Trap Karaoke Is 'Soul Train' for the Black Lives Matter Generation | VICE | United States
VICE: Where did the idea for Trap Karaoke come from?
Jason Mowatt: One night, I hit up my friend Jon, and he said he was going to karaoke with his co-workers. I said, "Wouldn't it be cool if you could do Future?" because I know he's such a big Future fan. He said, "Like a trap karaoke?" We laughed, and he dared me to create it. The first event was September 29, 2015, in New York, and it was pretty wack. There wasn't much of a set list, but I saw a glimmer at the end. This girl named Belise Thomas did "Back to Back" by Drake. That was the summer that Drake was beefing with Meek Mill. He had that incident at the OVO Fest where he showed the memes and people went crazy. So I recreated that at the event. At first, I was just projecting lyrics on the wall. Then the chorus came up, and I started showing the memes, and people started losing their fukking minds. I thought, OK, I can build an experience around this .
You define Trap Karaoke as a "user-generated concert experience." What does that mean?
It's a fan-first experience, where you have regular people going up there channeling their favorite artist. I think people underestimated how engaged people would be around a concept like this. But we're packing really big concert venues. You would have thought the artist is the one up there performing. At Trap Karaoke, the whole point is to close that by putting fans at the center of the experience. It's like the people's concert. We've been bringing out the artists who perform some of these songs. People get up onstage and maybe 20 seconds in we'll cut the music and say, "You don't really know the words! We're going to get you someone who knows these lyrics a little bit better."
Helena Yohannes: In LA, a woman was performing "Down in the DM." And during her performance, Yo Gotti came up behind her and performed. You get to live out a fantasy of performing with your favorite artist. You can't let that go.
