Switched on Pop - The Dual Meaning of Fetty Wap’s Trap Queen

Episode Date: July 15, 2015

Fetty Wap’s Trap Queen is an unlikely contender for the top 10. It straddles genres between hip-hop and pop in subtle yet mesmerizing ways. Is it a drug song? Is it a love song? Or is it both at the same time? Join us to find out why you can’t get this ear worm out of your head. FEATURING Fetty Wap – Trap Queen Dr. Dre – Still Dre Peter Gabriel – In Your Eyes  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

If you're tired of endless scrolling to figure out where to eat, same. I'm Stephanie Wu, editor-in-chief of Eater. We've just launched the new-ish and way better Eater app. It has all the restaurants we love, gives you personalized picks wherever you are, and serves up smarter search results just for you. You can find my list of the best places for martinis and fries in New York City. And save your favorite spots, share lists, follow editors, and book right in the app. Download the Eaterer.

app at eater app.com. It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm Nate Sloan. And I'm Charlie Harding. And today we'd be counting up. Watch how far the bands go. We just set a goal talking matching Lambos. Charlie, good to hear your voice. You too. It's been a while. Too long. All the listeners, all the loyal listeners have switched on pop out there. Apologies for the delay. Some interesting things have happened in our absence. There's some new names on the charts. Surprisingly. What's at number three on the charts right now? So we've got Fetty Whap with Trap Queen. Say that five times fast.

Fetty Wap, Trap Queen. Fettie Wattie Wap, Trap Queen. Fettie Wattie Wap Trap Queen. Tawdy Watt. You know, a lot of people are predicting this as a song of the summer, which is actually over almost a year old at this point, but has just risen to the scenes. I think it would be good to go in and take a listen. As soon as you came in the dough, I just want to chill, got a sack for us to roll. Married to the money, introduced it to my stove. Shoulder hard a whip and now she remixes for love. She my track queen, letter. I must say when I first heard the song, I was like, okay, like maybe not a lot going on here. It seems really repetitive.

Yeah. Not that it isn't repetitive. It is incredibly repetitive. Right. But it almost becomes this sort of like Zen repetition, in toning a mantra, perhaps. Before we get too deep into the song, do you want to just give us a little background

on where this is coming from and why maybe it's a very atypical contender for Song of the Summer? Yeah, so what, again, we were totally unfamiliar, I think like most of America, with Fetty Wap or Fettywap, a rapper from Patterson, New Jersey, who lost his left-eyed young age

to glaucoma now where it's an ocular prosthetic. Trapp Queen was a song that he wrote and produced independently and then got picked up by a small label and then got picked up by a bigger label and now has slowly climbed up the charts to emerge at number three. So this is a real sort of rags to riches assent here. It's so different from mass manufactured pop songs, which are intentionally marketed and pushed out there with a machine of labels working behind the tune. And I recently read that one of Rihanna's songs cost over a million dollars just to get it on the charts. This seems to have happened much more naturally. Wow, that is staggering. I know.

Fetty Wop is not Rihanna, clearly. No. This is, yeah, this is like straight from the streets to the charts somehow. Its identity is sort of in between these two genres. Like, it's two, it's two, like, subgenres of hip hop R&B colliding. Right. The drug anthem and the, the romantic anthem are happening at the same time. Yeah, exactly.

Okay. So on the surface, I think lots of elements of this song are familiar and very much grounded in the world of hip hop, right? We have these jittery electronic drums. Because you have the auto-tuned vocals. There's a lot which is familiar. And if you look at the opening vamp of the song, which is going from a, in between two different chords, both minor chords between A minor and E minor,

the exact same vamp as Dr. Dre's Still Dre. So for me, what they're doing here is they're grounding you in the, like, oh, you're listening to a hip-hop song. It's entirely in that darker side, the minor key. On top of that, that oscillating minor harmony is a very major melody. And as you were saying about the melody, it's super repetitive, right? It's just drilling that earworm in so that you can't forget it. And what he's doing here is he's just singing a C major triad, the three notes of the C major chord.

So in the harmony, the chords underneath, we have this going back and forth vamping on this minor element. Right. While he's singing supposedly something major. Right. Which feels a lot like this dual reference of being both a drug song and a love song. Having these minor harmonies underneath a very simple major melody introduces, is an ambiguity to the song that wouldn't be there.

Otherwise, like Charlie, what if we re-harmonized this song as with major key harmonies? I think we could turn it into a really beautiful folk song. Yeah, or a really saccharine and adine pop song.

So I'm, yeah, I'm sold on that. These minor harmonies underneath this repetitive major melody sort of mirrors the darkness and light of this trap scene that the protagonist find themselves in. What about the chorus? Does that musical relationship change at all? Fundamentally what happens in the next part of the song is that the melody and the chords switch places.

Okay. Take me through that. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster? Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova, and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness.

I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay. Ready? Do not sugarcoat something for me. No, no. We'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives, actors, entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey. Pretty tough is your front row seat to the women who have demonstrated the power in being

unapologetic in their pursuits. I hope you'll join us. New episodes drop Wednesdays on YouTube or in your favorite podcast app. Immigration may be Donald Trump's signature issue. President Trump is now targeting predominantly democratic cities for ice raids and deportations. Dozens of protesters clashing with immigration and customs enforcement agents in Minneapolis Tuesday. We will begin the process of returning millions and millions of criminal aliens back to the places from which they came. But what we want to do in this space is talk about America and politics beyond the current

president. So what do most Americans think about deportation and border security, period? I think that Americans are definitely against the kind of violent displays that we've seen in the street from ICE. When it comes to the question of deportation, the answer is more complicated. sense is that people want order at the border. They don't like the idea of having no idea who's coming into the United States at any given time. The view on immigration from the bottom up instead of the top down. That's this week on America Actually. Every Saturday in your audio

and video feeds. Okay. So earlier we had these, this minor vamping chords going back and forth between an A minor and an E minor, while the voice was outlining this beautiful major tonality, the C major. Now, all of a sudden, what changes is the chords switch, and they start to have more of a major tonality. They start vamping back and forth from the A minor to G, which is a major, more happy sound, more in the world of romance and pop songs, perhaps. while his melody, the words that he's singing, all of a sudden drop down from the C major chord to the A minor chord.

And so where he was singing in that sort of happy romantic realm, all of a sudden now we've switched down to the minor sadder, darker realm. Whoa, okay. So the ambiguity is maintained, but by reversing the major and minor positions of harmony and That's exactly correct. Huh. Okay, Fettywap. Yeah, right? I like that.

I like that. Yeah. He's playing with it. He really is sort of playing with our expectations here. Are we in a minor tonality? Are we in a major tonality? Are we? Is this a song about drugs?

This is a song about romance? What is this? And for me, he answers that question for just a moment. And in the chorus, there's this part where the vamp back and forth all of a sudden resolves. It goes up and up and then it hits a C major. And so where we had been using the same core progression as Drey, all of a sudden we've gone to C major.

C major is like the happy pop song key. So there is a moment where music, where the harmony and the melody both sort of say the same thing as it were. Yeah, exactly. Both agree to be major for a moment. both agree that, you know, there is a beautiful romance happening here. Yeah, and I think on that note, the other thing that really stands out about this song is something we've kept coming back to is the repetition, right? Right.

Like, the melody repeats itself over and over again in the verse. And then we have a new melody in the chorus, but then that repeats itself over and over again. And these are like tiny, just scraps of melody really. Yeah, just three and a half notes, basically. Right. Yeah. And then, so three and a half notes for the verse. And then just two more notes are introduced for the chorus. So really, the entirety of this song is made up of five and a half notes, I guess.

which is like kind of a remarkable exercise in economy of composition and minimalist means. Yeah, absolutely. And that half a note would be just sort of a passing note, something which we don't really land on. And the entire pitch content of this melody is just six or sorry, five and a half notes. That's pretty impressive. One could easily say that, oh, they don't know what they're doing. This is a, this is bad songwriting. Someone could say, oh, this is too simple.

Yeah, he doesn't even use the flat six anywhere in this melody. What a shame. I'm going to like a boy. I don't know who I was making fun of there. It sounds like some cartoon character of a musicologist. Yeah. In Paul Simon's compositions, he likes to try and use all 12 tones something. times.

Fetty Whip only uses five and a half. What is the name of this character? Dr. Nicholas J. Poopin-Wickle. Ooh, yeah. Don't want him as a professor. Yeah, and he wears a Tweed jacket with elbow patches and smokes a pipe. It's funny because the only person I can picture in my mind right now is you.

Oh, it is me. It is me. That's my online pseudonym. and now everyone knows. Dr. Nicholas J. Poopin'wickle. My cover is blown. So anyway, I think that this is super cool. For me, this is not bad songwriting

because there's a deliberate shift of context even with this incredibly simple melody. Right? As we're showing, it's going back from major and minor and constantly having us question, where are we? Yeah, okay. And I think that draws us in as listeners, makes us want to hear more. Even though what's happening on the surface might be simple, the relationship of these different structural pieces is really compelling. Yeah, absolutely. Even though that melody is so simple, it's changing, something underneath is changing those chords underneath are changing just enough to hold our interest. I'm thinking about the meaning of all this repetition now.

Right. And first of all, there's a lot of variation in it. Like, he's not singing the exact same melody every time. There's slight variations in, I mean, the overall contour of that phrase remains the same. But, you know, how many times he'll sing the first note versus the second note changes every time. So it gives it a slightly different melodic and rhythmic emphasis. One could argue that he's not even, both his melodic and rhythmic execution is. is kind of all over the place.

Feddywap even says you don't really got a rap no more. You just say the verse with a swag now. He said that on Twitter. No way. That's exactly what gives this song. It's emotional power is a certain maybe casualness and detachment almost, but that in an inverse way makes it feel so much more real and intimate. than some carefully crafted in a Swedish studio lab pop summer romantic anthem would be, you know?

Right, where the... This just hits you in a very direct way. Yeah, absolutely. If you tried to sing this song straight, if you just tried to sing it exactly on the beat, exactly with the notes, it would be unbearably repetitive. But by introducing some personality to it, it feels real. You know, there's a certain rhythmic repetition here, too, the way the song starts with the bop, b, bop, bop, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap, bap.

That rhythm basically continues through the whole song, but with some subtle changes, like when it gets to the chorus, those high synthesizers disappear, and instead that rhythm gets picked up by the bass. Huh. Boom, boom, bum, bum, bum, bum, bum. So it's just like this subtle, like that rhythm just glides from the upper strata of the pitch spectrum just way down to the lowest, but you still feel it, you know, push, like pushing you and pulsing you through the song. So just another piece where the elements are switching context and by switching context just

subtly enough, it sustains your interest. I dig that. Fettywap, who knows what he's going to come up with next? But I'm really enjoying his surprising rain on the top five of the pop charts at the moment. You were saying this is a very, this is a different kind of summer anthem. And I find that pretty, pretty refreshing. Absolutely. It's not what you expect in terms of a very clear love song with total universal themes and an upbeat major tonality.

It's a little more subversive than that. It's the same thing, right? It still is a love song with universal themes. does have a major tonality, and it has an upbeat rhythm, but it's subversive just enough by having these minor elements and the rhythm, which is kind of not your standard EDM, 4 to the floor kind of thing. Thank you, Feddywap, for bringing a little summertime blues, making the heat a little little sweeter from turning on the AC.

I don't know if that metaphor made any sense. It doesn't need to And thank you everybody for listening This has been Switched on Pop And we missed you Help us though Navigate the The labyrinthine maze

Of summer pop music Tweet us Switched on Pop on Twitter Email us Switched on Pop at gmail.com Stop us in the street and say Hey you gotta hear this song This is my summer anthem

Sing it to us for sure Hold up a boom box outside our window You can find more episodes of Switched-on-Pop on the iTunes store. Please leave us a rating there. It really helps. You can also find episodes on SoundCloud, Stitcher Radio, and any other place that you find your podcasts. Our internet home is www.

Switched-onpop.com, except there are three Ws. I only said two. Nate Sloan is our executive producer, head of Paola, and corporate strategy. Charlie Harding assembles all our dream catchers by hand. And edits, produces, plays the hell out of a telecaster guitar on each of our episodes. And wait for them.

I think I can edit that into something legible. Attention Spotify. Has arrived on the new Good Girl Jasmine Absolute of Caroline Herrera. A fragrance intense with character gourmet and addictive. Imagine a jasmine emvolventy, caramelized and tonka-tosted. A combination that seduce from the first instant and doesn't make a wea. Good Girl Jasmine Absolute, hypnotic, irresistible. Discoveredla hoy and let you embolever for your sensia.

Convierre your passion in a business with Shopify and bathe records of ventas with the form of pay with a better conversion of the world. Has heard it? The best conversion of the world. The incredible system of Pago of Shopify facilitates on your site web, in the networks,

and in any place. That is music for your ears. No, you'll be more whiltas. Your business will be a super-exiton-suit with Shopify. Empecies your period of Prueba per day for a euro at

me in Shopify.coms bar records.