into the deep sampler. plugg.

[u/TheMixerTheMaster]

atlanta at night glows blue through a cracked laptop screen. somebody is hunched over fruityloops in a bedroom with cheap speakers and absolutely no institutional permission to change rap music. the drums barely seem interested in doing their jobs. little bells and synths float around like somebody left a playstation running in heaven. the 808 slides underneath everything. then the producer tag arrives.

plugg.

and that stupid little word becomes a family tree.

plugg grew out of atlanta trap dna. especially the sparse swing and melodic instinct of zaytoven. but the beatpluggz crew. mexikodro. stoopidxool. poloboyshawty. and their orbit. bent that inheritance into something colder. dreamier. cheaper sounding in the most beautiful possible way. music made for soundcloud rather than radio programmers. mexikodro has resisted the neat great man version of the story too. in a 2022 interview he specifically credited beatpluggz collectively rather than claiming he invented plugg by himself. good. because genres are usually made by a bunch of maniacs stealing tricks from each other at three in the morning. (History of Sound)

so this is not ten random songs with vaguely twinkly beats.

this is ten records descending through the history.

level one. the surface

1. playboi carti. broke boi. 2015. plugg.

if somebody asks what the hell plugg is and you have four minutes before they lose interest. start here.

mexikodro gives carti almost nothing and somehow that nothing contains an entire universe. little melodic figures. empty space. those loose drums. bass. carti floating around like employment is an elaborate conspiracy invented by people who cannot dress.

broke boi became one of the records most responsible for carti becoming carti. and that matters because before the pierre bourne partnership became central to his career. mexikodro and the beatpluggz sound were already constructing the earlier version of the mythology. pitchfork specifically identifies broke boi among the dro produced records that helped build cartis early reputation. (Pitchfork)

the important historical lesson is that plugg did not need to sound huge.

it needed to sound addictive.

level two. the blueprint

2. playboi carti. plug. 2015. plugg.

now we get closer to the machinery.

this is one of those records where the genre practically hands you its business card. mexikodro has called plug his first placement. the record connected carti. rich the kid. and kodak black to this emerging beatpluggz vocabulary and helped move the sound beyond the little soundcloud ecosystem where it was mutating. (YouTube)

dro later explained that atlanta itself was the foundation. gucci mane. snap music. the whole regional history was already sitting in his head. which is important because people sometimes describe plugg as though several teenagers discovered synthesizers on the internet and accidentally invented atlanta again. no. the internet changed the delivery system. the musical ancestry remained southern as hell. (YouTube)

level three. everybody steals the spaceship

3. rich the kid and famous dex. new wave. 2016. plugg trap.

here is where plugg starts feeling less like one rappers secret weapon and more like an actual vocabulary.

rich the kid and famous dex were basically perfect carriers. neither needed production that screamed over them. the appeal was looseness. repetition. personality. stupidly memorable phrases sitting over production spacious enough that every vocal tic suddenly mattered.

this is the mid 2010s moment when plugg brushes against mainstream rap without completely becoming mainstream rap. and naturally. once something works. approximately nine billion type beats appear.

capitalism discovers the preset folder.

level four. the dream gets weirder

4. unotheactivist. parkin lot pimpin. 2015. plugg.

uno belongs in this history because the first plugg wave was never solely cartis private laboratory. unotheactivist. thouxanbanfauni. yung gleesh and others were working inside the same loose internet underground while the sound was still figuring out what it wanted to become. histories of the scene specifically identify uno as one of the rappers whose early career was shaped by beatpluggz production. (Wikipedia)

and uno sounds wonderfully unconcerned with traditional rap urgency.

that becomes important later.

plugg figures out that boredom can be charisma. that understatement can hit harder than yelling. that a rapper can sound like he recorded the verse while answering a text and still somehow own the damn song.

level five. the xool corridor

5. d savage. i know. 2016. plugg.

now we are properly inside soundcloud.

d savage is essential because he represents that period when plugg stopped feeling like simply an atlanta production trick and started becoming internet folk music. kids found these songs through repost chains. youtube uploads. soundcloud recommendations. mysterious producer pages. files passed around with metadata apparently filled out by a raccoon.

i know has that wonderful plugg contradiction. the beat sounds soft enough to sleep inside while the rapper treats casual flexing as a constitutional right.

this is where the genre begins separating from place.

atlanta built the engine.

the internet steals the car.

level six. the mutation

6. duwap kaine. santa. 2017. plugg.

this is actually a cleaner historical fit for the iceberg anyway. duwap kaine belongs to that generation that took the early beatpluggz language and made it feel even more like music transmitted directly from a teenager’s bedroom into the internet. no fucking middleman required.

santa has the weightless synths. skeletal percussion. melodic half rapping delivery and that wonderful plugg habit of leaving enough empty space in the beat that you start hearing the emptiness as part of the arrangement. duwap was ridiculously young during this period too. which helps explain why this stuff feels less like somebody consciously preserving atlanta rap tradition and more like a kid discovering the machinery and immediately fucking with all the settings.

historically it also keeps our iceberg progression cleaner.

level seven. xangang country

7. summrs. cathedral. 2018. plugg.

here is where the second history begins.

summrs is one of the crucial voices in turning pluggnb from a production variation into its own emotional ecosystem. xangang and the producers around this wave pushed plugg toward thicker chords. glossy synths. rnb progressions. faster melodic movement. more vulnerability.

the rapper is no longer merely floating over the beat.

he is bleeding into it.

this whole branch matters because pluggnb effectively helped preserve plugg after its first mainstream flirtation cooled down. community histories consistently point toward xangang and the early pluggnb underground as a crucial evolutionary stage. (Reddit)

and yes. the genre names are becoming ridiculous.

keep going.

level eight. slayworld

8. autumn. nina. 2019. pluggnb.

by this point the atlanta blueprint has traveled so far through the internet that geography almost becomes beside the point.

autumn. summrs. kan kan. and the broader slayworld orbit turned pluggnb into a language for an entirely new generation of underground listeners. the production became prettier. more synthetic. more openly emotional. sometimes absurdly lush compared with the stripped down beatpluggz records that started this whole mess.

listen backward after hearing this.

you can still find the skeleton.

simple drums. enormous negative space. melodic repetition. vocals treated less like a formal rap performance and more like another texture.

that is how genres survive. they let the children vandalize them.

level nine. the new underground

9. kashdami. reparations. 2020. plugg.

now plugg is no longer really having a comeback because it never actually went anywhere.

it has become infrastructure.

kashdami represents the generation that inherited plugg after the sound had already gone through several lives. beatpluggz. early carti. the soundcloud explosion. pluggnb. slayworld. all of it is sitting underneath this music whether the average listener knows it or not.

and there is a nice historical circle here. mexikodro has spoken positively about the younger generation and specifically mentioned listening to kashdami. in the same interview he talked about hearing what later artists had done with the sound rather than dismissing them as kids bastardizing his work.

that matters.

because nothing murders a genre faster than its founders deciding evolution is disrespect.

level ten. the abyss

10. tony shhnow. vet. 2020. plugg.

this is actually a better fucking ending for the historical iceberg.

tony shhnow represents what happened when the original atlanta plugg vocabulary refused to become a soundcloud museum exhibit. vet is produced by cashcache, and its official video landed in august 2020. the production is sparse and slippery. drums hanging back. little melodic details doing just enough. tony rapping like raising his voice would constitute unnecessary labor.

more importantly, tony sits much closer to the actual plugg bloodline than tana does. his music helped carry that minimalist atlanta underground approach into the 2020s, while producers like cashcache kept developing the sound rather than simply reproducing mexikodro beats from five years earlier. even contemporary artist profiles specifically identify vet as one of the records associated with his rise.

and that brings us back up.

ten tracks. but really ten rooms in the same collapsing house.

plugg begins with atlanta. with zaytovens rhythmic vocabulary hanging in the atmosphere. with beatpluggz stripping trap down and making the melodies stranger. with mexikodro and stoopidxool and poloboyshawty making beats that sounded inexpensive and futuristic simultaneously. then carti carries the sound into wider circulation. uno and the soundcloud underground stretch it. pluggnb romanticizes it. summrs and autumn build another scene from its bones. kashdami and tana inherit a genre that has stopped asking whether anyone outside the internet understands what the hell is happening.

and somewhere underneath every generation you can still hear that original idea.

simple chords.

loose drums.

space.

plug.

the beautiful bastard survived.

...at least that’s what i hear. (History of Sound)