Making fun of big-hair corporate pop from a generation ago is hardly a challenge for a critic as incisive as Hennessy. But CVS Bangers is not really a skewering of Adult Contemporary; indeed, there is a lot of gentle, even begrudging affection for this cheese, from listeners and Hennessy himself. “Racism — but so good!” he booms over Baltimora’s “Tarzan Boy.” In CVS Bangers, the major target of satire is the form, not the content: the current trends in club deejaying. And 1986 — an alternate 1986, if you will — provides another key to interpreting Hennessy’s mix.

In 1986, a hip-hop album went to number one on the charts for the first time. The Beastie Boys’ License to Ill proved that hip-hop had seeped into American youth culture, even into the suburbs. Of course, it helped that the Beastie Boys looked a lot like those suburban kids, and had songs about throwing ragers in your parents’ house. This was the obverse of Lionel Ritchie’s achievement: the Beasties crossed over by presenting the rebellious aesthetics of hip-hop shorn of its race- and class-based defiance. This success was replicated by Vanilla Ice, and arguably Eminem as well — after all, Em’s biggest hits were mostly about MTV celebrities and spousal abuse; his working-class backstory was something pushed by his management more than by his music. These three acts have four of the top ten best-selling hip-hop albums of all time; Eminem holds the top two spots.

This switching of black faces for white ones (which, I want to stress, should be blamed on the industry, not the artists) has only intensified. From Macklemore’s NPR-liberal wish-fulfillment rap to Mac Miller’s dorm-ready stoner anthems to Lil Debbie’s staging of postmodern minstrel shows, the past few years validate Eminem’s prediction in “Without Me” of an army of white rappers following in his footsteps (his prediction that popular culture would feel empty without him was far less accurate). Appropriation (“love and theft,” as Eric Lott puts it) is a story as old as American popular music itself, and it’s affected the other elements of hip-hop as well, including DJ culture. Here’s where Hennessy’s biggest barbs find their mark: the trendy club subgenre known as trap music.

“Trap” comes from southern street slang, a wry way drug dealers refer to their workplace. T. I. named his breakthrough 2003 album Trap Muzik; on hustler anthems like “Doing My Job” and “Rubber Band Man” he makes a virtue of the necessities of street life. Young Jeezy is a bit more overt about hustlers’ stark choices in his “Trap or Die” mixtapes, and Gucci Mane crafted the term into a badge of honor with such mixtape series as “Trap House,” “Trap Back,” and “Trap God.”

As a genre — or to be specific, as a sound — trap crystallized in two ways. First was the ascension of producer Lex Luger, who reached mainstream attention by sending Southern hip-hop’s tricked-out bass drums and skittering hi-hats into Wagnerian levels of bombast. Second was the mixtape mavens Trap-a-Holics, who curated their mixes with “drops” (small vocal samples that serve to brand DJs’ mixes) of a booming white-guy voice thundering “Real trap shit!” and the now-legendary “Damn, son, where’d you find this?”

Music styles that, like hip-hop, are connected to some kind of grass roots, are fluid, with constant incremental changes building into epochal ones. When they move from their base audience, it’s often because a particular conjuncture of sounds resonates with a new crowd. But here is where a kind of misrecognition occurs: for the neophytes, the style is this one way, frozen in time. The give and take between music makers and their core followings, the push and pull, ebb and flow that built disco, hip-hop, house, reggaeton, and so on, is interrupted by listeners who in their enthusiasm don’t always understand the history or sociology of their genres. They don’t have to: when music becomes a commodity, it can travel worldwide, as all commodities do, severed from any knowledge of the conditions of its production. Genres cease to be grassroots social worlds, and instead become something more like brands: mere sonic surfaces rather than deep historical processes.

When a genre develops a signature sound, it’s ripe for the plucking by interlopers. Instead of having any real connection to the communities that develop musical styles through the dialectical movement between music makers and their core audiences, an outside producer just has to have a decent set of ears and a computer, and can start cranking out reasonable facsimiles, like factories in China churning out fake Coach purses indistinguishable to everyone but connoisseurs. Even if you can tell the difference, the functional parts are close enough. Today’s Chinese pirate manufacturers pride themselves on their quality goods, just as today’s kings of musical appropriation do.

This is how a new definition of trap arose, one tied to EDM, or Electronic Dance Music, a term whose anodyne unwieldiness belies its coinage by academics — dance music fans ignored the name for years. EDM is now the branding initiative accompanying the latest wave of the mainstreaming of electronic music in the US (remember electronica in the late nineties?).

As you might guess, EDM trap has little to do with the off-the-books hustles of the urban poor. Rather, it’s a largely middle-class affair, slapped together by suburban teens and college sophomores; using dubstep as your Call of Duty soundtrack is so 2009. Today’s trap retains most of the sounds of underground hip-hop: the booming 808 bass drums, the hi-hats, and of course, the drops, now deployed in that irritatingly knowing way that characterizes so much digital culture. The answer to “Damn, son, where’d you find this?” is always the same: you downloaded it off the internet.

But there’s one important sound that has been removed in this refurbishing process: EDM trap is mostly instrumental. By dispensing with the rapping, EDM trap effectively silences the black voices that kept the style connected to the stories of the American lumpenproletariat. It’s the auditory equivalent of kicking out a poor family so you can live in their classic brownstone. In the words of one of the dance underground’s sharpest figures, Rizzla DJ: “Damn, son, put that back where you found it!”

Hennessy is hip to the easy appropriation that characterizes EDM trap: after all, the genre’s biggest hit, Baauer’s “The Harlem Shake,” sampled his voice without attribution for its hook and title, and eventually landed on The Ellen DeGeneres Show. In CVS Bangers, Hennessy gets his revenge, connecting trap’s empty dudebro swagger to the schmaltz of Sad White Guys like Take That and Rod Stewart. He drops a “Damn, Hen, where’d you find this?” over Don Henley’s “Boys of Summer,” one of the most overplayed songs of the late eighties. What’s underground or obscure about a genre as enthusiastically new-economy commercial as trap?

So, to put it most unkindly, trap is the adult contemporary for the prosumer age: instead of a top-down strategy of gentrifying the airwaves, now the structures are in place so that such appropriation appears as spontaneous and driven by fans, even though the commercial internet runs on corporation-cultivated virality. While AC continues to do the vital work of soundtracking our shampoo purchases, viral video crazes like the Harlem Shake become an important part of austerity-era work discipline: every middle manager’s “great idea” for a morale booster is to corral the office into ironically flailing around in front of a webcam.

That trap is as safe and gentrified as eighties adult contemporary probably isn’t that much of a leap for your average jaded music fan or skeptical leftist. But let’s take Hennessy’s mix where he wants us to go: the store. Here’s the manifesto that accompanied the first mix, a sort of rough draft for the opus that is CVS Bangers 2:

CVS BANGERS IS THE AUDIOSCAPE FOR WHEN YOU’RE BUYING TAMPONS OR A [12-PACK] OF CONDOMS, A SAMPLING OF THOSE MAGIC TUNES THAT PLAY WHEN YOU’RE CONTEMPLATING HOW RIDICULOUS YOU WOULD LOOK CARRYING 24 ROLLS OF [TOILET] PAPER ON THE TRAIN, THOSE BITTERSWEET TUNES OF YESTERYEAR THAT SKIP THROUGH YOUR MIND AS YOU READ THE NUTRITIONAL INFORMATION ON THE BACK OF A BOX OF FROZEN PIZZA AND OPT FOR A PINT OF ICE CREAM INSTEAD, THOSE SPECIAL DITTIES THAT ACCOMPANY YOUR SMASHING THE BAR CODE OF A CAN OF RED BULL AGAINST THE SCANNER OF [A] BROKEN SELF-CHECKOUT MACHINE. CVS BANGERS IS COMMERCE ITSELF, AND COMMERCE, MY FACELESS INTERNET FRIENDS, IS BEAUTIFUL.

The “you” in this, as in so much of Hennessy’s work, is that art-school hipster type, the type of person who would go to a club where they might hear a few Baauer tracks — or better yet, the kind of person who would snicker at the middlebrow bro who actually likes Baauer. But Hennessy’s right: even if you’re too much of an aesthete for trap, and no matter what subculture you identify with, you’re probably getting your prophylactics and empty calories from somewhere that plays “Back For Good” by Take That a dozen times a day.

For me, this raises an interesting problem: how sub- or counter- are our cultures? Sure, we can develop our tastes and social networks in any number of directions, espouse any number of subversive political positions, make radical art. But when it comes time to meet necessities, we all rely on lowest-common-denominator mass production and mass consumption. Whatever show you went to, however face-meltingly avant-garde the club’s tracks, you’re going to end up rehydrating and caffeinating with mass-market goods. Subcultural capitalism seems less like an alternative to corporate capitalism, and more like its arts district. What Hennessy’s mixes suggest is that at the level of social reproduction, as with so much else, we haven’t really left the Reagan years.