Meet campus musical royalty: HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS

Everyone’s heard of the musical stars who came surging out of Harvard like an alien chestburster: Dean Wareham, Young Thug, Yo-Yo Ma.

However, a lot of Harvard students may be unaware of one of the most promising young rap groups, a rap group that successfully feuded with the poorly named and poorly clothed “Harvard Rap Collective.”

I’m talking, of course, about HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS. The Tab was lucky enough to interview one of the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS’ members. This is what he said.

All right, comin’ out the big DC, tell me about the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS.

Well, it’s a musical project that can be understood if you know more about me in light of that. We were a couple of Harvard students who produced four songs as part of a short but fruitful musical career. We made four songs that can be found on bandcamp at harvardtrapsheiks.bandcamp.com and these can be bought for the low price of $4.20, and you can also follow us on Twitter. We were inspired by a variety of modern phenomena: literature, movies, art, Amazon Prime, the Dutch East India Company, your TA who’s not really feeling what you’re saying in section but is probably cool outside of class, stuff like that.

So what is the essence of HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS?

It’s about contemporary life.

Your song, one of my favorites, Cocaine N Thangz, could you say what that song is really representative of?

Well, you know, from a young age, I’ve learned not to judge a book by it’s cover. This song is about cocaine, but it’s also about the things people use to get themselves through the day, or net them lots of money. It’s about why the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS are exceptional people, world historical musicians, and why any criticism of us, no matter how accurate, is really missing the point. We’re making a change in the world.

How would you describe the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS in one sentence? And it doesn’t have to be a grammatically complete sentence, it can be a list of nouns, or some grunting or whatever.

Erik Satie piano music played by Bradford Cox’s long long fingers.

I dig that. So, I’ve heard HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS are ready to come out with some new material. Is that just hearsay?

There may or may not be a plan to reunite. I’ve been reading stuff on Pitchfork on Stereogum saying “this is the most anticipated comeback album of 2016,” and it’s true we’ll be headlining festivals like Lollapalooza, Yardfest, the Cambridge Head Queens Pub.

People have been saying that it’s just to get more retweets on Twitter or more downloads on bandcamp, but that’s totally not what we’re about. What is definitely coming up is the re-release of a Purple Vinyl Edition of our debut album Farewell 2 leggings EP which got rated 5/5 at harvardtrapsheiks.bandcamp.com, for the true collector, this vinyl edition is a must. It’s going to be expensive, but for a collector it’ll be some really high quality noise.

What has the public’s response been to the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS’ message?

Much like any great artist, much like any great musician or political leader, there have been haters. I’m personally sure that those objections will fade away and end up looking like people who were against the Reformation or Napoleon trying to invade Russia in the winter.

Yeah, typhus might be a problem.

Basically people who seem persuasive at the time but end up being proven completely wrong. But, people have heard the music, it’s been very popular, YouTube has a user by the name of Drew Faust where you can find all of our videos. They have numerous views, and it’s done very well in the polls despite the leftist leanings of youtube.com. I forget what the question was, but people thought it was bad but they were really wrong, they were misinformed.

It was probably just hard for them to understand. When you’ve got such a dense, like a really meaty, thick, musical sausage, sometimes it’s hard to wrap your head around it.

Yeah, when people can’t really grasp that kind of thick, meaty, dense music, instead of going the extra mile, various critics have given up and have said that it’s just too big.

Where do you see yourself and the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS in five years?

Well, the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS definitely transcend time. Have you heard those beats? Have you heard those songs that sample those David Bowie songs, those Bob Dylan songs? That shit is timeless. And the bangles, think about the bangles, who would have thought to bring back the bangles? That’s either Kanye, or the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS.

So I think the TRAP SHEIKS may produce more music as they potentially descend into alcoholism and look to music as an escape from everyday life. Even if that doesn’t happen, the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS will probably just end up graduating from college and doing some great things with their lives.

What would be making it for THE HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS?

European tour would be the goal. We could open, ideally for a Japanese noise-rock band, that’s primarily where our fan base is in Europe. Not in America, in America, it’s the inner-city and various suburban regions.

Pending our tour, we’ll be releasing our tour updates on our Twitter feed which is twitter.com/harvardbangerz with a z. We’re hoping, eventually, to get an organized collection of our tweets in Widener one day.

Just to shift gears a little bit, I’ve heard that you’ve spent some time studying Scientology, can you make parallels between the timelessness of the TRAP SHEIKS and this modern phenomenon of Scientology?

Well they’re both cults, definitely.

Do you feel that one day, much like Scientology, the TRAP SHEIKS will have a documentary made about it, or hordes of lawyers to litigate on its behalf, or do you think of it as being sort of an urban uprising?

I think the HARVARD TRAP SHEIKS feel very victimized by the student body’s unthinking response to some of their musical art, so I think the PC lawyers will actually continue to litigate against the HTS, much like they have been in the past two years, just like the copyright lawyers, and the DMCA lawyers.

They’ve been taking down the TRAP SHEIKS music from YouTube and SoundCloud, which necessitates it being posted in strange and obscure locations which changes to the pitch of the entire song. So we’re the underdog here.

I’ve also heard that there was a feud that went on for the HTS very early on in their career on Twitter, what was that about?

In classic millennial fashion, before we made any music, we developed a Twitter presence. Our first tweet was especially good, the Twitter was made to express the public sentiments of the HTS. The first tweet was “Henry Louis Gates think he hard but his name don’t ring out in the streets,” and you know, there’s something to that.

Soon after, we got into internet conflicts with various rappers who thought their music was good and were trying to slide their shoddily constructed mixtapes into our DMs. Having listened to some of them, we opined positively on some, but some of them were just bad. A rapper out of Pittsburgh by the name of AC, his music was thought to be particularly horrible, so our argument started on Twitter, a dangerous medium, and we were compelled to write a diss track.

For our readers, could you tell me what the name of that track was?

It’s called Bowie (AC Looken like a B**** 2 Me).

@TheTab