Spanish trap music, between urban culture and the regeneration of colloquial language

Abstract

The aim of this article is to approach the cultural phenomenon of Spanish trap music in relation to its high linguistic creativity. Although this genre is not always represented in the main mainstream communication channels, it is the most popular among young generations and it has integrated various elements of the so-called “urban culture” into its language. In few years, it has appropriated codes from other genres (such as flamenco and reggaeton) but also from other symbolic and semiotic spheres (video games, social networks, pornography, social marginality, protest movements against financial oligarchies, imaginaries related to South America or the Arab culture...) reflecting such hybridizations in an extremely dynamic jargon. This article intends to present the first results of a research on the Spanish trap genre, which has rarely been studied from a linguistic and rhetorical point of view.