Billions of years have led to this moment in history. Stars formed and collapsed, galaxies converged, life emerged on a cooled clump of rock and evolved over eons, bringing into existence this species of reason and intelligence, of accumulated knowledge passed down over millennia. All this has brought us to this glorious decade, the 2020s, where anonymous TikTok sensations cook up cutesy-sparkly colon-three-core FL Studio remixes of all the hits you could ever dream of: Katy Perry, Paramore, NewJeans, you name it. 

These remixes have consumed me. I can no longer imagine a world without a version of “California Girls” by Katy Perry over an exquisitely crafted trap beat filled with 808s — it will take me this entire column explaining how I had gotten to this point in the first place. Perhaps that says less about my music taste, per se, but more of my post-pandemic psychological decline. Anyway.

As with any movement born of the internet, “plugg,” as this genre is called, has branched off into so many different niches and interpretations over the years that it is practically impossible to retroactively record this history in a meaningful way. Even a 20-minute documentary by SoundCloud, the free-to-upload streaming platform where plugg first rose to prominence, makes perhaps the best effort toward this task — a breathless speedrun of interviews and track snippets — and still comes a little short.

The best we can do, as that documentary does, is trace the humble origins of this new wave. It all started with the iconic “PLUGG!” beat tag, which emerged from Atlanta at some point in 2013 as the creation of producers MexikoDro and StoopidXool. It wasn’t long before that tag became the intro to tracks that were unlike anything heard before, with jumpy, melodic 808 basslines and creative trap rhythms layered with ambient synths. 

The sound took off in the next few years: The likes of Playboi Carti and Lil Yachty headlined the scene, with MexikoDro and StoopidXool, among others in their BeatPluggz collective, often producing for them. Another collective, Slayworld, had a whole list of big names: Yeat, Summrs, Autumn!, KANKAN, all of whom made their own names in the community. By the time Slayworld was enjoying its prime, plugg had taken on synth sounds more characteristic of R&B — this new wave dubbed “pluggnb,” which spawned great artists like LUCKI, Cochise, Thouxanbanfauni, SoFaygo, …

But it wouldn’t be a Generation Z genre without the layers of irony slapped onto it over the years. For example, the leading voice of the underground scene — unfortunately — is the social media entity collectively known as Hyperpop Daily. I won’t bother to explain what this account is; you can look at your own risk. The sheer amount of lore required to even pretend to understand their posts warrants its own college course — the prerequisites being RapTV (of which HPD is clearly a parody) and working knowledge in pluggnb, pop culture and stan Twitter lore, each of which are their own beasts. 

Besides its asinine antics, HPD also exemplifies the sort of dichotomy in visual aesthetics that has accompanied the rise of pluggnb as a hip-hop subgenre. Underground productions borrow heavily from the hypermasculine presentations of mainstream rappers — fiendish obsessions with sex, money, drugs, violence and cars run rampant. But the community also embraces a more cutesy, eccentric or effeminate side — and nowhere is that more apparent than in the newer niche of pluggnb remixes. 

Names like rxi, fss.s and chxnce come to mind as the leading producers of this odd but viral subcommunity for remixing K-pop or Y2K Western nostalgia hits. Their tracks are mesmerizing and inescapable. Trying not to laugh when the hardest flip of “Raining Tacos” by Parry Gripp starts playing through my headphones is a challenge, to say the least, especially when I’m in public; but often, just a second or two of further listening leaves me convinced it’s ostensibly a banger. And so, when I first discovered these tracks through TikTok sometime last fall, I listened to another, and then another — and before I realized, I was hooked.

What I especially love about pluggnb is that it has allowed for a democratization of music and music production — which really began with the dawn of the internet. But at a time when Universal Music Group and other behemoths are clamping down on copyright — as I’m writing this, UMG and TikTok are at a particularly tense moment over licensing contracts — and artists feel increasingly discouraged to take inspiration from one another for fear of being sued, pluggnb has offered a space where anyone can really do anything. FL Studio is the most popular digital audio workstation for these producers, and for good reason: It has an unlimited free trial. Artists willingly share free-to-use “type-beat” instrumentals on YouTube. Publishing is simple: Upload it to SoundCloud or YouTube, or post a screen recording of the FL Studio project on TikTok.

The success of the genre is a reminder that, even as the corporate class seeks to shut down the free-flowing creative spaces of the internet for its own profits, that energy and that desire will never really go away.

This trend of remixes does seem to be a little past its prime; fss.s and rxi’s most popular tracks were from a few months ago. But my hope is that pluggnb itself will continue to evolve or that new waves will rise up from the depths in the same fashion and give us a new world of music we never knew we needed. Until then, though, I’ll have the pluggnb flip of “Teenage Dream” playing on repeat.

“Jam Journal” is a rotating column featuring a new Daily Trojan editor in each installment commenting on the music most important to them. Jonathan Park is the digital managing editor at the Daily Trojan.