“It sounds like my childhood stuff,” DJ Paul says of the music being made by his young Russian disciples. “It reminds me of when I was a teenager in high school creating all those sounds.”
Though Three 6 Mafia never enjoyed much in the way of commercial hits — they cracked the Top 40 just three times — the slow tempos, triplet flows, gloomy atmospheres, and hyper-active drums in their 1990s releases all helped pave new roads for southern hip-hop. Now that foundational elements popularized in Memphis, Houston, Miami and elsewhere have infiltrated pretty much every genre of popular music, Three Six Mafia have become one of hip-hop’s most significant groups, an ensemble sitting in the middle of a wide, sticky web of influence.
Their sound helped spawned prolific scenes in Florida (Raider Klan) and New York (the A$AP Mob); massive stars like Drake and Cardi B have also paid homage. (Some acts have been forced to acknowledge their debt to Three 6 Mafia through legal means — Travis Scott settled with DJ Paul in 2019 after lifting a chant from one of the producer’s older tracks.) Three 6 Mafia’s “beats were some of the most advanced,” high-powered producer Metro Boomin told GQ in 2018.
One of the latest branches on the tree of Three 6 Mafia’s influence has been branded phonk, a term that has been in use for several years. Ryan Celsius, a Memphis hip-hop mega-fan whose YouTube channel has amassed more than half a million subscribers, identifies at least two prominent strains of the sound. He describes “the Florida-influenced stuff” as “rare phonk,” which relies on “more of a cleaner, almost mainstream trap sound.” “The vocals are still on top of the main mix and you can hear what the rapper’s saying,” Celsius notes.
In contrast, he refers to the Russian version of the sound currently gaining popularity in some corners of the internet as “drift phonk,” partially because “the visual aesthetic is related to street racing.” There are sonic differences between the two strands as well. Unlike the crisper sounds from Florida, in drift phonk, the Memphis samples are buried under blown-out drums, according to Tyler Blatchley, co-founder of Black 17 Media, the label that has distributed some of DJ Paul’s solo singles.
But DJ Paul doesn’t bat an eye. “Our sound’s popular everywhere right now,” he says. (He predicted this would happen on the 2000 track “Just Like Ous:” “They wanna dress like/Wanna sound like… the motherfukkin’ Three 6.”) “There’s not one single person in the world not doing the Three 6 sound, New York to Amsterdam to Norway,” the producer adds.
That's a lot of heat to match.I used to run into these eastern euros as a kid on message boards In the early 2000s looking for underground stuffDJ Paul's underground tapes from when they were in high school 30 years ago are still getting remixed by artists today and DJs overseas. There's a whole sub-genre of DJs remastering or ripping vocals from old Memphis tapes and they get millions of views/listens.
Russian Producers Obsessed With Three 6 Mafia Can't Stop Going Viral
I love Bone but their run was very short. By 2000 they were considered an old school rap group while 3-6 was still dropping hits.

When notorious thugs and thug luv drop wow
Shoulda been bone and WU though
Bone is winning this. They're one of the greatest groups in history. And they should've been facing off against WU-TANG.
Always seems like this matchup was forced. Nobody had these two groups on the same level or compared with each other when they were both active and in their primes
Should've did Three 6 vs 8Ball and MJG and Bone vs Wu-Tang

