EVERY GENRE PROJECT - July 23 - Pluggnb
Genre of the Day - Pluggnb
Album of the Day - Shawty Rxk Too 2 by RXKNephew (2021)
Sometimes, the plugg isn’t just a purveyor of druggs. Some pluggs are more versed in SoundCloud as a means of delivery rather than a mobile vehicle. On today’s featured album, our artist balances the task of doing double-duty, selling the fantasy of smooth, dreamy pluggnb beats and occasionally puncturing it with a truly off-guard bar. If pluggnb artists are sonic plugs, the sounds they’re pushing are equally intoxicating.
Why the extra g was added to the genre name plugg, the forerunner of pluggnb, is unclear. Perhaps it’s simple text-speak: occasionally, I’ll throw in some extra letters at the end of the word to indicate emphasis. Maybe artists indeed intended to delineate the difference in their output from a plug’s typical array of offerings. The producers constructing the beats have been as integral to the rap world’s ecosystem to the rappers themselves since the ‘90s, helping artists rise to fame via stimulating new sounds and sonically pouring out the gasoline for a hot emcee to set ablaze among listeners. In the early 2010s, a few Atlanta trap producers decided that combining their creative strengths through numbers could be fruitful; the collective declared themselves the BeatPluggz. For the all-important producer tag, which helps a listener identify who made a beat, the BeatPluggz kept it simple: the simple word ‘plugg’ was all you had to hear. Here’s Nebu Kiniza’s irresistible (at least, if you were me at age 12) 2016 plugg hit “Gassed Up” as an example.
Like yesterday’s gothic rock breaking away from punk, plugg’s key departures from trap centered on atmosphere and tone. Producers sandpapered trap’s usual busy drum arrangements in favor of slower, smoother rhythms and emphasis on melody provided by strong 808 sub basslines. Atmospheric synth pads and sparkly piano chords filled out the sonic background like hazy, colorful smoke. The druggs may not have created plugg—plugg producers were only plugging beats—but its sonic ambience was undoubtedly definitional in a hip-hop decade marked by downers in the form of legal weed, cough syrup, and Xanax, reflected in other dominant sounds like the more lo-fi, chillwave-influenced cloud rap.
A new collective called SlayWorld founded in 2016 carried the plugg zeitgeist torch to the other side of the decade as the easily accessible online platform SoundCloud increasingly became the center of all that was newly important in rap. Pluggnb, a portmanteau of plugg and R&B, evolved plugg’s sound with increasingly lush instrumentals with tinges of jazz or R&B, and densified the drums slightly. The collective’s artists like Summrs and Autumn! (where’s Wintr and Springg?) led the charge in directing pluggnb’s sound. New bigshot Yeat was also briefly affiliated with the collective and sound early in his career. Artists like Lil Tecca and SoFaygo played important roles in making pluggnb a rap sound du jour at the turn of the decade.
Reminding me of the wordy maximalism of lowend’s Certified Trapper, Rochester rapper RXKNephew minces few words as he luxuriates in the sonic satin of these enchanted pluggnb beats. The opener is thirteen minutes long, and he may not have taken a single breath recording the song. The intense, distorted kicks underpinning the swirling, alien leads provide a steady bed for his lengthy declaration. He often returns to key motifs: the glory of henny, his unexplained burning hatred for drill rapper Lil Reese, never failing to let your attention stray as he lands bars like “When it comes to drug dealing, I speak different languages / I will speak Vietnamese in this b*tch / I will speak Swahili in this b*tch.” He occasionally picks at low-hanging fruit (let Whitney rest), but I’d imagine most people would here or there over the course of such a marathon stream-of-consciousness release.
He sticks to more typical rap song lengths for the rest of the album; the strong melody of the sub bassline and crystalline chimes of the next song “Icy Stone Cold” feel like a glass of cold water after his bewildering, world-spanning previous oration. He shrewdly incorporates a variety of instrumentation into these luminescent pluggnb beats, such as the electric guitar riff driving “Sossy Aquarius” and video game-esque icy fantasies of “P Frank Out the Bowl.” His raps are winsome disruptors to the lush moods of pluggnb, catching you by complete surprise with hard pivots like bringing up the Beatles. “They like Neph, why you promote so much evil? / My favorite movie is Resident Evil / I'm way too young to know ‘bout The Beatles / Aunty get high listening to Beatles.” To summarize succinctly: plugg!