s ability to take his time and put out 50 incredible songs that you’ve almost certainly never heard before if you mostly follow US music criticism. His project has a lot more coherence than mine does—will probably write more about his 2024 list more next week. But then I remember that I can just listen everything from his lists, too, and that this whole social music discovery thing is a mutually beneficial enterprise for everyone involved. Oh, the humanity (complimentary)!

11. Zee Nxumalo f. Gino Brown: U’Spongé
South Africa

I was very excited to play this one for my kids, but when it came on after “Russian Roulette” in the car, it was immediately confirmed that my children are much more interested in Russian roulette than in Spongebob-themed amapiano. In fact, I would guess their interests go roulette > > > Russian roulette > > amapiano > Spongebob. I swear this is not my fault! …Entirely.

12. Datboi Smee, Skelvin, Bluenax: Active
Nigeria

More merely competent work that tickles my fancy from the stale-sounding Afrobeats/amapiano pipeline. Everyone still sounds like they’re having fun, though, and have fun will travel—i.e., will probably continue to sound pretty good in other international pop scenes for the next year or two.

13. WeTalkSound, Fimi, SGaWD: Hei God
Nigeria

‘Course I think the real ferment story in Nigeria for the past several years has been cruise music, not Afrobeats, and although this isn’t a cruise song, it’s probably the poppiest thing I’ve heard with a discernible cruise influence this year outside of actual cruise producers going pop.

14. D.A.M.A: Terra da Maria
Portugal

Apparently a mega-successful band in Portugal, which was news to me. I mostly liked it because it reminds me a little of the Tetris theme.

15. Vanille: Ce n’est que de l’eau
France

Light French pop take on a Jobim tune. Despite my weakness for bossapop I actually think the de-bossafication works here.

16. Disstantes f. Enidê MC, Carol Insana, Robson Riva: Latino
Brazil

Eclectic art-pop from a Brazilian group that operates like a collective, lots of guests, never pauses for too long on any one sound or genre.

17. Ari Árelíus: Hulin Hönd
Iceland

Almost included a somewhat boring song this week from a French artist named Igorrr just to get some Mr. Bungle representation into my lists (it’s a collaboration between Igorrr, Trey Spruance from Mr. Bungle, and Secret Chiefs 3’s Timba Harris), but this random single-digit-YouTube-views Icelandic song has all of the Byzantine guitar scales and sinister whispering I needed, even though there’s a mismatched guitar riff at the end that’s just dissonant enough to set my teeth on edge. Well, maybe that’s not so different.

18. Eefje de Visser: Onomkeerbaar
Netherlands

Unfortunately, I have to hand it to the PR on this one: “ethereal vocals waft through aquatic synthesizer soundscapes with elegance.” Sure!

19. ayutthaya: Get Out
Japan

20. TAMIW: Anthem of Sutra
Japan

Two good alt-rock entries from Japan, the first the sort of down-the-middle indie rock that is surprisingly hard to find in American indie during our national windowpane crisis, the second very much up my street, as it suggests Willow covering “The National Anthem” by Radiohead. Hm, I’ll need to start a petition for that.

21. WITCH: Nadi
Zambia

Zambian psych group WITCH is always dependable, but this one employs some Autotune fuckery that really clicked.

22. Táo: Cả Nhà Cô Đơn (buonhonmotchut)

A song from Vietnamese rapper Táo, who put out a trip-hoppish album in 2021, Đĩa Than, that he seems to have fully remade this year. A quick listen suggests the new version is much better produced, which helps this song—meandering singing and rapping against acoustic percussion, strings, and choir.

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That’s it! Until next time, if you must be out in direct sunshine snap, make sure you have adequate protection.

—Dave Moore (the other one)

Title from Westside Gunn f. Doechii: Egypt (Remix)

1. There is a similar, but parallel, evolution that happens in Brazilian funk music in a similar period, between the millennial heyday of baile funk, with its joyful Latin freestyle elements, and the hard clave that distinguishes the current crop of ‘20s funk. Will also use this footnote to address DJ Mustard, who has the bounciest trap beats I can think of and was also huge during the same period. Interestingly, I can’t think of a lot of producers that ever actually replicated his particular sparse party alchemy—he’s like the Max Martin of trap beats, sounds simple and is incredibly prolific but surprisingly few people can actually do it.

2. DAWs are “digital audio workstations.” FL Studio is the DAW made infamous in “Crank That” by Soulja Boy, which used only the factory default presets and according to the latest speedrun times can be re-created in 15 seconds.

3. If you are so inclined, as I am, you can watch 80 minutes of Avicii building a song entirely out of sample packs and a MIDI keyboard in FL Studio in 2012 here. The resulting song is horrible, but I really enjoyed the video.

4. As I remember it, Taylor Swift hiring Max Martin and doing a soft dubstep approximation for Red was the initial source of “not country anymore” commentary, which I quibble with in my Taylor Swift series but isn’t technically wrong.

5. That’s the clinical phrase for “tone deafness.” And hey, while you’re here, why not try Florida Georgia Line with Bebe Rexha on “Meant to Be,” maybe the purest distillation of the awkward transition from sunshine snap to Trap Daniels. Morgan Wallen sounds like Juice WRLD by comparison.