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. If you like beatz made by Lil Jon, Three 6 Mafia, Kanye West, Timbaland.He’s not making this mistake a second time. Made me miss some money!”Rap Beats, Hip Hop Beat Instrumentals are available for instant download. 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.
Three 6 Mafia The End Cracked The Top(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.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. 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.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. “It reminds me of when I was a teenager in high school creating all those sounds.”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.Producers “sometimes have the vocals so distorted and filtered you can’t really hear what the person’s saying,” Blatchley continues. 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. 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.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.![]() ![]() ![]() “I hope the end result of this,” he says, “is being able to go over and perform some of these records with the guys. While he doesn’t use the label “phonk” — “for us it’s just Mafia music, Memphis music” — he’s planning to record new songs with Lxst Century and is in conversations with Shoma about collaborating as well.DJ Paul is also finally ready to visit Russia. “I think that’s causing a lot of the buzz right now,” Celsius says.That buzz is likely to grow further since DJ Paul has gotten involved. These factors combine to make it easier for Russian tributes to 30-year-old Memphis rap mixtapes to reach a growing audience on faraway shores.
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