Matt Miller, Dirty Decade: Rap Music and the U.S. South, 1997-2007; Southern Spaces

The crunk concept was born in the late 1980s and early 1990s in nightclubs in southern cities like Memphis and Atlanta, as DJs, producers and artists strove to produce the kind of music appropriate to a rowdy, collective, and embodied experience. Before it became a rap subgenre, crunk's meaning evoked a high level of crowd energy and enthusiasm. In 1995, a post on the newsgroup rec.music.hip-hop defined crunk as "hype, phat," while another poster pointed out in 1998, "krunk is pretty much the past tense of crank."67 In Rolling Stone, a 1999 "glossary of Dirty South slang" defined Get Crunk as "get excited."68 However, the word has an additional level of connotation for young African Americans in the South, encompassing both a desirable state of out-of-control abandon on one hand and an intolerable situation on the other. Explaining the source of their macabre and violent lyrical themes, a member of Three 6 Mafia explains, "'Since Memphis is so crunk, all we gotta do when we rap is talk about real shit."69

Lil' Jon and the East Side Boyz album "Get Crunk, Who U Wit da album".

The crunk concept existed in southern rap circuits for several years before it emerged to fuel a putative subgenre, thanks to the efforts of rapper and producer Jon "Lil Jon" Smith (b. 1972), who started in Atlanta's bass music scene in the 1990s: "Crunk is a term," said Lil Jon, "that's been used in the South for as long as I can remember."70 Referring to his 1996 release "Get Crunk (Who U Wit)," Jon recalled, "We were the first ones to use it in a hook and tell people to 'get crunk.' We started calling ourselves a crunk group, so we kind of paved the way."71 Jon produced two gold records independently in the late 1990s, then signed with New York-based TVT Records in 2001, helping it become "Billboard's top indie label of 2004." He continued to promote crunk as a rap subgenre, which found enthusiastic reception by listeners and critics.72

Lil Jon was central in popularizing the crunk concept (1997, Ichiban Records).

Lil Jon's role in the establishment of crunk speaks to the ways in which strategically positioned individuals or groups can exploit their access within the music industry to exercise significant influence over wider sense-making practices on the part of audiences, critics, and music companies. While the distinctiveness of Lil Jon's performance and presentation should not be minimized, his music — like that of others tagged as "crunk" artists — could just as easily be understood as occupying a point on a continuum of constantly evolving club-based rap.

The transformation of "crunk" from vague idea to musical subgenre produced mixed results for artists from southern cities. For those in the right place (chiefly Atlanta), with music that fit the crunk conventions, this was a positive development. In addition to Atlanta-based artists like Lil Jon, The Ying Yang Twins, Bone Crusher, and Pastor Troy, Mississippi's David Banner and Memphis' Three 6 Mafia (arguably the uncredited inventors of the genre) also rode the crunk wave in the late 1990s. However, the essentialist conflation of geography and musical style that lies under much of the critical and promotional discourse around crunk limited the possibilities for those who were not in a position to capitalize on them. As Mississippi-based rapper Kamikaze complained, "The industry has us in a climate where every cat that come out the South gotta be crunk. They got us pigeonholed."73