phonk
The old ways are dying. That was the message Spotify CEO Daniel Ek delivered during a headline-generating 2020 interview with Music Ally. “Some artists that used to do well in the past may not do well in this future landscape,” Ek said. “You can’t record music once every three to four years and think that’s going to be enough. The artists that are making it [today] realize that it’s about creating continuous engagement with their fans.”
Perhaps no artist exemplifies this ethos better than the Brazilian rapper Mc Gw. He makes his vocals widely available for sample-happy producers, and as a result, he has already appeared on over 3,700 releases so far this year. That’s more than 10 times as many as any other artist in Spotify’s top 500, according to the analytics company Chartmetric.
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Mc Gw’s jaw-droppingly prolific release schedule, the growing popularity of his chanting vocals, and the rapid rise and mutation of the internet sub-genre known as phonk have combined to fuel remarkable growth on Spotify. He now has around 20 million monthly listeners, up from 3.7 million two years ago. He has become the 11th most popular artist in Brazil, according to Chartmetric.
“Before streaming, if you saw that [an artist with a ton of releases], you would think, ‘This super popular guy spends all his time running around different studios in São Paulo and everybody knows him,’” says Glenn McDonald, a former Spotify employee and the author of You Have Not Yet Heard Your Favorite Song: How Streaming Changes Music. “The fact that you can now take a shortcut to that by having your samples run around instead of you is pretty effective.”
“If everybody did it,” McDonald continues, “it wouldn’t be as effective. But the first person who does it can temporarily get very successful that way.”
And that appears to be what’s happening to Mc Gw. He’s now collaborating with Ana Costa, a revered samba artist, and the producer DENNIS, whose “Ta OK” was a hit in Brazil last year. “It’s just scaling from there,” says Jake Houstle, co-owner of the label Black 17 Media, which has distributed a number of songs featuring Mc Gw. “All these opportunities are coming in, and they’re all based on the fact that people use his vocals on everything.”
Mc Gw grew up in Rio de Janeiro, listening first to more traditional musical styles — samba and pagode — before turning to Brazilian funk, also known as baile funk, in 2011. Baile funk is a home-grown descendent of Miami bass, typically characterized by a distinctive up-tempo rhythm and severely streamlined production that focuses the ear on the boisterous rapping. “My main influences are MCs from Rio: MC Didoo, Mc Frank, Mc Tikão, Mc Vuk Vuk, and Mc Smith,” Mc Gw says. (He responded to email questions with help from a translator.)
Mc Gw is an adaptable performer: 2017’s “Ritmo Mexicano,” which has over more than 260 million views on YouTube, nods to commercial reggaetón. And it’s actually a different genre that has played a crucial role in his rise in the last two years. Confusingly, this style is known as phonk, leading to a nomenclature nightmare — while Brazilian funk is different from American funk, and phonk is another thing altogether, all three share the same pronunciation.
Phonk has been around for more than a decade, one of several styles gobbled up by extremely online listeners. When the genre started to reach a wider audience in 2019 and 2020, it was bleak, militant music, with freeze-dried synthesizers and drums so grimy listeners reflexively reached for the Windex. Samples of Memphis hip-hop legends added a human jolt to the unforgiving tracks.
Most of phonk’s biggest artists — like Kordhell, who has a platinum single in the U.S., and DVRST, whose song “Close Eyes” was synced in a commercial that played during the NBA playoffs — are faceless producers. The music thrives on TikTok pages devoted to weightlifting, careening cars, video game highlights, and anime edits, not on the live circuit. “It’s like a substance: Just keep pouring the phonk over my ears,” McDonald says.
The genre’s commercially popular wing often follows a specific formula, at least for a time. Phonk’s initial streaming hits sampled the likes of DJ Paul, a founding member of the group Three 6 Mafia, and Kingpin Skinny Pimp, a rapper who contributed to Three 6’s debut album and maintained a regional following. Other producers hoping for a phonk hit of their own also lifted vocals from the same sources.
More recently though, Memphis rap textures are out of vogue, and Brazilian vocals are in favor. This has been a boon for Mc Gw. “Nowadays many phonk producers are using [my voice],” he acknowledges.
Mc Gw makes it easy for them to do so by creating packs of a cappellas that samplers can sift through on YouTube, SoundCloud and elsewhere. (They’re initially free, but producers may pay a price — in the form of a fee, a cut of publishing income, or both — for the sample after release, especially if the song is successful.) “He is essentially the Kingpin Skinny Pimp of this movement,” says Houstle, who estimates that close to a third of the phonk records that borrow Brazilian vocals lean on Mc Gw.
The rapper enjoyed more name recognition as he was sampled more frequently. And to an extent, this fire fed itself: “As his notoriety grew, he started being placed on more and more songs,” Houstle explains. That helps increase his notoriety further, and the cycle continues.
Just as TikTok creators use a trending sound in the belief that it will make them more likely to get eyeballs, phonk producers thought an Mc Gw sample would make their song more likely to attract listeners. “If I want to go find new songs that are popping in Brazil, I just scroll through his most recent releases,” Houstle continues.
One snippet of Mc Gw’s vocals found its way to the Argentinian producer S3ZBS, who dropped it into “Montagem – PR Funk” in 2023. This strident, 61-second anxiety attack of a song has nearly 400 million plays on Spotify alone.
Mc Gw calls “Montagem – PR Funk” a new door that opened for me.” But that doesn’t mean walking through it was easy.
Online music communities often operate without regard for music industry convention. Producers tend to sample first and ask questions later, obtaining official clearances after a release — rather than beforehand — if they clear them at all. “Montagem – PR Funk” was no different.
Black 17, which owes much of its recent success to embracing phonk, signed “Montagem – PR Funk” once it started to perform well on TikTok. The label almost immediately found itself in dispute with the owners of uncleared samples, according to Houstle. One was Mc Gw.
Black 17 and Mc Gw’s team negotiated a deal — he was eventually added to “Montagem – PR Funk” as a primary artist — and they now work together regularly. Black 17 previously forged similar business relationships with DJ Paul and Kingpin Skinny Pimp when the phonk community started sampling them.
Mc Gw now employs several staff members whose primary job is to track down uncleared samples of him and negotiate deals with the producers behind the songs. This is a business necessity, the rapper says, since “currently almost 100 songs are released per week with my voice.”
It’s impossible to catch them all, but if Mc Gw puts agreements in place at least with the songs that are earning noticeable streams, this continues to expand his reach, and ensures that he gets paid for the use of his voice. It’s an odd system, but for now it’s working.
The rapper doesn’t only want to rely on the favor of sample-based producers; he is also hard at work on his own album, tentatively titled Phonk Nation. “Every day I’m in the studio,” Mc Gw says. “Thank God the phonk appeared — the work is being rewarded.”
Kordhell stumbled upon the YouTube channel Evil Aesthetic (stylized Ǝ V I L Æ S T H Ǝ T I C) by happenstance while digitally crate-digging in 2020. The U.K.-born, Los Angeles-based producer had a background in black metal; Evil Aesthetic specializes in phonk — a style indebted to ’90s Memphis hip-hop. Kordhell heard a kinship. “Phonk sounded similar to what I was already doing,” he says. “It was super dark, with almost a horror vibe, but in a hip-hop way.”
The producer decided to try his hand at phonk, and since then, the genre’s profile and Kordhell’s have risen together. Phonk fandom had primarily been underground, but starting in 2020, it became increasingly popular on TikTok, popping up in clips of car racing, weight lifting and more. That same year, Kordhell scored a record deal with independent label Black 17 Media. He now has two of the most commercially successful singles associated with the genre and has landed a spot on the upcoming mixtape that will accompany the 10th Fast and Furious movie — much of which is phonk-based.
“I signed him in October 2020 when he was doing 5,000 plays a day,” says Tyler Blatchley, who co-founded Black 17 Media in 2015. “Now he’s doing 4 million plays a day on Spotify alone.”
While phonk encompasses a slew of subgenres, one macho variant known as drift phonk has become most popular. Drift phonk hits like Pharmacist’s “North Memphis” and Kaito Shoma’s “Scary Garry” are icy and volatile. They nod to lo-fi Memphis rap mixtapes — creeping basslines, caffeinated hi-hats, eerie, pitch-shifted electronic cowbells — and incorporate samples of drilling, rat-tat-tat lines from rappers like Kingpin Skinny Pimp and DJ Paul, founder of Three 6 Mafia.
Blatchley first discovered “Scary Garry” on TikTok, where it appeared in adrenalized automotive videos. Black 17 had previously distributed some of DJ Paul’s solo releases, making the label ideally positioned to clear Shoma’s sample and officially release the track. “Scary Garry” started to gain attention on Spotify, and after that, Blatchley says, “I found more of these phonk songs and started playing middleman, clearing the samples and putting them on Spotify.” Black 17 now works with more than 300 phonk acts.
Word spread in the drift phonk community that there was an avenue to officially release songs with Memphis samples — and actually make money. Blatchley estimates that 60% of his signings have been brought to him by another act he was already working with; as a result, Black 17 pays an A&R fee out of its profits to any artist that brings a future signing to the label’s attention.
Because many of drift phonk’s most successful producers are based thousands of miles from the source of the samples that animate their work, they may have little understanding of Memphis hip-hop lineage — or of the lines they are sampling. But DJ Paul and Kingpin Skinny Pimp, at least, have said they are happy to be poached from. Phonk’s recent popularity has offered both a new source of income and a new source of exposure: The two are often credited as featured vocalists on tracks with hundreds of millions of streams.
Black 17 focused its phonk marketing in Europe, especially Eastern Europe, and South America, both because the music was already resonating there, and because the cost of TikTok influencer and advertising campaigns is considerably less in those regions than it is in the U.S. Black 17 co-founder Jake Houstle led an effort to establish exclusive relationships with a number of TikTok pages that were active in the phonk scene, which helped drive attention to the label’s new releases.
At the moment, the biggest threat to drift phonk’s growth is geopolitical: Many of its most popular artists are from Russia and Ukraine, two countries at war. A number of acts on Black 17’s roster have tried to flee their homes since fighting broke out in February.
But this tumultuous backdrop hasn’t slowed phonk’s rise. Earlier this year, Artist Partner Group took notice of the genre’s streaming numbers and connection to car culture and decided it would fit well on the next Fast and Furious mixtape. (APG has worked on multiple installments of the Fast and Furious soundtrack.) “We wanted to use a lot of fun music and really lean into the genre,” says Olly Shepard, APG’s vp of film/TV and synchronization. And in May, Spotify launched its official phonk playlist.
Yokai, a “phonk connoisseur” who chronicles its artists and subgenres on YouTube, used to “not even bother trying to explain to most people what the music was,” figuring he’d only elicit blank stares. Now, he says, the genre “has grown to a point where most people have at least a passing familiarity with it.” By the end of 2022, Black 17’s roster of phonk signings is on track to earn over 4 billion Spotify streams. And after experiencing streaming success abroad, Houstle says, “we’ve reached a point where we have the marketing dollars to start playing around in the U.S.”
As for Kordhell, he recently became one of the 500 most popular artists on Spotify, a first for a phonk producer. He’s been busy with upcoming productions and remixes. “I’m exhausted,” he says. But he wouldn’t have it any other way: “I want to ride the wave.”
A version of this story originally appeared in the Nov. 19, 2022, issue of Billboard.
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