It was in the Introduction to Audio Software class at Milwaukee Area Technical College where Dashiun Graham learned how to make his signature sound, a successive clap that mirrors the hand-made beats students do at lunch time when faux rapping with their friends. The tools that he had at his disposal were basic, not too advanced, but more than enough to create an entire musical world. The boredom of being a student was decreasing his vigor for life, as it does for most creatives who are stuck in a monotonous circumstance. Several years of making music — mixing vocals, making beats — led him to this point. Once he had his signature sound, the rapping part became easy: his hyper, distorted, and broken rapping was reactively congruent to his style of production. “I had a piano, a MacBook, and my inspiration was just my ability to make music. I didn’t have beats, I didn’t know how to mix yet”, Graham, also known as the Milwaukee rapper Certified Trapper, tells me, from a Hibachi restaurant in Midtown. “So I had to learn how to make that sound good on my lonesome.”
Trapper, a man of monosyllabic sentences and quiet charm that can sometimes boom into a youthful smile, has a keenly chaotic quality to his music in a scene that is largely unruly and uncooperative towards the capitalist standards of mainstream rap. Hearing him can remind fans of SpeakerKnockerz and the irreverence of Lil B, but the sound is original. “I don’t really listen to other music, because if I do, then it gets stuck with me”, Trapper explains. “I fuck with Detroit type beats, or Baton Rouge beats, but I don’t know how to make those yet.”
It’s hard for me, the type of person who was raised more traditionally than most of the rap nerds you see on forums, to keep up with all of the id and schemes being devised in Milwaukee houses and recording studios. Like most internet emcees, Trapper’s relationship with releasing music is based on the quantity, the appetite for recording. All rap fans can discuss Milwaukee with cinematic detail. There is Trapper, the weirdo; AyooLii is like that too, although his rapping is more traditional; Chicken P is the originator, perhaps the best Milwaukee rapper of all-time if you judge rappers by their productivity and album history, but he feels one step behind the strangeness of the Certified Trapper sound.
East Side Milwaukee, where Trapper was from, is very territorial. It’s like going into Bensonhurt if you are a Black man named Malik. It’s a place where tribalism tends to form. Kids walk in from different neighborhoods and get stopped by residents if they don’t appear to be from Milwaukee. Trapper claims that trapping is called walking where he is from, and he had walked “fifteen miles” before. He can no longer do that, he claims, even though it is unclear whether that is because of his newfound fame or because he is just tired from doing all of that walking. Sports wasn’t much of a haven either; he could feign interest in flag football. “I ain’t scored all season, and then finally in the last game, I scored”, he says, not adding much to the story.
Trapper might not express himself with complete exuberance (except when recalls the time that Jim Jones showed up to his studio session) — young rappers are usually young men with no media training, put in a position where they have to explain themselves with nerds such as myself — but his sound is something out of autistic heaven. The smacking sound is an 808, but distorted to a higher pitch so it can sound like someone is legitimately smacking you in the face. “I use a snare but I pitch everything, I EQ everything”, Trapper explains. “I don’t always check the decimal of the sound because I am busy making the songs.”
He can be hyper fixated on it, like any true phenom is, and constantly tinkering with it. For him, the production, exemplified on “When I Sneeze”, is a chance to be weirder than the other internet rappers. Trapper’s sound is as good as any to begin with when consuming the Milwaukee rap scene; it’s the apparatus that is doing the heavy lifting for one of the more surprising rap regions to come about since, well, forever. When the subject tof Milwaukee rap’s roster is brought up, he is bullish: “I fuck with AyooLi, I fuck with DC the Don”, says Trapper. Chicago is a mafia run city whose white flight begeted violence and intense overpolicing. Memphis is a city of extreme racism and social tensions; in one of the more famous examples of racism in Memphis history, three black grocers where lynched by a white mob in 1892. It’s the home of the blues, so rap naturally became the music for the descendants of slaves in that region. Milwaukee, however, being the most innovative rap region is shockingly funny, seemingly odd. People still think of it as the city where Ryan Braun played. Giannis Antetokounmpo’s rise as Bucks superstar feels less unique than Milwaukee being its own rap world within hip-hop. The music is isolated and divided, quite like the city — a place where Black people go largely forgotten — that it is birthed in.
Milwaukee is a hot region, but the industry pressures are not something that Trapper does not try to adhere to. He couldn’t care less if he was recording in his basement or if Def Jam Records had posters of him in Times Square. To him, the music is something that is born out of his need to create; not any ideas of fame that he has. He is a father of four now, at the young age of 23, and that’s something that preoccupies him. “I say it to this day: I rather do what I do, and leave the industry, if it comes to niggas being gay and niggas doing shit that we would never do”, says Trapper. “I’m Certified was something that I purely did.”
It was the Hibachi theme, his favorite kind of cuisine, on the new record that led Trapper and I to meet up. He likes the rice and eggs, a warm meal that allows for Trapper to eat well and relatively healthy. The album, Trappernese, is good, but not quite as popular and eccentric as I’m Certified, which feels like the sprawling masterpiece so far in his career. Eventually, he is looking forward to changing styles, and continuing to progress. He understands that fashion and clothes are as much a part of hip-hop, and so is hair. A suggestion of mine that he liked was getting an afro; a fizzled hairdo would do wonders for his overall aesthetic. He looked at me and flashed a smile, as we begun talking about how funny it would be if Taylor Swift, whose music was reverberating through this Hibachi spot, started to make music with Trapper. “She might not like it”, Trapper says, laughing.