EVERY GENRE PROJECT - September 1 - Rare Phonk
Genre of the Day - Rare Phonk
Album of the Day - Evil Wayz by DJ Smokey (2013)
Perhaps it is an auspicious time for rarities—just over a week ago, Botswana’s President Mokgweetsi Masisi unveiled none other than the second-largest diamond of all time. In a country where the precious stones account for 30% of the GDP, it’s not only a dazzling marvel but tangible economic stimulus. Though perhaps not worth tens of millions, discovering rare music, or music that feels uniquely our own, feels similarly exhilarating. Music and identity are often interlinked, and all listeners hold the tunes and artists that help set themselves apart particularly near. Producers are even more brazen in the quest to discover diamonds in the rough, relentlessly crate digging for samples and sounds that are best poised to put their compositions in a class of their own and make their beats a unique asset. Rare phonk seeks to rarify its hazy air through dreamy, unique samples and shadowy ambience.
Memphis rap came up briefly in an early article covering the strange, hyper-masculine Internet phenomenon genre of drift phonk, but today gives us a chance to probe a rap scene unlike any other further. A singular artist essentially singlehandedly laid the foundation for that distinctive environment. In the early 1990s, DJ Spanish Fly musically distilled the bleakness he saw permeating the cityscape through intense yet sparse drums, often achieved through the Boss DR660 machine, accentuated by cowbell and minor-key melodies. It set a background of industrial darkness that sounded like nothing else in the rap world or in the dirty south as emcees matched the atypical beats with unusual cadences and flows and put the city on the map, and the sound stuck locally like glue. It thrived in the dual shadows of DIY production resulting in the signature lo-fi sound and gothic overtones in imagery and horror movie samples.
A couple of decades later, the tapes of major players like Tommy Wright III and Three 6 Mafia increasingly swept through Internet circles. Rock, metal, and singer-songwriter settings (and, if you were in Denver at one time, country) had long been the most acceptable places to express themes of death, darkness, and the macabre, but the Memphis scene’s pioneering efforts in making rap a place to do so spoke to a new generation of somber aspiring producers and rappers. Rare phonk—honestly, despite my intro, seemingly better referred to as cloud or chill phonk—retooled the Memphis rap revival of the early 2010s in the template of cloud rap’s ethereal atmosphere and with evolved trap drum patterns. It unearthed old samples of Memphis rap and even plucked out-of-left-field jazzy, calmer samples. Like the original cassette tapes that spread the gospel of Memphis rap in the ‘90s, YouTube acted as the informal conduit for rare phonk’s sound to proliferate, most prominently by the channel “rare” for which the genre is named. It reminds me that the path of discovering new music is nebulous—new sounds often transmit through this online word-of-mouth, and to discover them, you have to be open to creative exploration.
DJ Smokey’s particular haze helped define the sound, and without his and other producers communicating Memphis rap’s hallmarks to a new era of listeners, it’s unclear if Eastern Europe’s drift phonk would’ve come about. The weight of ambience is particularly heavy in his vision; the thumping sub bass, glimmering synth flourishes, and tight drums stand close in the mix compared to the distant, hallucination-like vocal sample in “Kill at Will.” Looped declarations that epitomize the hard-hitting lyrical skews of Memphis rap blink in and out like a stuck-on-loop VHS as in “Swishaz Fulla Dank, Pt. 2.” Rare phonk’s production tactics allow for exploration of speed à la chopped and screwed songs, and “Trillwave” slows so intensely you can hear the subtle decays of all the drumkit’s pieces. The yearning, chilling strings, luxuriant synths, and hi-hat intensity of “Evil Wayz” are one of the best displays of the sound’s otherworldly blend of musical idiosyncrasies. Though each genre is a chance to explore a rarity, rare phonk’s name and atmosphere posit the importance of slowing down and deeply absorbing that fact with each listen.