Jerk

Jerk is a microgenre of hip-hop that emerged in New York City in the early 2020s, named in homage to the jerkin' dance music of the late 2000s but rebuilt from the materials of internet rap. Its beats, produced largely in digital audio workstations, favour fidgety, off-kilter percussion, staggered snares, sparse plugg-derived synths and detuned melodic fragments, over which rappers deliver Auto-Tuned, half-mumbled verses. Developed by *Xaviersobased* and the *1c34* collective and popularised by *Nettspend* and *Fakemink*, the style absorbs cloud rap, digicore and Milwaukee lowend, and spread through SoundCloud and TikTok to a parallel underground scene in the United Kingdom.