phonk

This is a music genre which dates back to the 1990s in the Southern US but which has, in the last couple of years, become mainstream at least for the Twitter generation.  It began as a blend of hip-hop and funk with Memphis rap and a few other things, creating an aggressive beat and somewhat distorted sound.  The name phonk is an attempt to capture the way in which funk was pronounced.  By 2010 the rapper and producer SpaceGhostPurrp had made it popular.  With the beat intensified it became the chosen music to accompany drift car racing (the car racing in which cars slide on all four wheels around corners) so that the sub-genre drift phonk has been accepted as what is referred to as just  phonk since 2020.  Andy Ward, writing in the Conversation, argues that it is now ‘the subversive soundtrack to a generation rallying against authority in a changing geopolitical landscape’.