What is crunk music?
At its height during the early to mid-2000s, crunk music ruled the airwaves. The hip-hop subgenre was so influential that it shaped the nature of the era’s pop charts, but what, exactly, was it?
Crunk emerged from the Miami bass scene that thrived in the nightclubs of America’s southern states during the late ’80s and early ’90s. From that scene, the burgeoning crunk subgenre borrowed big, heavy beats created by drum machines, jarring, almost overbearing synthlines, and call-and-response vocals.
Sampling isn’t too much of a thing within crunk, while, lyrically, the concerns of its songs tend to revolve around having a good time. It is party music, often with an easy-going tempo and heavy basslines designed to encourage dancing.
The term “crunk” seems to be the past participle of “crank,” an African-American slang term meaning excited people or situations. But another theory as to where the word came from is that it is a contraction of “crazy” and “drunk”—hence, “crunk.” It is difficult to say for sure, but the word was certainly in use by the early ’90s. Outkast dropped it on their 1993 song ‘Player’s Ball.’
Among the leading pioneers of crunk were Three 6 Mafia, from Memphis, Tennessee, and Lil Jon, from Atlanta, Georgia. Three 6 Mafia’s ‘Tear da Club Up’ is widely credited with laying the groundwork for crunk’s rise in 1992, while that same year saw the release of Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz’s album Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album.
Inspired by the music Three 6 Mafia and Lil Jon were creating, other performers started to experiment with this new crunk sound. Artists such as Trillville, Bone Crusher, Ying Yang Twins, David Banner and Pastor Troy all started releasing crunk songs, some of which went on to find modest national success. Releases such as these marked the first time that crunk really started to infiltrate the US at large.
By the 2000s crunk was truly moving into the mainstream. Perhaps the most obvious success story came in the form of Usher’s smash hit, ‘Yeah!,’ which incorporated a lot of elements of the crunk style. This was produced by Lil Jon, who also rapped on it alongside Ludacris.
Lil Jon remained central to crunk’s success during its 2000s heyday. As well as helping to force it into the popular sensibility with hits like ‘Yeah!,’ he continued to make his own crunk songs that helped to define exactly what the subgenre was, notably the track ‘Get Low’ that he made with the Ying Yang Twins. This reached number two on pop charts in America.
As the 2000s progressed, new subgenres began to spring up in crunk’s wake. Trap is perhaps the most important of crunk’s successors, which, while darker in tone, nonetheless shares many of the same features. In any case, newer sounds like trap came to displace crunk’s dominant place within hip-hop, and its overall popularity began to fade.