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11:23 · 1,569 words of transcript · watch on YouTube
- The genre is named after Atlanta slang for a drug house, and T.I. coined the term in 2003 with a record called Trap Muzik.
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- Trap split in two directions in the early 2010s, harder through Waka Flocka Flame and Chief Keef, and more melodic, minimal and atmospheric on the other side.
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- Travis Scott's route to the record was failure first: two projects that went nowhere, moves to New York and Los Angeles, a period homeless, and being cut off by his parents for dropping out of college.
▶ 00:01:48
- T.I., the rapper who named the genre, heard one of his tracks and signed him to Grand Hustle, and Kanye West then brought him in to work on Yeezus.
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- The claim for Rodeo is that it sits at the middle of the hourglass, with Scott co-signed by the people who built the genre and positioned to pass it forward.
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- The first voice on the record is not Scott's but T.I.'s, narrating, a device borrowed from Common's narration on Kid Cudi's Man on the Moon.
▶ 00:03:44
- The structural break from trap norms is concrete: where a hit of the era ran verse and chorus, Pornography runs spoken intro, chorus, short verse, chorus, interlude, an instrumental change and a verse covering the last third.
▶ 00:04:27
- The first single ran close to eight minutes, long by any standard, was originally meant for a Kanye record, and closes with over a minute of piano as the beat drains away.
▶ 00:04:46
- 90210 is the clearest demonstration, starting as spacey synthwave and turning into psychedelic soul, and its second half is where Scott drops the persona.
▶ 00:06:04
- The downstream claim is that Post Malone, Lil Nas X and Lil Uzi Vert might not sound the way they do without Rodeo, which opened room for genre-crossing inside trap while keeping mainstream reach.
▶ 00:07:17