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It has been used in more than 550,000 TikTok videos, often creepy clips where the main character is ambushed suddenly by a ghost-like figure. Kaito Shoma’s “Scary Garry” is just 100 eerie seconds, punctuated by horror-house laughs, garbled jabs of distortion, and barely intelligible Memphis chants. Late last year, Blatchley stumbled across a track by a Russian act as it was going viral on TikTok. That being said, DJ Paul’s connection with his Russian admirers is a recent occurrence. (He predicted this would happen on the 2000 track “Just Like Ous:” “They wanna dress like/Wanna sound like… the motherfuckin’ Three 6.”) “There’s not one single person in the world not doing the Three 6 sound, New York to Amsterdam to Norway,” the producer adds. “Our sound’s popular everywhere right now,” he says. Though other artists indebted to Three 6 Mafia’s style, including Ghostemane and $uicideBoy$, can sell more than 3,000 tickets at a single show in Russia, casual listeners might still be surprised to hear about the latest continent-crossing musical exchange, only possible in this hyper-connected era: young producers in Russia devoting themselves to a black art form dense on regional slang and spoken in a language they may not even understand.īut DJ Paul doesn’t bat an eye. “But you can hear the Memphis cadence it’s like another instrument they use.” Producers “sometimes have the vocals so distorted and filtered you can’t really hear what the person’s saying,” Blatchley continues.
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Unlike the crisper sounds from Florida, in drift phonk, the Memphis samples are buried under blown-out drums, according to Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of Black 17 Media, the label that has distributed some of DJ Paul’s solo singles. In contrast, he refers to the Russian version of the sound currently gaining popularity in some corners of the internet as “drift phonk,” partially because “the visual aesthetic is related to street racing.” There are sonic differences between the two strands as well. He describes “the Florida-influenced stuff” as “rare phonk,” which relies on “more of a cleaner, almost mainstream trap sound.” “The vocals are still on top of the main mix and you can hear what the rapper’s saying,” Celsius notes. Ryan Celsius, a Memphis hip-hop mega-fan whose YouTube channel has amassed more than half a million subscribers, identifies at least two prominent strains of the sound. One of the latest branches on the tree of Three 6 Mafia’s influence has been branded phonk, a term that has been in use for several years. (Some acts have been forced to acknowledge their debt to Three 6 Mafia through legal means - Travis Scott settled with DJ Paul in 2019 after lifting a chant from one of the producer’s older tracks.) Three 6 Mafia’s “beats were some of the most advanced,” high-powered producer Metro Boomin told GQ in 2018. Their sound helped spawned prolific scenes in Florida (Raider Klan) and New York (the A$AP Mob) massive stars like Drake and Cardi B have also paid homage. Now that foundational elements popularized in Memphis, Houston, Miami and elsewhere have infiltrated pretty much every genre of popular music, Three Six Mafia have become one of hip-hop’s most significant groups, an ensemble sitting in the middle of a wide, sticky web of influence.
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Though Three 6 Mafia never enjoyed much in the way of commercial hits - they cracked the Top 40 just three times - the slow tempos, triplet flows, gloomy atmospheres, and hyper-active drums in their 1990s releases all helped pave new roads for southern hip-hop. “It reminds me of when I was a teenager in high school creating all those sounds.” “It sounds like my childhood stuff,” DJ Paul says of the music being made by his young Russian disciples. As these songs have started to amass millions of streams, DJ Paul is seeking out these young artists halfway across the world, partnering up to help them officially release music that relies on previously uncleared samples and working on new tunes together. In the last few years, a group of Russian producers, including Kaito Shoma, Pharmacist, and Lxst Cxntury, have been crafting singles that are heavily indebted to vintage DJ Paul productions, embedding snippets of classic Memphis tracks deep in instrumentals that roll like army tanks, slow and imperious. He’s not making this mistake a second time. But I was a kid watching too much shit on TV. “I always had a thing about Russia because of Ivan Drago in Rocky IV - ‘the Russians don’t like us, man,’ that’s what I used to think. “I was young at the time, and I turned down the show because I heard the weather was bad, it was cold all the time,” the producer explains. As a young producer for Three 6 Mafia, the long-running Memphis rap group with a gift for grimy, bulldozing beats and brawling hooks, DJ Paul was offered the chance to perform in Russia.