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

Often dismissed as meaningless or, at best, functional "inane party chants," crunk lyrics vary widely in complexity and meaning.83 In addition to the theme of communal enjoyment in the space of a party or club, crunk lyrics usually include a strong emphasis on sex, violence, and intoxication (understood as key components of the club experience). The setting of the strip club depends upon the objectification of women, and crunk has drawn criticism as a music defined by "rampant misogyny."84 While a critical engagement with and recognition of crunk's misogyny is important, there are other elements to the crunk lyrical world.

A Three 6 Mafia spinoff mixes occult imagery with
themes of club-based rowdiness (1999, Relativity).

Songs such as Three 6 Mafia's 1997 crunk anthem "Tear Da Club Up" invoke a level of crowd enjoyment which borders on violence and destruction, similar to the explosive combustion suggested by black artists in the mid-seventies who urged audiences to "tear the roof off the sucker" in a "Disco Inferno."85 However, crunk's exploration of rage and violence as enjoyment and release in the club context is particular, both in its language and its tone, which are much angrier than anything produced in the eras of soul, funk, or disco. In a departure from 1970s club culture, crunk lyrics often turn other imagined club goers into targets for rhetorical rage and imagined assaults.

Lyrically, crunk often derives its creative energy from imagining and describing violent conflicts or confrontations between groups in an "us against them" context. In songs such as "What U Gon Do" or "White Meat" (both included on the 2004 album Crunk Juice), Lil Jon creates scenarios which imagine one group confronting another in the nightclub space, threatening to "bust your head 'til the white meat shows." Other songs, such as "Stilletoes (Pumps)," by the Atlanta-based group Crime Mob, or Ms. B's "Bottle Action" declare that women who attend clubs in expensive or fashionable clothes are nonetheless prepared for interpersonal violence, usually against challengers of their own gender.

The nightclub is a frequent setting for crunk songs and imagery (2004, TVT Records).

While some crunk lyrics fantasize violence for mass consumption, I argue that, in addition, they relate to recent African American youth subcultural practices in the form of the nightclub experience as a central site for collective expression. While almost never expressed explicitly in crunk lyrics, the anger, rage, and violence expressed in the music evokes contemporary social conditions of African American young men, as well as the media imagery that helps justify the persistence of these conditions. Like previous forms of black popular music, the stylistic and thematic changes that marked the emergence of crunk appear "closely related to changes in the state of mass black consciousness."86 Though its style and content are far from being simply determined by the social context, crunk can be understood as engaging and responding to the extreme marginalization of black youth, particularly black men, in the post-Fordist, neoconservative climate.

As Tia DeNora has demonstrated, the possibility for music to be used to organize subjective experience on a non-cognitive, embodied level is a dimension of music's relationship with agency that is often slighted in favor of an emphasis on semantic or symbolic meanings.87 I suggest that rather than focusing on what the lyrics of crunk say, it is more productive to turn our attention to what crunk does for listeners (or what they do to themselves with it) in order to understand the power of the music. While the "rebellious chants" of crunk express a literal message of release and anger, they are one component of an experience produced through the combination of musical and performative features, most often enjoyed in an embodied manner.

The club experience intensifies the expressive power of crunk. Sometimes compared to "slam-dancing" or "moshing" associated with punk, the dancing at clubs or concerts associated with crunk often is a rough and chaotic affair, with participants feeding on each other's energy as "the club gets truly unruly, when elbows are wildly thrown and moshlike mayhem erupts on the dance floor."88 In addition to conjuring collectively embodied aggression and release, punk and crunk share a connection (real or imagined) with urban working-class culture.89

Atlanta-based Crime Mob raps about women's
participation in crunk's rowdiness (2004, Reprise/WEA).

Lil Jon consciously frames his success in terms that emphasize down-to-earth attitudes. In a description contrasting the action in one of his music videos with a "normal video," Lil Jon states: "No mansions. . . we ain't about that [bourgeois] shit. We about being regular." Jon then describes the plotline for the video produced to promote the 2002 song "I Don't Give a F---," in which the artist and his rather nondescript and burly sidemen "aren't on the guest list" and eventually "rush the VIP [the most exclusive section of the club]", demonstrating, to some degree, a resistance to the glorification of wealth and status that has often characterized rap culture.90

The association of crunk with the lower social orders mirrors its association with the lower regions of the body or with previous stages in human evolution. The descriptions of crunk as "simple, catchy," "crude," or even "outrageously puerile" often imply a distinction between two broad classes of music, which correspond to the intellectual and the corporeal (metaphorized as high and low, respectively): "like Lil Jon, and more than a few of his other Southern brethren, [Georgia rapper Pastor] Troy's aiming for that grossly reactive section of the brain that governs activities below chest level. Which is where most pop music aims anyway, though Southern artists tend to be more upfront about it."91

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