When students started wearing bootlegged versions, school districts promptly banned them. Jeezy had a handful of shirts printed to promote TM101, featuring three stacked spheres that looked like a snowman. These are the places that hip-hop claims to care about Pill
He argued that the trap opened doors, not closed them: “I used to hit the kitchen lights / cockroaches er’where / Now I hit the kitchen lights, there’s marble floors er’where.” His weathered rasp dared you not to believe him: the self-proclaimed Donald Trump in a white tee. In 2005, with help from play at Atlanta strip clubs and nightclub airplay, Jeezy became its first superstar: his Def Jam debut album Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101 went platinum in its first month. Like Jay Z and Nas early on, he rapped from the perspective of a dope boy who felt some remorse about his career choices. video, TI’s 2001 debut album I’m Serious offered a grittier look into the drug trafficking within its confines.
While the hills of Atlanta project Bowen Homes were colored purple for OutKast’s B.O.B. The Atlanta Housing Authority (AHA) stressed that it had the well-being of residents in mind: “Public housing was warehousing the poor without providing hope of any kind for a better life.” Local politicians and real estate developers pushed for this change to spruce up the city’s public image, with the 1996 Olympics approaching.
In 1995, Atlanta became the first city to demolish all of its projects in favor of mixed-income housing. In 1932, Atlanta became the first city to have a public housing project. It evolved from an Atlanta street-level movement to a global phenomenon, but it has its roots in the south’s segregated past. The sound’s dramatic synthesized production would eventually cross over to EDM and even pop, though not without controversy. The stories were alluring, bellicose and, perhaps most importantly, different from the triumphant tales of excess coming from New York and Los Angeles in the early noughties. Little did they know that trap would have a lasting influence itself. It was initially sold as a southern revival of the west coast gangsta rap (they initially invited comparisons to NWA), but according to these rappers, their music was the byproduct of their (and OutKast’s) native Atlanta being a crack-cocaine town, a lasting result of the Reagan-era “war on drugs”. As OutKast’s Big Boi explained on 1998’s SpottieOttieDopalicious, it was the absolute last resort for employment: “The United Parcel Service and the people at the post office / didn’t call you back because you had cloudy piss / So now you back at the trap just that, trapped / Go on and marinate on that for a minute.”Ī decade later, though, those trapped in the early noughties drug trade spoke up for themselves. Y ou used to want to stay away from the trap: an abandoned house where drugs are peddled.