How Russian Drift Culture Made The Soundtrack For Internet Looksmaxxers

There’s a lot that is being said about looksmaxxing and the manosphere lately. Louis Theroux made a documentary about how content creators exploit young men's insecurities to sell them products. Much has been said about Clavicular, the streamer who injects himself with self-prescribed drugs and hammers his jaw to get that Apollo-esque bone structure deemed ideal by looksmaxxers online. Adolescence opened a can of worms about the dangers of incel culture and how it affects boys as young as eleven.

Owen Cooper and Erin Doherty in Netflix's Adolescence

The thing about Looksmaxxing is that it sprang from the fringe ecochambers of the internet that believed that looks are everything. There’s the mythology of the “Chad” who gets all the girls, and the “subhuman” who looks so ugly that he isn’t even deemed worthy of basic human respect. And the cogs keeping this scale alive are the social media edits: constant rankings of people's looks, edits of top 1% men (by looks, of course) and comparisons between the have and have-nots of White genetic excellence. And soundtracking it is phonk music, a genre that's creating records without even any official label backing it yet.

What Even Is This Phonk Music?

To understand just how popular Phonk is, you have to start with scale. One of its most popular producers, Slxughter, for instance, had a monthly YouTube audience of 981 million this February - much more than the combined audiences of Taylor Swift (396M) and Kanye West (276M). Yet, most listeners could not pick him out of a lineup or name the songs.

Phonk is the music that plays in the background of your YouTube Shorts, TikTok edits, and Instagram reels. There’s a good chance you have come across it as well. It starts with a cowbell ticking slowly, building to a drop. And with that drop, you are greeted by a transformation on your screens, with a heavily distorted bass playing in your earphones. It’s so widespread now that you don’t hear it only in lookmaxxing videos anymore. It’s there in your gym playlists, runway clips (if you’re into fashion), and even samples of songs like the recently viral track “Like Jennie” (yes, that one that got into a controversy for copying the theme song from Alia Bhatt’s character in Rocky and Rani Ki Prem Kahani).

A large part of the genre is produced by anonymous teenagers and early-twenties creators working out of their bedrooms, watching what trends, then adjusting their sound in real time. They all sound the same: short intros, aggressive drops, loop-friendly structures. When it works, it works at a ridiculous scale. You don’t have big labels backing them up, yet these tracks, once viral, generate billions of plays across platforms, and their royalties can make producers go from anonymity to making millions within months.

How Phonk Reached The Looksmaxxers

Phonk initially started from the underground rap scene in Memphis, Tennessee, in the 80’s and 90’s. Artists like Three 6 Mafia, DJ Squeeky, and Tommy Wright III were constructing a sound from horror-film samples, cassette-warped vocals, and bass so heavy it distorted the tape itself.

The Memphis underground never broke nationally. But decades later, Soundcloud rappers were slowing down samples of these songs for their beats (hence the name Phonk; it was coined by producer SpaceGhostPurrp to describe what the word funk sounds like when you slow it down). In fact, till here, the music didn’t even sound like contemporary reel edits.

Till the Russian drifters set in.

YouTubers from the Russian and Eastern European drift scene grabbed those Memphis samples from Soundcloud rappers and began pairing harder, faster versions of phonk with videos of cars sliding through corners, smoke cutting across neon-lit streets and whirring engines.

A key figure in this phase was Shinigami Tenshi, who helped establish one of drift phonk’s defining traits: the cowbell as a lead instrument. Then, around 2019, producer Junior Ferrari’s tracks blew up in Russia, effectively kickstarting drift phonk as a mainstream genre.

From there, it was only a matter of time before the bass-boosted drift-phonk tracks found their way into gym playlists, and, ultimately, into the clips of the (then fringe) looksmaxxing editors. A fun coincidence here is that many of the "gods" the looksmaxxers glorified for their bone structure were also of Eastern European origin (like Nico Lachowski in this article's feature image).

These songs were just centred around that beat drop in the edits, and as such, producers didn’t bother to build a complete structure like a typical song you'd listen to on Spotify. The result: songs that don't even sound like songs anymore. Yet, because the algorithm favoured these tracks so much, they quickly spread everywhere. And with it spread the manosphere.

Today, phonk has changed so much that many of its original creators don’t even identify with it. Von Storm, a member of the OG phonk collectives, Holy Mob, calls Spotify’s official phonk playlist a collection of “meme music”. “It’s like Looney Tunes cartoon sound effects mixed in with Brazilian phonk,” he said in an interview.

“They’ve really chewed up phonk and spit it out.”