While there’s still inventive shrapnel worth excavating from the demolition zone, so much of modern phonk feels optimized to be indistinguishable so gymgoers and gamers can hit play and cede control, racking up streams endlessly. Von Storm, a member of the O.G. phonk collective Holy Mob, was baffled by the new selections on Spotify’s official phonk playlist. “The top tracks definitely aren’t my cup of tea, they almost sound like meme music. It’s like Looney Tunes cartoon sound effects mixed in with Brazilian phonk,” he told me. “They’ve really chewed up [the genre] and spit it out.”
It’s baffling why people even label this music phonk anymore beyond semantic inertia—we’re so far from SpaceGhostPurrp’s Gothic freakiness. There’s still people making “classic” phonk, like rappers Freddie Dredd and the massively successful $uicideboy$, but the music barely ever rises above retrobait Memphis homage. And the most viral new-gen phonk bears no resemblance to Memphis rap besides the apocalyptic menace. It’s all belligerent and garish, spiced up with little textural and melodic tweaks. Speaking with me last year, the UK producer dashie was conflicted about being in the scene. He began making dariacore, the frantic mashup craze pioneered by Jane Remover, before pivoting to phonk after he had a mortality scare and wanted a faster way of finding success through music. They told me there are some genuinely genius phonk producers, but also a mass of copycats. “This iteration of phonk has no cultural backing or anything. There’s no rhyme or reason to it. It’s just, truthfully, kids looking to make an easy buck or trying to get really popular, really quickly,” dashie said. “At the end of the day, my sole motivation was: I need to make this financially viable.”
Phonk’s reach is staggering but not real. Sure, Spotify’s official playlist has nearly 10 million saves—more than half of RapCaviar, the streamer’s main hip-hop playlist. But it’s not playing outside or at clubs in the US, and most of the phonk producers are faceless. This is music of the ether, functional autobot anthems with no artistic raison d’etre. “I can very much see why people get so frustrated with it,” dashie said. “It’s almost sacrilegious to the EDM scene.”
Andre Benz, the founder of the infamous YouTube channel Trap Nation and the label Broke, which works with many new phonk stars, was upfront about the genre’s soulless hunt for virality. “There’s not a lot of artistry in phonk,” he told me over the phone. “If you talked to a lot of artists, they’d probably agree. They’re making it for financial reasons and they’re making it to go viral.” As the head of Broke, Benz typically offers contracts for phonk singles, such as giving an advance in exchange for marketing to influential creators and anime pages. He calls phonk “edit music,” saying it’s stayed so viral because the producers mold their sound to fit trends. The monetary incentive is massive: Benz said he’s worked with teen producers who’ve raked in $150,000 a month.
