Phonk II: The Phonkening
ISSUE #254
Last year, I celebrated Atlanta’s Dragon Con with a playlist celebrating phonk, the coolest nerd music on the market today. Phonk is a chopped-and-screwed genre of electronica that takes old-school Memphis rap samples, compresses them and buries them beneath lo-fi distortion and 808 cowbell melodies. It got big from various YouTube mixes in Eastern Europe, where phonk would play over neon footage of car racing.
Now, it’s sequel time, and genre conventions have evolved significantly. A generic structure has emerged: a fade-in intro, a sped-up first minute and a tempo change to take the song out slower on its back. Many musicians have started to leave sampling in the dust and focus more on 808s and original verses. Some are fusing phonk with emo rap and horrorcore, like Ghostmane Playa, Scarlxrd, and PiNKII, while masters of the genre like my!lane and DVRST have started exploring a more cosmic, slowcore route. Kordhell has gotten big enough to launch an American tour, and almost every day a young DJ comes out of the woodwork with an anime avatar and a handful of singles getting play.
This is the realm of the self-proclaimed prodigies (most phonk producers hover around 15 to 17 years old), of autodidacts and blue-collar futurists. This is the new guitar in the far corners of the world. Welcome to the new age of fingerless gloves, the soundtrack to the getaway drive.
Yet these are often sophisticated and complex compositions. They’re designed at first provide stimulating play, but there’s artistic meat there nonetheless. It’s a hyper mix of classical, breakcore, bubblegum pop, and progressive rock.