Weed plants sandwich a stop sign in the center of the Brooklyn Made stage. The DJ is playing a random assortment of half-decent rap music while Tony Shhnow is on stage pouring a drink into a red Solo cup. It’s Tony’s first tour with Cousin Stizz, and it’s his first time in Brooklyn this past April. The Cobb County rapper sports eyeglasses that have gold semi automatic guns on the sides, a green army jacket, a black Louie Vuitton belt, and a pair of clean white Air Force 1s. Tony opened with “EVEN ON A SUNDAY,” a track built entirely by plug-in style beats. When asked to define plug on a Zoom call, Tony replied, “It’s player ass trap music. It’s a player ass hustle Music. Getting money music. Sometimes your girl don’t want to hear you playing gangsta ass shit all the time. Sometimes she wants to be serenaded.” With plug, the instruments are synthetic and digital with compositions of tinkering bells, woozy flutes, and slow drums. “Plug is super chill, relaxed stoner-type stuff. But also super street Atlanta turnt. I feel like there’s a duality,” ATL producer Popstar Benny says over the phone.
Plug music results from Atlanta street tapes bootlegged on peer-to-peer sharing sites like Limewire and Frostwire and hosting sites like Datpiff and LiveMixtapes. “It was built on traditional Atlanta. It was mixing traditional Atlanta with the internet age,” Benny adds. Taking inspiration from the elegance of Zaytoven’s piano work, Plug adds a pop spin jam-packed with explosive digitized synths and video game sound bites.
Plug Motivation is Tony’s new project, 24-tracks of money hustling, designer flexing, and drugs come entirely produced by the most prolific producers of the plug sub-genre: Big Emm, Cashcache, DJ YoungKash, Fashion …
Read More
Author: Anthony Malone / High Times
