Walker Chambliss coins 'cloud rap' to describe Lil B and Main Attrakionz — sub-genre gets a name
In 2010, the music blogger Walker Chambliss coins the term 'cloud rap' to describe the hazy, reverb-saturated production aesthetic and lo-fi vocal style of Main Attrakionz member Squadda B, Lil B, and the producer Clams Casino — artists who had been working in this register together since 2008. The Cloud Rap Tape compilation (2010) and Lil B's mixtape catalog from the same period codify the form. A$AP Rocky's 2011 mixtape Live. Love. ASAP, produced largely by Clams Casino and Friendzone, broadens cloud rap into a major-label commercial register.
Why it matters
Cloud rap is the post-blog, pre-streaming sub-genre nobody quite had a name for until 2010. The production aesthetic (reverb-soaked synth pads, half-speed drums, vocal samples that sound like they were recorded underwater, an overall atmospheric drift) had been building in Lil B's prolific mixtape catalog since 2008 and on the Bay Area Main Attrakionz records since the same period. Clams Casino was the producer making it sound that way. The name made the sub-genre visible. A$AP Rocky's 2011 breakthrough was the moment it commercially crossed. Yung Lean made it a global teenage phenomenon by 2013. The aesthetic has, in the years since, dispersed into the broader SoundCloud-emo and trap-dreams register that dominates 2020s commercial rap. You can hear the original cloud-rap fingerprint on basically every late-2010s atmospheric trap record. The 2010 naming is the hinge.
Branches
Sub-genre1
Citations 2
- B
- B
Nearby in time
- 2009Only Built 4 Cuban Linx... Pt. II is released
- 2009Kanye West interrupts Taylor Swift at the MTV Video Music Awards
- 2009Jay-Z's 'The Blueprint 3' debuts at #1 — his record-breaking 11th #1 album
- 2010Lil Wayne begins eight-month sentence at Rikers Island
- 2010Guru (Gang Starr) dies of cancer
- 2010"Runaway" is released