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Marco Pavé is Project Pat meets KRS-ONE. Spitting an urban country consciousness with a confidence that could only emerge from coming of age as a Muslim Milllennial in North Memphis. As a rapper and songwriter, Marco Pavé appeals to a diversity of rap enthusiasts, from purists to radio lovers to hipsters, with a soulful style of hip-hop storytelling and community engagement that appeals to racial and geographically diverse millennial audiences. Pavé has performed at SXSW and was an Official A3C Hip-hop Festival and Conference Artist. 

Roundtable: Trap Rap’s Crossover Into Mainstream Pop
Trap music started as a subgenre of Atlanta hip-hop that gained popularity in the early 2000s. Although rappers like Backbone and OutKast of the Dungeon Family rapped about the dangers of getting caught up in the dramatics and consequences of the trap as a form of drug culture, it wasn’t until rapper T.I. and his second album Trap Muzik that the trap was branded with a life and sound of its own. The southern hip-hop interpretation of the trap was a lyrically and sonically grimy space, consisting of stark bass lines, synthesizers, and low-pitched vocals. Trap rappers amplified if not celebrated the trap’s gritty reality as a reflection of the post-Civil Rights Black South, a far cry from the previous generation of Atlanta rappers’ rendering of the trap as a warning. This is significant, considering how Trap music served as an oppositional statement to Atlanta’s burgeoning position as an international hub. There are now generations of trap rappers, including ‘first generation’ artists like T.I.P., Young Jeezy, Yo Gotti, and Gucci Mane to newer Trap rappers like Pill, Future, Migos, and Fetty Wap. 

Our roundtable panel is interested in how Trap Music has crossed over from its southern hip-hop roots into other areas of popular culture like EDM and Pop Music. From fleeting references to the Trap a la Nicki Minaj’s “Beez in the Trap” or giving street cred to pop artists i.e. Katy Perry for “Dark Horse,” the Trap has become mobile and decentered from its original intentions. What are the requirements to define a piece of music or culture as ‘trap?’ How does region and musical preference influence how one listens to and defines trap music? Ultimately, our panel seeks to trace Trap’s transition from a musical and cultural statement of southern hip-hop into its current state as a frivolous accessory/moment in popular music and culture. 

Roundtable: Chocolate Cities
“We didn’t get our 40 acres and a mule, but we got you C[hocolate] C[ity],” George Clinton declares victoriously on the title track of Parliament Funkadelic’s 1975 Chocolate City album. Rather than wait on unfulfilled political promises, Black Americans were occupying urban and previously white space in massive numbers, their movement and increasing political power embodied on the track by multiple but complementary melodies. Bass and piano take turns keeping the beat and beginning new melodies, saxophones speak, a synthesizer marks a new era, and a steady high-hat ensures the funk stays in rhythm. The Parliament, its own kind of funky democratic government, chants “gainin’ on ya!” as Clinton announces the cities that Black Americans have turned or will soon turn into “CC’s”: Newark, Gary, Los Angeles, Atlanta, and New York. Parliament’s “Mothership Connection” public service announcement is broadcast live from the capitol, the capital of chocolate cities, Washington, DC, where “they still call it the White House, but that’s a temporary condition.”

Spurred on by postwar suburbanization, by 1975, the chocolate city and its concomitant “vanilla suburbs” were a familiar racialized organization of space and place. The triumphant takeover tenor of Chocolate City may seem paradoxical in retrospect, as black people inherited neglected space, were systematically denied resources afforded to whites, and were entering an era of mass incarceration. Still, for Parliament, like for many other Black Americans, chocolate cities were a form of reparations, and were and had been an opportunity to make something out of nothing. For generations, these chocolate cities—black neighborhoods, places on the other side of the tracks, the bottoms—had been the primary locations of the Freedom struggle; the sights and sounds of Black art and black oppression; and the container for the combined ingredients of pain, play, pleasure and protest that comprise the Black experience.

Four decades after Chocolate City, including eight years of the first African American president, what is the status of Clinton’s Afro-futurist vision of the chocolate city, and how does that vision play out in current music about and situated in chocolate cities? What is the sonic legacy of the Chocolate City? What does a chocolate city sound like today, or in many cases, what does a gentrified chocolate city sound like? And how does new post-place and post-genre music signal a rejection, revision, and/or continuation of Parliament’s Afro-futurist urban politics? This panel explores these questions and the relationship between the city, politics, and music with a discussion between Hip-hop artists and scholars from three of America’s chocolate cities: Memphis, Brooklyn and Philadelphia.