East Coast
This month, for the New York edition of the regional report, you get ten songs for the price of one. This is because of the sudden, unprecedented (but also somewhat precedented) ubiquity of a 15-year-old beat made by a teenager from Atlanta that has once again sparked its own microgenre.
Zoom out and consider a state of the union for New York drill. The beat is Soulja Boy’s breakout hit “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” the viral dance anthem that became the “Macarena” of the Snap Movement, spent seven incredible weeks as the number one song in America on the Billboard charts in the late aughts, and launched Soulja Boy from a kid posting beats on his MySpace page to one of the formative rappers and producers of the Blog Era.
The beat has never really left the ether, but it's been reincarnated here in New York as a drill riddim, where collectively it represents the sound of the fall. Trying to lay out anything resembling a succinct chronology for how this came to be would be difficult, if not impossible, through the various YouTube links of questionable veracity in terms of official parentage and timestamp. Many of these tracks are not attributed to a group, but an assemblance of individual rappers who have come together for a moment that often doesn’t bother to go by a name that strays very far from its source material (See: Zdottheghost, Drew 41 - “Crank Dat,” Drelu, Camonethree, Finnese13 - “Crank That,” Jah Ebk, Kay Buggout, Curry G - “Crank Dat,” which I am only marginally confident in presenting here as “Actual Songs,” rather than possible instrumental and acapella hand-stitched fan videos).
The beat has most notably been imprinted on by the controversial Brooklyn collective 41, composed of Tata, Kyle Richh, and Jenn Carter, who were joined by Deebillz for “Stomp Stomp”—which has garnered 2 million views since getting an official video and an actual song name on YouTube a month ago. But it has also been touched across boroughs by the rappers Sha Gz (with Nesty Floxks) (“SMD”), Jay5ive (“Suicide Hill”), Sha Ek (“Crank That Jiggy”), and SugarHill Keem (“Crank That Move”).