After laying down beats, hooks and verses for six songs, Traxamillion got tired of his own voice.

So he tapped three friends to feature over his hard-knocking trap tracks. After that, he threw the snack-sized project up on Soundcloud, tweeted it to his 25,000-plus followers and kicked back as the internet distributed the digital tape.

“The future is now,” the 37-year-old San Jose native says, reflecting on how much faster things move these days compared with 10 years ago, when he helped jumpstart the Bay Area’s hyphy movement with his sparse, rumbling production style.

“Back in the day, you used to have to print CDs, stand on the corner, hand it out, then go to the club and hand it to the DJ,” he continues. “Now, you got a little social media network and it blossoms from there.”

His latest blossoming project, “Trapp Addict,” hearkens back to 2006’s “Slapp Addict,” and reflects the transition of San Jose’s foremost producer to trap from hyphy. Back in the mid-2000s, Trax rose to national renown for epitomizing the thoroughly Bay Area brand of hip-hop—a style epitomized by thundering kick drums, uptempo bass lines, 808 plink-plonks and emcees, like E-40 and Mac Dre who sputtered out energetic bars, slathered with uproarious and unique regional slang.

“It’s all about bounce,” he says. “Like slap (Trax’s preferred term for hyphy), the main component is the 808, but trap has a slower bounce. There’s a simplicity, but making it sound simple is really intricate.”

Trap’s best known practitioners—artists like Young Thug and Fetty Wap and producers like Mike Will and Metro Boomin—all hail from the deep South. But the style has infected every realm of modern music. Its minimalist construction and deliberate pace prioritizes novel noises—spawning a sonic arms race among producers who have delved into EDM filtration techniques to extract beat-accessorizing muffles and whines.

Like slap, the style balances humongous bass with electro-influences, but trap artists have pioneered atypical rapping techniques that juxtapose melodic autotuned croons with spazzed-out flows punctuated by propulsive ad-libs that burst free in a schizophrenic call-and-response. 

“The ad-libs are as intricate and as important as the main vocals,” he says. “It’s like two extremely different verses. You’re your own hype man.”

Trap, slang for a destitute neighborhood or crack house, continues the tradition of gangsta rap, but paints layers of nuance into semi-fictitious portraits of perilous extravagance. On “Joogin and Finessin,” Trax growls that “fucking bitches is (his) profession.” At first blush, it’s a crude boast, but when juxtaposed against the lamentation of ignoring his mother’s intervention, it reads more like a desperate deflection—a coping mechanism learned on the mean streets.

He spits, hoots and hollers over quick-hissing hi-hats, spacey wah-wahs and hollow barrel smacks. It’s quintessentially modern—an admirably deft positioning from an artist over a decade into an established career.

“I’ve always been interested in what’s in the club, what particular rhythms get people moving,” he says.

In his early teens, Trax soaked up hip-hop hanging out with college DJs and attending local shows. He started rapping in middle school while also beat-boxing, banging on tables and fiddling with his keyboard—the first suggestions of his knack for beat-making.

In 2005, he produced “Super Hyphy” for Keak da Sneak, laying a hypnotizing bass loop and funky chirps below Keak’s gravelly verses. Soon after, he crafted “Sideshow” for Mistah F.A.B. and Too $hort. The hit rode catchy bloops, deep buzzing synths and womp-womping horns. It became an anthem for the raucous, ghost-riding parties that claimed the Bay’s night time streets.

“Every record I did after that mimicked the same swag and same style,” he says. “The Bay Area has a lot of pride in ourselves. So to get that co-sign made me feel like I earned my place in hip-hop.”

His next project, Tech Boom, is due in June. Trax will leverage his rep to expose San Jose artists like Ziggy, City Shawn and Flammy Marciano while expanding the repertoire of known names like “funky white boy” bassist, Paul de Lisle of Smashmouth.

Trapp Addict | Traxamillion
Out Now
Streaming, iTunes: $4.99

In the era of performative wokeness, it didn’t take long for the Internet to explode in a fit of raging think pieces over the second single from Macklemore’s second LP, This Unruly Mess I’ve Made. The eight-minute “White Privilege II” finds the white Seattle rapper taking a long, hard look in the mirror—acknowledging his complicity in cultural appropriation and conceding that he has, and continues to, reap untold benefits simply because he happened to be born with a pale face and blond hair.
On Summertime ’06, an album released a year and a half earlier, a young, black rapper by the name of Vince Staples, finds himself taking an equally long and hard look in the mirror. On “Lift Me Up,” the album’s lead single, Staples ponders his own complicity in in the black-on-black violence and crime that has long plagued his city of Long Beach.

And, not unlike Macklemore, he considers the state of hip-hop—a genre of music created for and by African Americans, which now finds itself catering to an audience that gets whiter with each passing year.

“All these white folks chanting when I ask them, ‘Where my niggas at?’” Staples rhymes pointedly on “Lift Me Up.” “Goin’ crazy, got me goin’ crazy, I can’t get wit’ that / Wonder if they know I know they won’t go where we kick it at.”

The targeted line captures a tension in modern hip-hop. The genre has long since crept from its birthplace on downtrodden inner city streets into comfortable two-story suburban homes.

As an artform, hip-hop necessarily operates in the figurative sense. Listeners can draw conclusions about “the streets” that are fundamentally misguided and lacking in nuance. Early rap hits, like “The Message” by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five and “Fight the Power” by Public Enemy, meditated on sociological issues and portrayed gangster lifestyles like Scorcese did in Goodfellas—savoring the benefits, but also highlighting the immense, long-lasting pitfalls of the dangerous lifestyle.

However, by the late ’90s and early 2000s, gun-toting, drug-dealing kingpins were celebrated in mainstream hip-hop. And somehow, they became my heroes. I watched 50 Cent’s film. I played his video game. I told my public defender mother I wanted to be a pimp—much to her horror.

I thought being a pimp meant being just a really awesome, respected dude. Thirteen-year-old me didn’t want to oversee a stable of prostitutes, I just wanted to embody the bulletproof cool of 50 Cent.

Vince Staples and Kendrick Lamar represent a new, and more nuanced strain of gangsta rap. As demonstrated by the aforementioned line from “Lift Me Up,” the mental mining in which Staples is engaging can unearth some rather difficult and unwieldy realizations.

And I celebrate Staples’ ability to balance gritty, unflinching realism with worldly, philosophical rumination. But in my sing-a-long support, I delight in his depictions of the grisly realities that actually killed his friends and drove his loved ones to drugs. I can imagine why my chanting must drive him nuts. He knows that I don’t have the frame of reference to understand his struggle.

When I listen to him, it’s tourism. Through his imagery-laden self-expression, I merely catch a glimpse of things I could never fully understand. As much as I’d like to be in his circle, enjoying complete solidarity with Staples isn’t something I’ve earned, or likely would even want to.
Staples’ rap comes from bleak circumstances. I can’t relate to a lot of it. But I don’t listen to music solely as a reflection of myself. That’s dull and limiting. On his album, Staples paints a meticulous self-portrait within a highly detailed landscape. He drips with disarming authenticity. His raw self-awareness inspires my admiration.

He can’t educate me sufficiently on his own, but he highlights circumstances that I should understand before making social, personal and political decisions that affect people very different from myself. I don’t identify with the precise details of his upbringing, but I can gain from the universal truths he’s culled from his life. And plus, his beats bang.

Next Monday, Staples will open for Logic, a half-black rapper who scans as white with—let’s face it—a lot of white fans. At some point during Staples’ performance, some of those white fans might feel uncomfortable singing along, and that’s fine. After all, in those moments, it’s probably better just to listen.

Vince Staples plays on Apr 11, 7:30pm, $40-$45 at San Jose State Event Center.

thouDirtbag Dan bustles about his high-ceilinged studio in an industrial block just outside of San Jose’s Japantown. He points out a psychedelic mural of a shark by a local artist on one wall and mismatched grey curtains stapled to another. The latter serve as the backdrop for his battle rap podcast.

It is here bongs modified for cannabis wax sit next to microphones.

He leafs through a box of vinyl records with a Bach album on top, then settles into a squeaky swivel chair sitting next to a DIY recording booth made of white laminated wood.

The space is in a state of disarray. Soon, all of Dan’s equipment and decor will be shipped to a new workspace in another part of the city. His former studio will be transformed into a blandly stylish condo for an upwardly mobile couple. A homegrown talent, Dan has watched his surroundings morph from sleepy and semi-rural to jam-packed with sprawling development—all of it built to support the ever-expanding ranks of the tech industry.

“What used to be a farm is Netflix,” Dan says, reflecting on the change he’s seen. “I think that’s a rare thing for a city that has a million people. San Jose is a new city in every sense of the word. There’s not the history of art like there is in [other] cities in the Bay Area—Oakland, San Francisco, Berkeley, even Vallejo—where artists came up 30-40 years ago and laid the groundwork for the guys that you hear on the radio.”

Born Daniel Martinez, the 32 year-old may be moving, but he’s not leaving. He rides in the vanguard of his city’s earliest efforts at national hip-hop and battle rap recognition. As a teenager, he started battling when studio time became scarce and, a little while later, performed in the very first West Coast acapella showdown uploaded to YouTube. According to Dan, he’s in the top 20 most-viewed of English-speaking battlers on the streaming video service.

“Maybe it takes a little bit more physically and mentally to be a top-level ballet dancer,” he muses. “But, purely mentally, nothing is as gnarly as battling, because it’s being a comedian, a musician and a poet all at once. Plus you gotta do it right the first time. Plus everyone wants you to die.”

In battles, contestants trade foul bars, built upon shame-inducing personal details gathered from social media. They can prepare their attacks beforehand, but flub or falter and your opponent will tear you to pieces while the crowd howls in approval. Dan has performed this superhuman feat of mental toughness at the highest level of competition roughly 75 times over the last decade.

“I’ve been more scared at battles with 100 people there, than shows with 10,000,” he says. “But there’s something about those moments when you really put the knife in, or you look at your opponent like, ‘You’re fucking dead. I beat you.’ And you see the defeat in their eyes. That is unmatched.”

Battle rap trafficks in truly heinous subject matter, and those who wish to excel need thick skin. But participants earn (at least) a grudging respect from their peers if they are bold enough to test themselves in this ludicrous crucible. The community hasrepresentatives from every race and region, including battlers like No Shame from Texas, an openly transgender performer. Though insults are the antithesis of political correctness, battle rappers don’t really mean their nasty remarks and contestants often exchange daps and hugs before leaving the stage.

When rapping in the studio for his proper albums, Dan wipes away some of the unchecked vitriol of the rap-battle arena, revealing disarmingly sincere and unpretentiously deep sensibilities. On 2014’s DBDLP, he expounds upon a scorched-earth social theory on “F@#k That,” portrays the highs and lows of dream-chasing on “Thinking of a Master… Plan” and talks about his divorced dad’s descent into meth addiction on “Suburbanites.” He spits with sneering twang over full-bodied beats built from deep-crate samples by pals Skylar G and Ichy the Killer. He eschews “half-assed” routes of backpacker martyrdom and falsely extravagant braggadocio for raw honesty that encapsulated his then-self.

“The hardest thing to do as an entertainer is be honest,” he says. “If I wrote that album today, it would be different. I’ve learned a little bit more, I feel different about certain things. That’s interesting for me as an artist to play shit back, and be … like, ‘I don’t believe that anymore.’”

Like his city, Dirtbag Dan is in transition. Recently, he starred in what might be his last battle. Citing a waning desire to demolish his opponents and a complacent comfort with the craft, Dan says he’d rather oversee and aid the scene than directly participate. He wants build up his already popular podcast, and begin performing more stand-up comedy, where he balances freewheeling filth with layered introspection. He’ll be participating in Jokes Over Bars, the first annual battle rapper comedy showcase on January 12. When he goes onstage to tell jokes, he’s nervous like he used to be in his early career, but not that nervous.

“I feel like a dick when I say it to the other comedians, but [their] job is fucking easy,” he says. “Walk in the fucking park. You tell the same jokes over and over and over again, and get better at them, and add things to them. You know how many fucking punchlines I fucked up? That I didn’t even get to get out right? Let alone refine and master.”

Dan’s comedy foray in turn benefits the San Jose battling community. He will be the gregarious host and organizer of the fifth Battle of the Zay, an annual battle rap extravaganza that lands on January 9. For the first time in the event’s history, he won’t be battling because he no longer feels the need to perform to give the event legitimacy. He ceded his spot as the Zay’s foremost representative to his buddy, the viciously verbose Caustic.

“I won’t really realize until the day of the battle, but I feel like it’s going to be fucking amazing,” Dan says. “You don’t want to be battling top-ten dudes while you’re throwing the event. Now, I can step back and focus on making it a crazy card. We’re trying to be the minor leagues for the majors. We want to create battles that are unique to us, and build up new cats.”

For BOTZ5, Dan has assembled a battle royale, where six of the best-known spitters will unleash their hottest minute-long bars in a random ping-ponging order. In the head-to-head match-ups, he pits up-and-comers against veterans so they can gain exposure in viral circles. But online devotees don’t always translate to real-life fame.

“It’s not like back in the day, when if you were on MTV everyone knew who you were,” he says. “Nowadays, you could have millions of views on YouTube and you can go to the grocery store and no one will know who the fuck you are. You have crazy weekends, then you come back to real life. Like, I’ll be in Toronto at the same event as Drake, but clearly Drake’s life is different on Tuesday than mine is.”

Dan’s diverse hustle plugs many holes for San Jose. He’s a visible viral representative, a booster for new talent and a link between the area’s hip-hop and comedy. As his city evolves, so does he, tackling new challenges to reflect his updated motivations and goals. He keeps constant only his stage name and his motivation. He grinds both as a means and an end.

“Whether it’s comedy or battles or hosting or music, I’m doing a job,” he says. “And honestly, really, really, I don’t give a fuck about money that much. I do, but I give a fuck about money like I give a fuck about air: I cannot live without it, but I don’t think about it unless it’s not around. I’ve been fortunate enough to rap for a living for over a decade. Dope.”