Performer Cardi B in dressing room backstage at the BET Hip Hop Awards, 2017
Photo by Flo Ngala, image courtesy of the artist
INVASION OF PRIVACY
JACE CLAYTON
Performer Cardi B in dressing room backstage at the BET Hip Hop Awards, 2017
Photo by Flo Ngala, image courtesy of the artist
It’s no coincidence that the loudest sound in “Bodak Yellow” is also the lowest/longest. The rest of the song is anthemic, instantly recognizable. But the bass? It is standoffish, barely aligned with the rest of “Bodak Yellow.” It’s not quite a kick drum and never quite forms a bassline. It doesn’t sound out every bar. Unless you’re listening on a cellphone or laptop speakers, in which case it doesn’t appear at all.
Sound propagates as waves, so while we describe bass sounds as low, we can also call them long. A high-pitched soundwave measures less than one inch from peak to peak. That satisfying-yet-infrequent Cardi bass thump came from a wave over thirty feet long.
The unorthodox sonics of Cardi B’s breakout single are extraordinary, yet they also represent a microcosm of what’s happening in trap bass at large. My first lessons in the power of bass came from dancing to house, then jungle/drum and bass, in Boston’s afterhours club The Loft. My body learned about bass long before my mind did. And those basslines behaved. They understood that their function was to get people moving—either by supporting the melody with a hummable line, or by accenting the rhythm. Usually both. Those genres set the standard for how bass would move from the nineties until the early 2000s. That’s when dubstep, EDM, and trap grew into popularity, bringing with them strange new forms of low-end.
As “Bodak Yellow” spread from social media posts to corporate-owned airwaves to raucously public city blocks, the now-you-hear-me-now-you-don’t bass struck me as its (sometimes) hidden heart, an unsung engine of the song’s contagious power. I was left with a question: What does it mean to craft a sound to disappear and appear? Answering it took me from the microscopic interactions of bass frequencies at the edge of human perception to the macro-politics of Black public life in America.
By bleeding through walls and other barriers, bass always presents the possibility of an invasion of privacy. On a dance floor, this can help us break social walls and gather in communal joy. Elsewhere it can have dire consequences: In 2012’s infamous “loud music murder case” a white man shot and killed Black Florida teen Jordan Davis as the result of an altercation over the volume of the trap that Davis and friends were listening to inside their car.
Bass confuses the line between civic and personal space. One needs serious speakers to push the air required to make long/low waves. Once they are made, the low frequencies travel much farther than their midrange counterparts. Apartment walls or car windows can easily absorb the short waves of high-pitched sounds. You can be inside at home, but if a neighbor is playing loud music, then your personal space is being invaded—and it’s the bass that does the invading.
The deeper the bass, the more likely it is to “disturb the peace” (if one has subwoofers)—and to not be heard at all (if one is listening on small speakers). The flamboyantly truant bass from “Bodak Yellow,” the lead single from Cardi B’s debut album, Invasion of Privacy, calls our attention to this wider play of absence and presence common to trap bass.
Before we’re even born, we use our ears to orient ourselves in relation to the world. I am here and that sound-source is over there. Stereo hearing allows us to locate ourselves in the world. Bass denies us this primary way of knowing (prior to sight), replacing it with something closer to critical intimacy.
Here’s how it works: When, say, a dog barks, the sound arriving at each of your ears will vary slightly. Your brain analyzes this infinitesimal acoustic difference to determine where that dog is located in space. (Humans have a touch of sonar, after all.) Bass waves, however, are too long for our ears to register any meaningful difference. Bass is nondirectional. This is why surround sound systems require multiple speakers but only one subwoofer. It means that we experience bass as pure presence. And the closer the bass tones get to a sine wave, the more immersive the sound will be. Low-end touches us as intensity without direction. Bass lives in you, on you. It flows through the human body at a scale we can only register as power. Immanent and fresh as hell. (Whether it’s pleasure or pressure depends on the DJ.) We can’t locate things, or ourselves, in the world by listening only to bass—it makes critical distance impossible.
Low-end happens whenever sound and social space become the same thing.
Trap producers, however, rely on sine waves. The legendary boom of the 808 kick drum? That’s a sine. These S-curve waves are the fundamental building block of electronic sound. Unlike EDM’s harmonically rich bass waves, sines contain no harmonics apart from their single pitch. This results in a sound that is smooth and deep. Their mathematical elegance and physical simplicity yields incredibly powerful sonic manifestations. Sine waves boast of several unique properties that no other cyclical waveforms have. Their unique force can be difficult to describe accurately without resorting to stuff like this: y(t)=A sin(2πft + φ) = A sin (ωt + φ). But it is easily and immediately felt. This power is invoked every time someone praises an 808.
Sine wave bass is ur-bass, pure and uncut. In terms of sheer vibrational power—the power to move things—anything bass can do, sine wave bass can do better. Rappers, physicists, and the laws of the universe agree on this point. Using sine waves allows trap producers to access bass at its most intense.
Bass is fundamentally unruly. Trap focuses this basic acoustic fact into social commentary by making the interplay between amplification and silence part of its overall thematic of presence and absence in contentious public space, and linking that to race. Trap lyrics provide context, yet it is the underdog sonics themselves that articulate a complex engagement with American power.
Cardi B adds a profound twist to this dialectic a few songs later in the album when she says: “I like niggas that been in and out of jail.” Cardi acknowledges that oscillating against one’s will between freedom and confinement helps to define what “niggas” are and makes those subject to that subjection deserve love. America incarcerates a higher percentage of its citizens than any other country.1 The governmentally mandated absence and presence of people—lovers, children, parents, friends—has defined the Black community in America since its inception; nearly 10 percent of Black men in their late twenties are currently in jail. Facts like these can be hard to discuss or envision. Just ask the MTA.
The people who design New York City’s transit map cannot agree on whether Rikers Island is public or private space.2 The island shares its name with the notorious jail complex, which holds approximately 10,000 inmates, the overwhelming majority of them not convicted of any crime.3 Should Rikers be mapped or muted? Every new edition of the MTA subway map chooses a different approach. The current map (from 2013) displays Rikers. The previous map omits it. The one before that includes it. On it goes, swerving wildly between public and private. When dealing with Rikers, the flip-flopping subway maps display institutional irrationality rather than any useful information.4
Trap bass is what niggas that been in and out of jail sound like, and the NYC subway maps are what those niggas look like. The state of people moving between states.
Trap manages to articulate a deep and troubling aspect of Black American existence. It makes audible how Blackness is, if nothing else, a mix of hypervisibility and invisibility, a seemingly permanent conflict with ruling order. Trap bass highlights the flow between power and powerlessness. Frequencies crafted to antagonize, to stir up public space.
Acoustics are inseparable from Blackness if we understand Blackness as the condition of being in and out of societal shelter. And this is what trap—and the prison-industrial complex, the other trap—and bass acoustics state very clearly, Blackness is all about.
Earlier I said that bass can flow past barriers that stifle other frequencies. That’s true, but there’s more. When low-end is played inside, significant amounts of bass reflect back into a room. The reflected wave bounces back on the original, resulting in odd interference. At certain points in a room, the original bass wave and its reflection will cancel each other out, becoming unusually quiet. In other spots, the waves will double up, becoming much louder. Two people on the same couch can experience dramatically different levels of low-end, to the extent that they may appear to hear different notes. The louder the speakers are, the more interference occurs. And of course, the closer the waves are to the sine waves, the more intense all of these ghostly highs and self-negating lows will be. How much bass you perceive depends on where you stand.
At home this isn’t a big deal, but it’s the major acoustic and architectural problem for commercial studios. Music gets professionally “mastered” and mixed in rooms that attempt to rein in the ungovernable via bass traps.
Bass traps trap bass. These hunks of material are custom-built to absorb low frequency acoustic energy. Music studios place them at strategic (and discreet) locations throughout the room to deaden the bass response.
As with bass, so with Blackness. A relational force, it can be directed yet never quite controlled. The amplifications bring on silences. Do you hear what I hear? Doubtful. It lacks substance yet lives in us and passes through us, uniting us to the uncivil public sphere whether or not we want it. Blackness is expressly not a medium where one can orient oneself or locate something in the world. It is fun to consume, easy to imitate, and incomprehensible to inhabit.
What to do with a situation you cannot think yourself out of, whose very conditions mean that while inside it you cannot orient yourself to any outside? Trap bass zeroes in on the constructedness of that condition—and sells it. While letting the low-end work its physical magic, waiting for a crowd to turn up. The situation calls for a dance.
What’s the opposite of transcendence? When you sink so low into something that you start to move with it. When, instead of rising above into airy utopia with the critical distance to match, what you feel spills over into whatever’s next to you—and vice versa—replacing any easy subject-object distinction with something more like critical intimacy.
Philosophers call this mucky space immanence. I call it bass.
1. Sawyer, Wendy and Peter Wagner. “States of Incarceration: The Global Context 2018,” Prison Policy Initiative, June 2018. www.prisonpolicy.org/global/2018.html.
2. Acosta de la Peña, Estefanía, Laura Sánchez, and Misha Volf. “Putting Rikers on the Map,” States of Incarceration. statesofincarceration.org/story/putting-rikers-map.
3. Randle, Aaron. “Rikers Island: The Closing of the Notorious Jail, Explained,” The New York Times, October 18, 2019. www.nytimes.com/2019/10/18/nyregion/nyc-news-rikers-island.html.
4. Young, Michelle. “Fun Maps: Rikers Island Keeps Disappearing and Reappearing (on MTA Maps),” Untapped Cities, August 30, 2013. untappedcities.com/2013/08/30/fun-maps-rikers-island-keeps-disappearing-reappearing-mta-maps/.
CLAYTON