SpaceGhostPurrp coins 'phonk' — early-2010s revival of Memphis underground rap aesthetics
In 2011, SpaceGhostPurrp (Markese Rolle) coins and popularizes the term 'phonk' to describe his and his Raider Klan crew's revival of 1990s Memphis underground rap aesthetics (Tommy Wright III, DJ Spanish Fly, Three 6 Mafia, the chopped-and-screwed tape tradition). The Blvcklvnd mixtape series and the broader Raider Klan releases — which include early collaborators Denzel Curry, Xavier Wulf, Amber London, plus the producer DJ Smokey and rapper Lil Ugly Mane — codify phonk as a discrete, internet-driven sub-genre distinct from contemporaneous trap and cloud rap.
Why it matters
Phonk is one of the more peculiar sub-genre revivals in recent rap. The source material is 1990s Memphis cassette-tape underground rap — Tommy Wright III, DJ Spanish Fly, the deep Three 6 Mafia catalog from before they became national — which had been mostly forgotten outside Memphis itself for the better part of two decades. SpaceGhostPurrp in 2011, working out of Miami, started sampling that catalog, treating its aesthetic seriously, and giving it a name. The Raider Klan crew expanded the work. By the mid-2010s, phonk had become a major SoundCloud sub-genre with international reach (especially Eastern European producers in Russia and Ukraine). By 2021-2022, drift-phonk had become a TikTok soundtracking phenomenon. The whole arc — Memphis-cassette underground, internet revival, global SoundCloud, TikTok virality — runs through what SpaceGhostPurrp set up in 2011. You can play a 1994 Tommy Wright III tape and a 2022 Russian drift-phonk track and hear the lineage. The lineage runs through Purrp.
Branches
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