I spoke to perc40, an Atlantan responsible for all kinds of percussive havoc, like wildkarduno’s “i dont give a fuxk bout da 808s,” which he produced with utrippin. He was one of the early extremo-plugg architects along with beatmaker/rappers like Squillo, tdf, marrgielaa and boolymon. perc40 told me he finds the 808s trend “weird”; with a cringe in his voice, he said most of these trendbouncers don’t put any effort into sculpting the music besides the provocative bass. “It sounds played out. Minus the 808, the beat is just kinda…” his voice trailed off.

For the plugg heads, there’s a clear intent to the music’s delirium. perc40 lit up as he told me about how he enjoyed experimenting with Ableton’s saturation effects, and the way dreamy melodies clash excitingly with serrated low end on a track like “pouring up” from his last tape. Other artists toy with the style by throwing heavenly choral calls over the mix and trying to match the madness with equally aggro threats and growls. These are producers and performers who came from the underground, building on a lineage of influences—from Slayworld to BeatPluggz to RonnyJ’s fried detonations. By focusing solely on “insane 808s,” the context disappears. “When people hyperfixate on the 808s and shit, I feel like it takes away from the rest of the beat,” perc40 said. “And it also takes away from where we got [the sound] from.”

When the sound is calibrated correctly, it’s genuinely thrilling, forcing you to retrain your fight-or-flight response to what initially hits like air raid alarms and 100db construction clamor. There’s something bizarrely blissful about listening to this music with headphones on, letting the industrial uproar pulverize your brain to bits. And the best producers give their bass such textural personality it feels like it’s fighting to get a word in, practically a second vocal feature. tdf’s beat on wildkarduno’s “all good” sounds like the opposite of all good: imagine a scuba diver desperately gasping for air while trapped underwater in the Mariana trench.

On TikTok and X, where the 808 craze has really taken off, many of the songs don’t include vocals and are basically just 20 seconds of a DAW with humorous on-screen text. There’s a mixture of artful lunacy that smacks like experimental IDM (Insane Dance Music)—especially by people with a background in electronic sound design like selasi—and irredeemable blather. My ears and eyes are still sore after imbibing TikTok’s endless stream of low-effort 20,000 Hz sirens and “808s screaming from pain” jokes. It’ll be intriguing to see if this rash of outside interest leads to more electronic producers working with plugg rappers. As of now, it feels mostly like people treating the sound as a novelty, a viral “challenge” they can hop on for engagement. This has angered folks: “Making music for teenagers posting tiktok content about how chatgpt made them fail English,” the producer dollmaker wrote. “No groove and no love for the game.”