[image]
[title]It’s the first Saturday in January, arguably the deadest day in the capital’s clubland calendar. A weekend where most of us are wincing at the mere idea of more alcohol, spending £20 on the door and breaking ‘flexitarian’ resolutions with a sloppy 2am kebab. Yet somehow, Phonox is rammed. Fast-paced bass rumbles through a chatter of scantily-clad club kids queuing along Brixton Road.
They’re all here for one thing: donk. Not quite sure what that means? ‘Donk is the sound of an offbeat bass line between the kick drums’, says DJ Lobsta B, the evening’s headliner. ‘Imagine you’ve got a plastic drain pipe and you hit the end of it with a sandal, it would make a donk.’ This particular noise has warped into a whole genre of electronic music, typically played at 150 beats per minute (BPM) or over: mixing everything from trance classics to nostalgic emo hits and sped-up versions of pop songs (cue another of the evening’s DJs, Alterum, blasting the ‘Winner Takes It All’ remix to close their set).
To those unfamiliar with it, donk probably sounds bizarre or tacky, and in some ways it is. But it’s also extremely zeitgeisty, in a ‘ketamine-chic’, ironic kind of way: attracting the fashion students, bedroom producers, models and misfits. Tonight, there are girls in corsets with G-strings poking out from their low-rise jeans. Others are donning fluffy ski hats, leg warmers and T-shirts that read ‘Déteste Donk’. It is a young, queer-friendly space where you are just as welcome to come dressed as a crustacean (for Lobsta B) as you are in head-to-toe Martine Rose.
It’s also a far cry from the genre’s more working-class beginnings, characterised by Wigan Pier nightclub and breakout stars The Blackout Crew (the group behind 2009’s scene hit ‘Put a Donk On It’), as well as the early days of Planet Fun, the event promoter that’s been playing donk in underground venues across the UK for at least a decade. So how did we get to this era of ‘nu-donk’? And what’s really so appealing about it?
The early days of donk
The beginnings of donk are tricky to pinpoint, but early ravers (on Reddit) claim it can be traced back to 2003 when a new genre of music blending hardcore, hard house and trance – known as ‘Scouse House’ – began creeping into nightclubs in north west England. At the centre of it was the legendary Wigan Pier, where DJs would take mainstream dance music and pitch it up, adding the reverse bass ‘donk’. At the same time, MCs were performing in a double-time style, rapping over DnB tunes. This resulted in groups like The Blackout Crew, who achieved viral success with their trope-identifying 2009 hit, ‘Put a donk on it’.
Made up of MCs Cover, Allison, Heaton, Davis, Kabbani and Chadwick, the group combined the 150 BPM madness of happy hardcore with northern-twanged rap verses. Speaking to Dazed in 2023, Chadwick, AKA MC Vipes, said: ‘At the time, most of the tunes were being made on what we’d call the bounce scene, which is now called the donk scene, which is our type of rave scene with that type of music. Every producer was just getting a Rihanna tune and putting a donk on it and speeding it up. We were just having a laugh and taking the mickey out of people who did that and it just sort of blew up online.’
Donk’s popularity was baffling to the media, with Vice labelling it as ‘the lowest common denominator of British dance music’. ‘There was a total bastardisation of the whole genre and I hold my hands up now for having a role in that,’ says DJ Fingerblast, a fundamental figure in the scene thanks to his viral remixes (Nickelback is a must-listen). ‘There was a point when I thought we were doomed when the whole ideation of making music seemed to shift to, ‘‘Lol, I put a donk on it’’, and a load of really horrible music came out. I think, I hope, we’ve passed through that now.’
A flash in the pan
As donk’s popularity grew, its roots started to wither. Following years of noise complaints, Wigan Pier was closed in 2011 and the scene ground to a screeching halt. But people still craved silly dance music. Bubbling along in the underground, and notably in the south of the country, was Planet Fun, founded by Fingerblast in 2017 and joined by artists like Peggy Viennetta, Count Baldor and Trancey Beaker soon after. These nights weren’t specifically centred around donk, but were a celebration of all things hard club music.
‘I remember seeing SOPHIE at Simple Things [in Bristol] around 2012. This was during a time when journalists were like, you shouldn’t listen to this music, it’s all a joke,’ Viennetta says. ‘She was playing hard dance to a crowd of people that all wanted to see Caribou, and I was like, ‘‘Wow people are playing the music that I love and it’s not just homogenised house and techno everywhere’’.’
Planet Fun soon began hosting nights with performers like GFOTY, Hannah Diamond, Chem Diaz and Space Candy, who were blending donk with hyperpop and commercial pop remixes at events in London and Bristol. Particularly notable tracks from this era include Count Baldor’s remix of 100 Gecs’s ‘Stupid Horse’.
Lobsta B notes this moment as the beginning of a donk renaissance. ‘Five or six years ago, donk really started to come back and that’s when I finally started to release my music, which I started making 15, maybe 20 years ago,’ he says. ‘Fingerblast’s tracks made me realise I could release my own. When I first heard his tunes I was like, “I’ve been making stuff like this for years”.’’
Call it a comeback
Nowadays, it feels like donk is in a new era. It’s combining all of its earlier influences, from rap to hyperpop, with a smattering of internet meme culture. Leading this surge is Mums Against Donk, a London-based club night blending the silly ‘put a donk on it’ mentality with the ‘everybody’s welcome’ feel of Planet Fun. As the founder Alterum explains: ‘Come to Mums Against Donk and you’ll find people with brilliant outfits; music that is hard, fast and silly; you can laugh, you can cry; we've even got a sensory space if you need to sit out for a minute.’
You can laugh, you can cry – we’ve even got a sensory space if you need to sit out for a minute
Alterum’s sets are rooted in hardcore and bounce music, characterised by ridiculous remixes like the donk take on ‘Gimme Gimme Gimme’. (You will always hear an ABBA remix at their sets.) ‘The queer rave community has always been there for me,’ they say, stressing that the support network you’ll find at the parties is just as important as the music itself. ‘At school, for example, I was an outcast. And so I took that and I went right, let’s do something for all the queer weirdos who like the silliness. We’ll bring them all together, we’ll stick them in a room and we'll play ’em some cheese.’
Their mashups of camp classics – with pitched-up vocals and high BPMs – feel like the dance floor equivalent of sped-up TikTok remixes. Pair that with Comic Sans gig flyers and colourful clubwear and we’ve arrived at a scene which honours the cartoonish absurdity of donk’s early years while recontextualising it for a modern audience. In other words: we’re officially in the nu-donk era.
A craving for 150 BPM
Another new name on the scene is Donnay Soldier, whose music is more similar to the classic Wigan style of hard-and-fast DJing with an occasional stint on the mic. He heckles the crowd, leaps up onto the booth and attempts to rap along to 150 BPM tunes while fans demand he brands them with a logo knuckle duster stamp.
Soldier observes that the popularity of donk is becoming more widespread. ‘I think everyone’s tastes are getting faster – DJ Heartstring’s trance music is making 150 BPM accessible,’ he says. ‘You get desensitised to the higher BPM. I think you’ll see [the] people making normal mainstream stuff being influenced by Heartstring and then coming to more donk nights.’
Phonox’s co-headliner Lobsta B agrees. ‘Donk is hard and fast, the tracks are short and we’ve squeezed as much as we can into an hour,’ he says. ‘For those of us with a shorter attention span, that’s the kind of music we want to hear – not techno tracks that go on for ten minutes and you barely notice the change.’
It’s almost as though our appetite for silly, short-form content and sped-up songs on TikTok has percolated into club culture. Those on the frontlines, in the DJ booths, are witnessing this in real time. As Lobsta B says: ‘Donk has got the fun element that the techno scene is missing. Post-Covid, people just want to go and have fun. They want the escapism of going somewhere where they can be free to express themselves and have a laugh. That’s why donk’s not going anywhere for a while.’
The super-speed takeover
A couple of months after the Phonox night, we’re at Planet Fun in London’s Corsica Studios. There’s a bizarre tug-of-war happening on the dance floor: Essex girlies and rich kids in head-to-toe Corteiz are battling for space in the main room, while the smoking area is a sea of kids looking like they’ve stepped out of the street-style pages of i-D magazine.
It begs the question: does the sudden interest in donk come from a crowd who are detached from its working-class roots, who are embracing it ironically – in the same way it’s now fashionable to dress ‘badly’ with a ‘ketamine-chic’ aesthetic? There is a genuine fear from regular ravers that people are superficially entering their space – Fingerblast, for one, is apprehensive about donk’s surge in popularity.
‘I would love to see them [the new crowd] at a club night in Bolton,’ he says. ‘Joking aside, it’s hard to be enthusiastic when the parties that were instinctively about having fun have shifted toward London university fashion shows. It’s sad to see the working class culture which encompasses donk music often being used as a punchline by artists and promoters who are ten steps removed, but I’m genuinely humbled that we’ve managed to push the music to a broader LGBTQ+ audience over the last few years.’
All that said, Mums Against Donk seems to have a real desire to keep the scene as authentic as possible. The music stays silly, but it’s a laugh-with-us mentality. The community is welcoming and the nights stay ‘affordable’ in an attempt to honour donk’s more working class beginnings (they also reserve 100 tickets per rave for people who can’t afford to go).
View this post on Instagram
The nu-donk movement doesn’t seem to be going anywhere anytime soon. Around the UK, there is an insatiable appetite for the hard and fast stuff: Alterum has just released a new video game-inspired night called Super Sonic Raving, Brighton-born Donkline is taking over a pub in Bristol next month, and Edinburgh’s Overground is fully embracing meme culture with its Willy Donka rave experience.
Should we be that suprised? Behind all of the uber-fast ‘boing’s and skewed, silly vocals, there is a genuine, decades-long love for the music. Donk isn’t a joke anymore – it’s a scene led by DJs who believe in respect and letting go on the dance floor. After all, where else can you hear Rebecca Black’s ‘Friday’ followed by a hardcore mix of ‘Angels’, with a filthy donk on it?