Phonk Heaven

Welcome to the one stop shop on everything you need to know about Phonk music
So sit back and enjoy the ride

The History of Phonk Music

Phonk is a subgenre of hip hop which can be directly traced back to the Memphis rap scene in the late 80s. The hip hop coming out of Memphis at this time featured crisp beats and a heavy use of samples, similar in sound to its wildly popular cousin gangsta rap. Fast forward a couple of decades and you’ll find the influence of Memphis rap’s slow tempo beats in trap music. This new hip hop subgenre grew in popularity during the early 2010s, spreading quickly across sites like YouTube and SoundCloud. Social media would play a big part in phonk’s evolution into drift phonk too, with TikTok’s explosion giving rise to this new subgenre. But this new subgenre quickly became far more popular than the phonk which came before it, with many people referring to the drift phonk subgenre simply as phonk. In fact, drift phonk is so dominant that even Spotify’s multi-million listener ‘phonk’ playlist is actually filled with drift phonk music. Drift phonk became popular within TikTok’s car community for soundtracking high octane clips of drifting. As you can guess, this is where the name drift phonk came from.