For a few months last year, one of the most entrancing places on the internet was the YouTube page of a musician called Certified Trapper. He would post endlessly. The songs were alluring, free-flowing blips of internal monologue. The videos were ruthlessly DIY affairs, shot mostly at home: Certified executing peculiar proprietary dance moves; Certified cartoonishly flashing his gold teeth; Certified grooving in front of anodyne greenscreen images of churches and traffic intersections. Eventually, the endless flow abated—not because Certified got burned out, but because he got signed.
Jeff Vaughn is the CEO of Signal Records, a joint venture with Columbia. He gave Certified his deal, and he’s a true believer. “He’s the most unique, most talented, and most polarizing presence in the city and in music, period,” Vaughn says. The city in question isn’t New York or LA or Atlanta, the country’s traditional rap hubs. It’s Milwaukee.
And it’s not just Certified: Some of the most exciting rap music being made right now comes from America’s 31st largest city. From Wisconsin. Certified is predated by similarly singular acts like Mari Boy Mula Mar and has already cultivated oddball protégés like AyooLii. Then there’s Big Frank, Carvie P, Munch Lauren, Steve Da Stoner, MarijuanaXO, Joe Pablo. You may have never heard of them but they’re big in Milwaukee—and, increasingly, they’re big on TikTok, where the city’s locally grown dance moves have boosted the city’s sound. If you see someone on TikTok slightly crouching down, stretching one arm out as if pointing at the horizon and panning across the room, you’re seeing Milwaukee. A rapper named 50K Stash created the move and now everyone in Milwaukee is doing it. All the time. And so are all their fans and imitators on TikTok. What started as a local trend has become a massive online swell.
The TikTok-friendly Milwaukee sound is defined by short tracks, loosely rattling bass, and an immediately recognizable metronome-esque hand-clap rhythm. It’s known as lowend. One of the earliest lowend hits, Esco and Shawn P’s “Like Yhop,” takes Natasha Bedingfield’s pop standard “Unwritten,” drenches it in the claps, and runs it through utterly blown-out speakers. “Feel the raaaain on your skiiiin, like yhoooop!” It’s a gem.
Lowend “is built around these eighth-note claps that at least partly have their origins in Louisiana styles like bounce and ratchet,” says John Chiaverina, the Milwaukee-raised writer and musician known as Rustbelt. “Those styles clearly have a history in the city,” but as filtered through the iPhones and the minds of Certified Trapper, AyooLii, and a whole bunch of other would-be stars, it’s now spinning off in bold new directions. Milwaukee, says Chiaverina, “is building a trademark sound.”
With Certified Trapper, that trademark sound, and the viral dances that go with it, could go pop. “I see him as somewhere between Pharrell and Young Thug,” Vaughn says. “At the moment, people either love him or hate him, but in the long run I believe he has one of the broadest potential commercial appeals of any artist of his generation.”