About

#Trapcovers are covers of pop songs performed in a trap music style. The covers, and their related hashtag, became popular after members of the Black Twitter became angered by white women performing pop-style covers of hip hop songs, which often included "translating" the song from patois or Black American English^[1] into Standard American English.

Origin

On February 18th, 2016, a singer named Samantha Harvey posted a video to Facebook and YouTube in which she covered Rihanna's "Work," a song that is mostly sung in a Caribbean patois. In a now-deleted comment, Harvey wrote that she had to "translate" the lyrics before she could sing them, indicating that they were not in a proper English.^[2] Many white people commented that the cover was great because they could now understand the words to "Work." The controversy was reported in several major outlets, including Paper Magazine.^[3]

On February 25th, Twitter user moisturizeds created a series of tweets where she spotlit white people singing "Work as well as Beyonce's single "Formation", in which the word "negro" is used; the tweets all received several thousand favorites and retweets each, and were collected in an article on web site Foxy. Later that day, the user NathanZed created a video of himself singing The Beatles' "Hey Jude" in the style of trap music. In a subsequent tweet he explained that the video and the hashtag was a rebuttal for "white covers turnin' party songs into elevator music." The tweet received just under 11,000 retweets and 18,000 favorites in less than 24 hours. NathanZed also gave credit for the hashtag to another user, IllCapitano94, who also released a trap cover of Vanessa Carlton's "A Thousand Miles" shortly after.

Spread

The hashtag #trapcover spread quickly after the two initial videos were made, as followers of NathanZed (he has over 150,000) quickly took to the format. User Yo_Its_Tree posted the first response, using the lyrics of Coldplay's "Yellow"; the tweet received 1,400 retweets and over 2,000 likes. After more covers were posted, including ones of popular songs like Taylor Swift's "Shake It Off" and "The Star Spangled Banner", NathanZed reported that the hashtag was trending with more than 38,000 tweets. The hashtag was covered in mainstream publications like Jezebel and New York Magazine's Vulture.

Various Examples

Search Interest

External References