Inside the Unmistakable Madness of Milwaukee’s Rap Scene

Milwaukee’s rap scene is its own universe, with its own stars, sound, and frequency. Forever undersung, even among mid-sized rap locales like Detroit and St. Louis, the artists in Wisconsin’s biggest city embrace their limited resources, creating distinctive styles laced with fat basslines, drums that rumble like old steam locomotives, funky synthesizers, and too many handclaps to count; elastic Auto-Tune melodies and spice-talking raps; and dances not to be attempted by those with bad knees. The scene is proudly insular, fun, and fast-moving—it’s generally unbothered with soundtracking the lives of anyone outside of Milwaukee, and not a week goes by nowadays without the release of wildly singular and thrilling music.

The songs can be romantic, wounded, fly, fun, comedic, or just some trap shit, and they’re almost always delivered with a signature flamboyance. Hints of Atlanta trap, Houston gangsta rap, Chicago drill, and Detroit street rap are in the mix, along with the offbeat Southern blues of Baton Rouge and the Bay Area’s chip-on-the-shoulder spirit. But the final result is always unmistakeable Milwaukee madness.

“You really have to be from here to get it,” says Lakeyah, one of only a few Milwaukee rappers signed to a major label, of her city’s sound. “Nobody in the industry understands it, but you can dance to it, you can twerk to it, and we got our own lingo.”

It’s a scene full of outsized personalities who are eccentric without ever trying to be anything but themselves. Certified Trapper, arguably Milwaukee rap’s biggest freak, has become a cult phenomenon over the last few years thanks to an around-the-clock churn of nutty, self-produced bedroom recordings. He’s racked up hundreds of thousands of plays on YouTube and inked a deal with Columbia, though he admits it took a minute for people to dial into his eccentricities. “Motherfuckers was calling me ‘weak,’ because my music is kind of harmful to your ears,” he says. “But now people calling me the ‘coldest weak rapper ever,’ and they can’t stop listening to me.”

In my time roaming around the lively city of 570,000, chopping it up with rappers, producers, videographers, DJs, managers, drug dealers, and comedians about Milwaukee rap’s current moment and how they’re building an ecosystem to sustain it, the underlying tone is both prideful and ambitious. It’s a real rap community. All the moving and shaking is done on-the-fly, and the biggest stars are posted up in the parks and gas station markets like everyone else. Sure, they would love it if a chart-topping rapper faithfully repped their sound. But in their minds, they already have a bottomless pool of hitmakers. They’re just waiting for everyone else to get hip.