Remember 2016? Almost nobody does. It was a long time ago now and, in any case, what were we all so vexed about? Anyway, unlike many needless recaps of this distant epoch, SoundCloud’s late-to-the-breakdown analysis of its stats last year offers some insight into the shape of music’s future.
Having run the numbers, the streaming site has concluded that, among other hashtaggable, made-up genres such as AfroTrap, retrowave and perennial internet favourite cloud rap, 2016 was apparently characterised by something called “phonk”.
Not to be confused with funk – a movement involving men in white suits playing 16th-note rhythms with emphasis on the upstrokes – phonk is an obscure hip-hop splinter cell. Typically, it takes samples from early-90s hip-hop and deploys distorting techniques such as chopped and screwed – the song-stretching fad that peaked in 2009 – to create a darker, danker sound. The result sounds not unlike Biggie Smalls floating in miso soup.
Genres such as phonk have likely caught on in part because it’s easy enough for bedroom producers to get something out of a few classic samples by tweaking the dials in odd directions. Miami rapper SpaceGhostPurrp is credited with kickstarting phonk on his 2012 debut album; he’s now producing for 2016’s most-followed new artist on SoundCloud: Lil Uzi Vert.
With a rudimentary interface that keeps the over-25s at bay, SoundCloud has long been the go-to portal for Generation Z. And, for a generation younger than Google, phonk ticks a lot of boxes. For the Zs, 1967 has always been as accessible as 2017, and they consume content with the same gleeful disposability and fascination with the nostalgia of the recent past. Both of which are very phonky attributes.
The Zs are often portrayed as nice but soft and omnivorous in their taste. Or why the most played single is Desiigner’s Panda, a track that posits a near-future in which rappers have abolished consonants in favour of a kind of BMW-obsessed baby-talk. And it could also be why Lil Uzi Vert is so popular: he offers a mish-mash of the drill-bit dumbness of trap, the lava‑lamp beats of cloud rap, the fog of phonk, and an internet sense of not being tied to a regional “scene”.
But the unlikeliest revelation of all SoundCloud’s number-crunching is the continued influence of chillwave. Started as a joke, the moniker was rejected by the artists associated with it (Neon Indian, Youth Lagoon, Memory Tapes). Now, its electronic burble, endless reverb and trust-fund hippy vibes make these artists seem like the Sex Pistols of the Gen Z era. SpaceGhostPurrp may at least turn out to be its Rancid.
