I just watched the vid for Gunna - Skybox, and it reaffirmed my faith in trap.

That was good - it had been dwindling for a while, and though Eternal Atake got me feeling it again for a couple of weeks, it didn’t last. There doesn’t tend to be a lot of variation in trap albums, so whilst output is high and linear change rapid, individual releases acquire a decidedly ‘throwaway’ quality.

In order to counteract this tendency, trap videos have become increasingly inventive. Whilst fast cars, expensive watches and twerking thots remain staples of the genre, the last few years have seen an increasing degree of experimentation with regard to visual style and content.

Gunna’s Skybox , the video for which came out on March 6th, is one such experiment. There’s a lot going on in this video, but I want to talk about two things - the use of claymation and the Middle Eastern setting - in order to argue that trap is successful because it presents us a fiction, a magical dream-land in which capitalism has been denuded of its violence and its inconsistencies. It is thus a) deeply problematic and b) thoroughly enjoyable.

Over the last decade, rap has been finally and totally assimilated into the mainstream. The rapper, who once existed as a countercultural symbol, now serves to propagate mainstream values. Videos like Skybox achieve this by setting up the rapper as a villain, as an outsider, but then sweeping any of the genuinely ‘outsider’ elements of his character (those that would actually challenge society) under the rug. The video distracts us from this with magic - nice colours and fantasy settings.

The beginning of the video clearly takes its cues from Kenny Beats’ recent vid with Denzel Curry, using the Adult Swim-style claymation to present Gunna in a hot air balloon, smoking a big blunt and admiring the three giant goddesses he floats past. One of the goddesses then flicks him out of the sky, he spirals towards the ground, and when he hits, the cartoon filter disappears.

What is the effect of presenting the rapper as a claymation figure? It sets the rapper up as a fictional outsider, a comic-book character. We seem to relate both to famous people and to comic-book characters with a degree of creative fiction, able to excuse the brutality of The Joker because ‘his victims deserved it’ or the pedophilia of R. Kelly because, ‘I mean come on, he made Trapped in the Closet’ . Reinforcing the link between celebrity and fiction, then, further reduces our ability to understand the artist. It sets him up as a model to be compared to, rather than as a really living thing to be understood.

When the claymation fades, Gunna wakes up, immaculately dressed, outside a remote Middle Eastern village. The village, too, exists in a fictional world: the women are highly sexualised, dancing in veils and skimpy hijabs, and there’s a talking goat. Gunna walks into this village, makes eyes at the women, then takes them all in his limo for a dance at his palace. The video is spared from being offensive only by virtue of its being so ridiculous. When Gunna sings ‘I’m in a castle, fucking a genie’ we feel that his cartooning has been made complete: he is no longer real, he is an expression of pure fantasy. He lives in a land of magical realism, far away from here, in some nostalgic alternative reality in which he has hot-air-ballooned to the middle east and then hooked up with all the fine women there. Its a child’s fantasy, but one that works. It conveys its message so well: it is beautifully shot, the colours are on point, the setting is great; its impossible not to be won over by it.

The rapper, then, is interesting because he exists both inside and outside society. The typical trap artist represents your classic rags to riches story: a boy from the hood who made it out. He’s sold drugs and he’s killed people, but he only did it because he had to, and now he’s here to tell you about it. He’s someone from the outside who’s come in; a past villain who’s been reformed (to some extent) by the riches offered by the capitalist system. That he has come all the way from the bottom only supports this further: by showing that anything is possible, it takes away our grounds for saying ‘I don’t want to’.

So we see the villain as a negative role-model with a positive element. The rapper, to the extent that he endorses anti-social views, fills the role of villain: he’s an anti-hero, a bad guy its OK to like. But to the extent that he is relegated to the realm of the imaginary, we are prevented from seeing the real negative causes and effects (both social and personal) of his behaviour.

Gunna’s lyrics speak of drugs and violence, but both are absent from the video. The gap is filled by the cartoon and fantasy elements, which surrogate the excitement we would feel from these illicit activities, presenting Gunna not as a glaring example of the harsh emptiness of capitalism but as someone who has found success within it.

This is the contradiction which the current social order must maintain in order to maintain its supremacy. It has to present the image of the rapper as having been incorporated into society, as having erased his bad behaviour in order to fit in with society. Simultaneously, it has to allow him to express all this bad behaviour through his music, in order to give him the appearance of authenticity, which is what we’re seeking, I think, when we listen to rap music. It has to make him seem countercultural and tolerated, which is a difficult line to tread. Hence, rap videos increasingly disappear into the imaginary: its easy to erase all the problematic elements of his lifestyle if you render it in cartoon, or transpose him to a fantasy setting.

By relegating Gunna to the realm of the imaginary, the mainstream has turned him into something which just makes it easier to get on with our lives. It turns him into a comic-book character. Captain America was invented to boost US morale during the Second World War. Even though Captain America didn’t (indeed, couldn’t) exist, he made ordinary Americans feel like they had a chance (and to be fair, feeling like you’ve got a chance is sometimes the difference between having a chance and not). In the same way, when we erase all the complicated, real elements of Gunna’s character, we stop him being a critique of the system. When he sings ‘Bought a new Benz, lost some more friends… trust got thin had to keep a FN’ he wasn’t joking; this is his life. But leave it out of the video, and let him mumble it, and we can almost be forgiven for thinking that he’s happy.

Trap is prevalent in western society because it serves both the outsider and the insider equally. It convinces the masses that capitalist life is essential, unavoidable; but if you’re an outsider, it convinces you that you can still find a way in, and that you should, because look how good things are for Gunna. It attempts to justify capitalism; sure, the West fucked over a lot of people to get here, but now its got Eliante and Richard Mille and Gunna’s having so much fun that you’ve gotta say it was worth it.

It creates a weird dialectic: capitalism is the only game in town, and you can either commodify yourself as an insider (get on with work, and feel comforted by knowing that Gunnas still exist) or commodify yourself as an outsider (refuse to play the game ‘their way’, but still ultimately play a capitalist game by commodifying yourself into something that makes the ‘insiders’ feel better). So ‘true’ outsider status has been stripped, and we are left feeling as though no real change is possible; I could change my life, be like Gunna, but i’ll never change the system, and moreover I wouldn’t want to, because Gunna is cool and I like him.

By presenting Gunna as a cartoonish, larger-than-life outsider, the video allows us to get all the good and none of the bad, thus rendering him a tiger without its teeth, a challenge without grounds. If we saw the full expanse of Gunna’s life - the bad decisions forced on him, the amount of drugs he takes to cope with it - we would see that the system is broken and want to do something to change it. When, in Baby Birkin , Gunna sings ‘I know my purpose/ European car came with curtains’, it is tempting to forget, given how nice it sounds, that here is a man genuinely finding self-worth from buying a Rolls Royce. We should look at the enormous lack in his life that has created this need, rather than simply validating it, and chucking money at him. Its like he says in ‘Who You Foolin’’ : ‘sometimes a gangster need a hug’.

But just to be clear, I really enjoyed this video. 5/5.