Short answers, pulled from the story.
Crunk is a subgenre of hip hop that emerged in the early 1990s in the African American strip clubs and nightclubs of Memphis, Tennessee and Atlanta, Georgia. It draws from Miami bass, Eurodance, and 1980s call-and-response hip hop, built around Roland TR-808 and TR-909 drum machines, heavy basslines, and shouted or chanted vocals.
No single artist invented crunk, but Memphis-based group Three 6 Mafia, formed by DJ Paul and Juicy J, are credited as instrumental to the genre's emergence in the mid-to-late 1990s. Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz, who released their debut Get Crunk, Who U Wit in Atlanta in 1997, were central to bringing the style to a national audience.
Crunk derives from African-American Vernacular English as a past-participle form of the verb "to crank". In Southern dialect, "cranked up" was sometimes expressed as "crunk", meaning energetic or hyped. The term later also took on the meaning "crazy drunk", particularly after the 2000s rise of the Crunk brand drinks.
"Get Low" by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz with the Ying Yang Twins reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2003 and spent more than 21 weeks on the chart. Usher's "Yeah!" and Ciara's "Goodies", both produced by Lil Jon, topped the Hot 100 in 2004, and Chris Brown's "Run It!" reached number one in 2005.
By the end of 2009, crunk had seen a relative decline in mainstream American music, largely due to the rising popularity of trap and drill music as well as electropop and EDM. The genre also acquired a negative public image after the Crunk Juice alcoholic drink was allegedly marketed toward people under the US legal drinking age.
Lil Jon was the dominant commercial force in crunk. He released his debut album in 1997, independently produced two gold records before signing to TVT Records in 2001, and produced a string of top-10 Billboard Hot 100 hits in the early to mid-2000s. His Kings of Crunk album went double platinum, and he has been credited with inventing the Crunk Juice alcoholic cocktail.