Jesse McCarthy’s Notes On Trap is one of the best pieces of writing on music I’ve read ever. I often feel that modern hip hop music is considered a gimmick or not worth serious intellectual interrogation by most literary writers, and this essay really emphasizes why that’s not the case. I’ve been reading through n+1’s The Intellectual Situation and that essay blew me away. Trap is the music of the modern Black proletariat, and as McCarthy argues, it could even be understood as the soundtrack to all of American life cutting even across class in some ways. The music really gets at the nihilism of will that permeates every sector of American society, right now.