Triller: Houston's Trae & the Diary of Tha Truth

Trae’s impeccable (and free!) Tha Diary of tha Truth mixtape opens with an Avril Lavigne sample, layered over some simple kick-cymbal action without any hint of irony: “I wake up in the morning, put on my face / The one that's gonna get me through another day / Doesn't really matter how I feel inside / 'Cause life is like a game sometimes.” Over the top, singer L-Boogie lilts in and out with chants like “Wake-up shorty.”

Those who already know Trae will find the sample both amusing and extremely fitting. Improve the cadence a bit and you could easily slide those lyrics into one of the Houston rapper’s raspy verses. Effectively, this already happened countless times, because Avril’s lyrics approximate Trae’s own mantra.

Though the words match up, Avril was singing about being a teenager while Trae raps about - with all due respect to teenagers - a more complex set of emotions. Friends lost to drugs, guns, and jail beset the ostensible majority of Trae’s verses – and while, tragically, many Houston rappers can write songs around the general premise of Trae’s “Miss My Dawgs,” few could rap that specific song or look so critically upon their grief.

“I’m running with this pain and can’t shake it like it’s a felony,” Trae raps. A few bars later: “I promised them I would keep it real…I’ve got a couple shoes to fill.” Though he’s specifically nodding to fallen Houston legends Fat Pat and H.A.W.K., the verse indicates Trae’s greater sense of responsibility to fulfill expectations from everyone around him, while simultaneously burdened by personal pain. On the subsequent song on Diary, “All I Need,” he elaborates further, as he discusses how loss “turned this man into a gorilla” before stating that he was “bred to be the truth.”

It’s an old story – strength in the face of adversity, pushing through emotions – told in every medium possible (see, for example, Star Wars. That stuff is all day in Star Wars). But in rap, this approach is novel, perhaps because it’s so hard to pull off. If Trae’s basic premise is that he must stand tall and honorably and not dwell on his anguish, then he’s contradicting himself every time he raps about it. In a lot of Trae’s music, you don’t hear a word about his fallen friends or his pain, and I think he represses those emotions because he considers that part of his promise to “keep it real.”

Yet at the same time, once you hear Trae take it to that level on a song like “All I Need”, his not-so-revelatory songs take on a new edge. “I’m Fresh” and “Nuthin To A Boss,” his two new singles, are still trunk-rattlers, and they will frustrate new listeners, because he is clearly capable of more emotionally invested songs. But it’s songs like these – particularly the gun-metal, psychedelic “I’m Fresh” – where Trae keeps the oath he made to himself. He does not just fill a verse – he twists tempos and metaphors and does everything in his power to keep himself occupied and keep those four minutes free of life’s pains.