Rapper 2 Chainz turned a marketing ploy for his new album into a HIV testing clinic
American rapper 2 Chainz has turned a marketing ploy for his new album into a community HIV testing centre.
The hip hop artist, Tauheed Epps, has a bright pink “trap house” in Atlanta in order to market his new album, Pretty Girls Like Trap Music.
The house, which name references a drug dealers house, has been host to a number of community projects as well as marketing the rapper’s music.
It offered hair and nail appointments for women in the local community, as well as serving as a “Trap Church” which insisted the local community get in touch with issues and oppression facing them.
For a short time, it also acted as an art gallery which had paintings on sale of the figureheads of rap, André 3000 and Tupac.
Now, the house has been turned into a health centre.
The unconventional testing clinic was established in conjunction with the Fulton County Board of Health, Atlanta AIDS, and Test Atlanta.
The rapper wrote that he did not want trap to be related to “negativity” and hoped the testing centre would help alleviate some of the stereotypes about the music genre.
“The word TRAP is and was associated with a negative connotation,” the rapper wrote on Instagram.
“We will see after we get thru injected some cultural ideas the [sic] move the needle inch by inch.”
A recent study found that HIV levels had soared in young gay, black men in Atlanta.
Research carried out by Atlanta’s Emory School of Public Health found that black men who have sex with men (BMSM) are 3.8 times more likely to acquire HIV compared with their white male counterparts.
It meant that a young black gay man becoming sexually active at the age of 18 in the city had a 60% chance of being HIV positive by the age of 30.
Newer research revealed that young people with HIV now have a practically normal life expectancy.
The expected age at death of a 20-year-old patient starting antiretroviral therapy (ART) between 2008 and 2010 before the disease had fully taken hold was 78 years old.
Life expectancy in the US is 78.9 in the US and 80.1 in the UK.
