Artists can only speculate as to why the infrastructure for a thriving hip-hop scene isn’t here. Maybe it’s because Pittsburgh doesn’t have enough people. Maybe Pittsburgh really is a “blue-collar, football rock n’ roll town” without a love for hip-hop, as rapper Ray Dawn calls it.

“I have more plays in Pittsburg, California, than Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania,” says Dawn, who has nearly 50,000 views on his latest single on Soundcloud.

To artists, Pittsburgh seems like a wall, holding them back from fame and fortune. It looked as if that wall might be coming down for good when Wiz and Mac blew up. But though they launched record labels and signed a few Pittsburgh artists, it wasn’t enough.

The producers never came. The record labels looked elsewhere, so more artists never popped.

“When Wiz went and when Mac went, we kind of thought that, ‘OK, the floodgates are going to open and other people would go,’” Jasiri says. “When they didn't, it was kind of like, ‘what happened?’”

“But to me, they were like blockers. They came up and made a hole, now it’s up to me to run through that bad boy.”

Local producers and rap fans say there are several Pittsburgh rappers poised to run through that hole.

And they could do so behind a style of hip-hop much different than the city’s used to.

The two street rappers are on their way up. Their mixtape together, titled “Trapnese,” has amassed more than 2 million views on Spotify, and that’s not counting the tape’s single, “Today’s A Good Day” featuring Wiz Khalifa, that has about 4.2 million itself. Wopo’s song “Elm Street” was featured as one of Complex’s “10 Dope New Songs You Should Be Hearing Everywhere Soon,” and Hardo has received praise from stars like Mac and T.I.

Their music is considered trap rap, a style of hip-hop that’s as bass-heavy as it is raw and unfiltered. It bounces in the club but also drives home a message. And for a city that has a rich history of jazz music, it’s an abrupt change in style. Most lyricists who have broken out of Pittsburgh in the last two decades, including Mac and Wiz, made music heavily influenced by jazz, with an ear for rhythm over noise — or, as Franchise from local rap group The Come-Up describes it, “rapping street music, but rapping it over horns.”

Hardo (Lake Fong/Post-Gazette)

To rappers like Hardo and Wopo, trap is about their own lived experiences, but the style is often criticized for glorifying drugs, guns and crime. It’s that stigma, Wopo believes, that has prevented him from booking shows in the city easily. That could be why there’s a disclaimer before one of his recent music videos, “All Guns are Props.”

There’s no doubt, though, that trap is what’s hot. What was once a niche musical movement in Atlanta is now an undeniable wave in popular culture, with artists like the Migos, Future, 21 Savage and Lil Yachty flooding the pop music charts.

“It’s not just people from the streets listening,” says Pittsburgh artist and producer Norman Dean. “You got suburban kids listening to trap music more than they listen to anything else. That's what it’s become these days. It’s spread like wildfire, from the streets to the suburbs.”

Not everyone is riding the trap wave. PK Delay and Joel Kellem, both 22, take pride in sounding different — “The music that’s popular right now isn’t the sh*t we make,” Kellem says. “Because the sh*t we make is hard and wavy.” It’s not uncommon for artists to be a bit territorial in Pittsburgh; though trap is popping, hip-hop here is still a mesh of subgenres lacking a cohesive sound.

So there are a lot of lanes. And those lanes are getting more crowded. Hip-hop connoisseurs say there are more rappers on the local scene than ever, thanks in part to the immediate platform aspiring artists are given on social media and the popularity of hip-hop nationally. Dean, who has seen about 300 aspiring rappers come through his South Side studio in the past three years, says nearly everyone wants to try their hand at rapping, but he can count the number of potential breakout stars in Pittsburgh on one hand. That’s a question that everyone on the scene mulls: Who is next to pop?

Local producers say the potential breakout stars here — Wopo, Hardo, PK and Joel, Flatline Nizzy, Trula Moses, Trula Meez, Dean, Choo Jackson, Palermo Stone, The Come Up Boys, Devin Miles, Chevy Woods, Mars Jackson — have the talent. They just need some help from their city. They need venue owners to open their doors for more hip-hop shows, and they need fans to come and buy merchandise. They need artists and DJs to bring local acts with them when they tour the country, like Pittsburgh's DJ Afterthought did on all 47 dates of his last tour with Houston rapper Riff Raff. They need Soundcloud and Spotify plays from Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, and not Pittsburg, California.

“The lane is wide open for someone to blow,” says Nigel McDaniel, host of WAMO 100’s “Local Music Monday.” “We can't be like crabs in a barrel, we have to broaden our horizons and can't be too narrow-minded when we see someone bubble up.”