Crunk

• 1. Introduction

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  Crunk is a subgenre of hip hop that began life in the African American strip clubs of Memphis, Tennessee and ended up placing multiple songs at the top of the Billboard Hot 100. That journey from underground Southern nightclubs to national pop dominance took roughly a decade, and it reshaped not only hip hop but also R&B and the language people used to describe being excited, being reckless, or simply being "crazy drunk". The questions worth asking are how a regional sound built on drum machines and chanted slogans broke through to the American mainstream, what the word "crunk" even means and where it came from, and why, by the end of the 2000s, the genre had receded almost as quickly as it had arrived.

• 2. A Word With Deep Roots

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  The word "crunk" turns up in a Dr. Seuss book from 1972, Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, where Seuss used the compound "Crunk-Car" without providing any definition. That may be coincidence, but the term's later life in the American South is well documented. Atlanta, Georgia nightclubs were using the word as early as the 1980s to mean being "full of energy" or "hyped".

  By the mid-1990s, the meaning had spread and slightly fragmented. Rolling Stone magazine published a glossary of what it called Dirty South slang, defining "to crunk" as "to get excited". The word traces back to African-American Vernacular English, specifically to the past-participle of the verb "to crank". In parts of the South, "cranked" was sometimes conjugated as "crunk", so a party that was cranked up was simply said to be crunk.

  Outkast is credited with being the first act to use the term in mainstream music, on their 1993 track "Player's Ball". Three years later, Memphis-based group Three 6 Mafia included the track "Gette'm Crunk" on their 1996 album Chapter 1: The End, the same year that Memphis underground artist Tommy Wright III released On the Run, featuring the Project Pimp track "Getting Crunk".

• 3. Memphis, Three 6 Mafia, and the Sound

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  Crunk music arose from Miami bass before 1996, and its earliest home was Memphis, Tennessee. Two mixtape DJs, DJ Paul and Juicy J, began making original music characterized by what has been described as "spare, low-BPM rhythms, simplistic chants... and narcotically repetitive, slasher-flick textures". That duo eventually became known as Three 6 Mafia.

  Their releases regularly featured rappers including Project Pat, Lord Infamous, Gangsta Boo, and La Chat. The New York Times later denied that Lil Jon's Get Crunk, Who Are You With was the first crunk album, a detail that underscores how contested the genre's origins remained even after the music went national.

  Musically, the genre borrowed from Miami bass, Eurodance, and 1980s call-and-response hip hop. The Roland TR-808 and Roland TR-909 drum machines became central to the sound, providing looped, stripped-down claps and bass drum rhythms. Simple, repeated synthesizer melodies played in ostinato form were layered over those beats to create what producers described as a hypnotic effect. The tempo of Lil Jon's track "Get Crunk" sits at 78 BPM, a relatively slow pace that let the bass and the chanting vocals take center stage rather than speed.

• 4. Lil Jon and the Mainstream Breakthrough

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  In Atlanta in 1997, Lil Jon and his group the East Side Boyz released their debut album Get Crunk, Who U Wit, the first of six albums the group would put out together. Lil Jon produced two gold records independently before signing to TVT Records in 2001, and after earning the title "King of Crunk" he went on to collaborate with Snoop Dogg, Ice Cube, Ludacris, and Britney Spears.

  "Get Low", released in 2003 and performed by Lil Jon and the East Side Boyz with the Ying Yang Twins, is widely credited as the track that put crunk into the national spotlight. It reached number two on the Billboard Hot 100 and spent more than 21 weeks on the chart. Rappers from outside the South who had previously avoided association with Southern hip hop, including Busta Rhymes and Nelly, accepted offers to appear on remixes of that song. The album containing "Get Low", titled Kings of Crunk, went double platinum.

  Also in the early to mid-2000s, Lil Jon produced a string of top-10 Billboard Hot 100 hits including "Get Low", "Goodies", "Yeah!", "Freek-a-Leek", "Okay", "Cyclone", "Girlfight", "U and Dat", and "Touch". His 2004 album Crunk Juice further extended the brand in a literal direction: Lil Jon has been credited with inventing the alcoholic cocktail of the same name, and non-alcoholic drinks marketed under the Crunk brand name were sold with Lil Jon as spokesman.

• 5. Crunk&B and Pop Crossover

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  Two songs helped define what became known as crunk&B, a fusion of crunk with contemporary R&B. Usher's "Yeah!" and Ciara's "Goodies" both topped the Billboard Hot 100 in 2004, introducing the substyle to a broad pop audience. Both tracks were produced by Lil Jon.

  In March 2004, R&B singer Houston released the crunk&B track "I Like That", which reached number 11 on the Billboard Hot 100. In 2005, Chris Brown's "Run It!" took the crunk&B approach to the top position on the Hot 100. That same year and into 2006, crunk and crunk&B displaced hip hop and older contemporary R&B on the American R&B charts.

  In 2004, the independent label Crunk Incorporated signed a major distribution deal with Reprise and Warner Bros. Records for Crime Mob, a crunk group that released the platinum single "Knuck If You Buck", followed by their 2006 hit "Rock Yo Hips". Atlanta R&B group Cherish added to the run with their summer 2006 song "Do It to It", which debuted at number 86 on the Billboard Hot 100 for the week of the 20th of May 2006, later peaked at number 12 for the week of the 2nd of September 2006, and stayed on the chart for 21 weeks.

• 6. Controversy, Decline, and Legacy

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  The word "crunk" had picked up a second meaning by the mid-2000s: "crazy drunk". The company behind the Crunk non-alcoholic drink released an alcoholic version called Crunk Juice in 2011, and that product attracted criticism on the grounds that it was allegedly marketed toward 19- to 21-year-olds, a demographic below the US legal drinking age. Mainstream media began linking the term to criminal behavior, and crunk took on a negative stigma with police, parents, and journalists.

  On the musical side, the genre had been losing ground in the mainstream by the end of 2009, pushed aside by the rising popularity of trap and drill music as well as electropop and electronic dance music. The artists who had helped build crunk early on, including Ying Yang Twins, White Dawg, Bone Crusher, Lil Scrappy, Trillville, YoungBloodZ, Pastor Troy from Atlanta, and David Banner from Mississippi, largely moved on or found themselves working in a changed landscape.

  Creative offshoots of crunk did take hold, including Eurocrunk, crunkcore, crunkczar, aquacrunk, and acid crunk, as producers from outside the Southern hip hop scene picked up and reworked the template. In 2015, singer Tinashe incorporated crunk elements in her single "All Hands on Deck" featuring Iggy Azalea. In 2019, rapper Saweetie sampled Petey Pablo's 2004 crunk hit "Freek-a-Leek" for her song "My Type", evidence that the sound had become a recognizable and sampleable part of recorded music history rather than a live commercial force.