Artwork by: DJ PEWPEWPEW
Donk, also known as bouncy techno, hard bounce, or even scouse house, is an electronic dance music genre that emerged in the northern UK in the second part of the ’00s by the efforts of pioneering acts such as Hyper Deejays and the Blackout Crew, commonly referred to as the Beatles of this scene/subculture. Mainly derived from UK happy hardcore, this genre borrows its ecstatic drive and high velocity (tracks are usually around 150 BPM) by merging it with unintelligible, puzzling North English rap, and, of course, the obsessive and definitely funny use of the off-beat rhythmic component known as donk.
As stated in a pivotal Noisey Special dating back to 2012, donk “may well be the apotheosis of all ridiculous dance music to date“, thanks to its unstoppable, dull charge powered by molly and steroids, often off-key slang rants, and the typical desecrating practice of repeatedly dancing to the donk version of just about any mainstream pop song clumsily remixed by blindly adding DONKS all over the place. In other words, a purely proletarian, anti-elitist music style produced and danced by working-class kids who have the only goal of spending all-nighters jumping around to their favorite, objectively irresistible genre. To the best of our knowledge, donk might indeed be the greatest music genre every played by sound systems worldwide.
Interestingly enough, other than stemming from the original Northern UK region, donk has massively appeared over the years in countless mixtapes, records, and tracks from producers and DJs regardless of geographical notions. In particular, and without exaggerations, donk has been a seminal component to the emergence of the digital-native, tout court counter-cultural movement that could generally be referred to as meme music.
Memes – other than basically being the only mass device left to counter the multi-zillion dollar bourgeois propaganda industry – are undeniably one of the most interesting cultural outings of our recent times, and meme music in particular is in clear opposition to the dominant business techno model that has been hegemonizing and steadily depleting creativity in the club scene over the last decades. As reported in the poignant Vice feature out this summer about the seminal US scene revolving around DJ Fingerblast, Peggy Viennetta, Count Baldor, and Trancey Beaker, “pranksters, memesters and DJs alike” from all over the world “are conjuring up club-ready chaos away from business techno’s po-faced mainstream“.
What we feel definitely brings together meme music and donk is their paramount capacity of demolishing everything the bourgeois state pressures us to hold sacred, and they do that by compacting, sublimating, and ultimately helping us overcome our systematic, lacerating struggle in the form of immediate, carefree bass gratification. There’s no time to spend pondering on discriminatory concepts such as “intelligence” or “being appropriate”, there’s a happiness revolution to accomplish, and no quarters will be given.
Well, ok, all these words above just to say that the donk prodigy, ghoul boy DJ PEWPEWPEW from the Ghoulcore Kingdom (aka the UK) is with us today for a 45-minutes stunner session of happy hardcore, grime, and jersey club tunes. You may already have heard of him thanks to his incendiary mixes, the exquisite bangers MET HER AT THE DONK PARADE, TOKYO TWIST, and LIKE A G6, but also via the A.C.A.B. stunner out this June. Be ready to be swept away by a decent dosage of vertiginous speed, proud stupidity, and – more importantly – ENDLESS FUN. Push the button!
But first, follow DJ PEWPEWPEW on Instragram and SoundCloud, where you can find his latest amazing productions and mixes.
TRACKLIST
Ansza – Who’s In Charge
Cookiee Kawaii – The Bonus Track
LOUD BIZ – 4×4
Soulely – Stand up tall
MUDZ x Breeza – Jermaine Defoe
benuebermensch – a lil unts unts
Mod-r – WAP
DJ Blyatman – No Problem
Cheeze & HeadzUp – Blade Til You’re Dead
Danny Stranger – Fashion Soup
7uka – MYSTIC
Shinsei & NOLEJ – Time
Danny Stranger – Cut you off
Crude Intentions & Dr Rude – Tell Me Now
Nasty King Kurl – Temperature
DJ PEWPEWPEW – Better Meow
Replicator – Halo
TripleXL – Day By Day
Nicki Minaj – Starships (Pachelbel – Canon in D Version)
Are you enjoying what you see on PAYNOMINDTOUS? If that’s the case, we’d like to kindly ask you to subscribe to our newsletter, our Facebook group, and also to consider donating a few cents to our cause. Your help would be of great relevance to us, thank you so much for your time!
We are a non-profit organization registered in December 2018, operating since late 2015 as a webzine and media website. In early 2017, we started our own event series focused on arts, experimental, and dancefloor-oriented music. We reject every invocation to “the Future” meant as the signifier for capitalistic “progress” and “innovation”, fully embracing the Present instead; we renounce any reckless and ultimately arbitrary division between “high” and “low”, respectable and not respectable, “mind” and “body”; we support and invite musicians, artists, and performers having diverse backgrounds and expressing themselves via variegated artistic practices.