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Introduction | Rap and Place | The Rap Map Unfolds | Rap Scenes and Styles | Marketing | Dirtiness Defined | Dirtiness in Southern Rap | Get Crunk | Visual Culture | Conclusion | Notes| Recommended Resources

Like "Dirty South," the passage of "crunk" from subcultural to mainstream usage has meant a significant diminution of nuance in meaning, producing oversimplifications informed by stereotypes. The multivalent and ambiguous sensibility that characterizes the concept in its use by creative artists and grassroots audiences — in which tropes of energy and release are central — became simplified and caricatured as the term went mainstream. The most prominent example of this was the frequent assertion by mainstream journalists that the word derived from "a blend of 'crazy' and 'drunk.'"92 While it could very well accommodate this dimension of meaning (as well as the related etymology of combining marijuana ("chronic") with alcohol (drunk), it should be clear by now that this represents only one dimension of a open-ended concept.93

In a similar vein, the understanding of crunk's relationship to southern rap and its place in the genre system of rap in general has produced further confusion: "The use of the word has far surpassed the actual amount of music released within its ambit."94 An example of this is the description of Atlanta rapper T.I. as a "crunkster," when his style of composition and performance falls well outside the parameters of the genre as it has taken form.95 Another reviewer writes that crunk was "made and minted in the US Dirty South, in new hip-hop strongholds from Atlanta to Houston," ignoring the fact that, with a couple of notable exceptions, "most of these cats grew up in the same Atlanta neighborhood."96 Crunk bears a strong association with Atlanta's rap industry and culture, but is also understood as a set of stylistic conventions that an artist can adopt or adapt.

The inroads that crunk artists made into mainstream musical consciousness met with less than universal enthusiasm. Despite Lil Jon's breakthrough to pop success with the production of R&B singer Usher's song "Yeah!" in 2004, an Atlanta-based reviewer criticized him as a "numbingly simple chanter [rather] than noteworthy rapper," and noted that Jon, once marginalized as "Southern" or "underground" or "independent," "now has the cachet to get A-list acts to join in on the inanity."97 Clearly, some reviewers wished the obnoxious music would just go away; "crunk is likely to be remembered with just a hangover a decade from now."98 For others, the work of crunk artists like Lil Jon pales in comparison to that of preceding figures such as OutKast and Goodie Mob: "These tracks [on Lil Jon's 2003 Kings of Crunk] have catchy choruses, chanted under some delusional notion that screaming vulgarities over a beat is what the Southern hip-hop movement is about." In this critique, Lil Jon's ability to relate to audiences with catchy choruses and beats (many of which he produces) represents a betrayal of a static and monolithic "movement" represented by elite artists "who have shown you can stay true to the 'dirty,' spit creative lyrical content and still move a crowd."99

Crunk's detractors often expressed a mixture of musical and moral objections to the genre and its representative artists. After a positive review of Lil Jon's music by Kelefa Sanneh, one Canadian reader complained that the New York Times critic was only interested in "champion[ing] the worst in pop music," and decried the "appallingly cynical attitude" evidenced by Lil Jon's "tireless use of racially offensive language and his blatant objectification of women (in his lyrics and in his videos)."100 Another writer connected crunk to an earlier generation's version of the archetypal southern, African American musical bogeymen, 2 Live Crew:

. . . their legacy thrives in the 'crunk' style, which depicts the sexuality of young black men and women in ways that, to put it mildly, conform to the fevered imaginings of the worst white racists. The standard defense is to say that this stuff is a parody. But of what? For millions of young people around the world, including many African Americans, these words (and video images) define blackness."101

These points deserve serious consideration, although I would argue that "grotesque" is a more appropriate frame for the representations in crunk than "parody." Lil Jon and other crunk artists like the Ying Yang Twins have forged close ties with strip-club-culture and have not hesitated to make the eroticized, objectified female body (or parts thereof) central subjects of their expressions. Still, it is difficult to separate the critique of sexism in crunk from the association of the music with "lower social orders." The perception of crunk artists and their antecedents like 2 Live Crew as representing a nadir of vulgarity and depravity speaks to the ways in which class affiliations (and related racial formations) affect our understanding of what is "crude" or "vulgar" — not to mention the taken-for-granted assumption of vulgarity for any expression related to sex, desire, or eroticism generally.

Many of the representations of women in crunk lyrics and imagery are unquestionably demeaning, but it remains difficult to argue that they are categorically more pathological than those which prevail in rap generally. However, there is a significant degree of particularity in the ways in which women are figured within the genre (and within the work of predecessors like 2 Live Crew). The crunk imaginary as elaborated in song lyrics and video imagery is marked by significant restrictions in terms of the ways that women can be figured — as the professional stripper or as a sexy dance partner — and often relies upon the display of the female body for male consumption. The figuration of women as strippers festishizes scopic pleasure and revels in the narrow roles and rules that mark the strip-club-experience, in which men alternately stoke (by watching and paying) and restrain (by not touching) their sexual desire. The female characters in crunk songs (as well as related styles like snap) are often distant objects, siren-like figures who play with and arouse male sexual desire from a position of cool, mercenary detachment. In a departure from the gender politics that characterized earlier groups like N.W.A. or the Geto Boys, misogyny in crunk lyrics is often expressed indirectly, through the emasculating reference to other males as "bitches" or "hoes."

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Introduction | Rap and Place | The Rap Map Unfolds | Rap Scenes and Styles | Marketing | Dirtiness Defined | Dirtiness in Southern Rap | Get Crunk | Visual Culture | Conclusion | Notes| Recommended Resources

Published: 10 June 2008

© 2008 Matt Miller and Southern Spaces