Steve 'Flash' JuonThere’s a saying among collectors: “If you think you’ve gotten everything, someone else will discover a variant of that thing, just so their collection is MORE complete than yours.” You can have the same coin but a printing error means you don’t have every version of it. You can have the same game but the publisher changed the copyright date or fixed a typo in the manual, so then you need TWO copies of it. It’s a cautionary warning not to go down the rabbit hole and one I have at times ignored at my own peril.
So-called “micro-genres” of rap should come with the same warning. Every time a significant number of rappers have come along to popularize a subset of rap, a new and even smaller subset of that genre is invented just to give the next man up a new lane. Rap music beget trap music, trap music beget plug music, and now that hair has been split again to create pluggnb. Autumn! (who really loves putting an exclamation point on everything) is one of the leading rappers of this style; before reviewing “You Never Was Mine” I couldn’t have told you it WAS a style. I would have classified his music as Soundcloud trap rap with a drill influence. Even the definition of pluggnb I found on Reddit said it’s derivative of the Soundcloud scene from the 2010’s so I don’t think I’m that far off.
Even if I find it personally frustrating that we as human beings keep inventing new variants to collect and new micro-genres to star in, I can’t deny it’s profitable for the conventions and dealer tables nor for the pluggnb artists who make the music. Autumn! has 232,000 subscribers on YouTube and his video for “How You Mad!” has done 342,000 plays. Unless he’s buying the numbers and botting the views (always possible in the internet era) the statistics back up that pluggnb is viable for those doing it. The only thing I don’t like about the song is the sudden and unnecessary volume increase before the short track ends. It’s attention catching in the wrong way.
Now that I know this micro-genre exists, I’m wondering what’s next for the scene, and at which point pluggnb will be subdivided into something even smaller. In the meantime if you can’t tell the difference between Autumn! and any recent Soundcloud or trap album you’ve heard I don’t blame you. I can sort of tell that it’s more melodic and R&B influenced, but with pitch modulation (i.e. AutoTune) things had trended in that direction a decade ago anyway. Even though he’s from Lafayette, if you told me he was from Chicago or Brooklyn after hearing “Scammers Jackboys Robbers!,” I’d believe you. That vocal correction, the heavy bass, and the proliferation of threats against haters is almost indistinguishable.
For me “You Never Was Mine” is par for the course of the larger genre. Maybe it’s an exemplary example of the micro-genre it’s considered to be. I would submit to you the word “micro” means “tiny” and that already makes the shift between plug and pluggnb hard to discern unless you’re one of those collectors looking for a misprint just to own a variant. I congratulate Autumn! on his success and find his music to be a serviceable plug/drill/trap album while neither being evolutionary nor revolutionary in any way. It simply exists in its own lane until an even smaller one comes along.