Crunk
| Crunk | |
|---|---|
| Stylistic origins | |
| Cultural origins | Early to mid-1990s, Memphis, Tennessee |
| Typical instruments | |
| Derivative forms | Trap |
| Subgenres | |
| Fusion genres | |
Crunk is a subgenre of hip hop music that emerged in the early 1990s and gained mainstream success during the mid 2000s. Performers of crunk music are sometimes referred to as "crunkmeisters". Crunk is often up-tempo and one of Southern hip hop's more dance and club oriented subgenres. An archetypal crunk track frequently uses a main groove consisting of layered keyboard synths, a drum machine rhythm, heavy basslines, and shouting vocals, often in a call and response manner. The term "crunk" is also used as a blanket term to denote any style of Southern hip hop, a side effect of the genre's breakthrough to the mainstream. The word derives from its African-American slang past-participle form, "crunk", of the verb "to crank" (as in the phrase "crank up").
The term has been attributed mainly to African-American slang, in which it holds various meanings. It most commonly refers to the verb phrase "to crank up". It is theorized that the use of the term came from a past-tense form of "crank", which was sometimes conjugated as "crunk" in the South, such that if a person, event or party was hyped-up, i.e. energetic – "cranked" or "cranked up" – it was said to be "crunk".
In publications, "crunk" can be traced back to 1972 in the Dr. Seuss book Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!. He uses the term "Crunk-Car" without any given definition. The term has also been traced to usage in the 1980s coming out of Atlanta, Georgia nightclubs and meaning being "full of energy" or "hyped". In the mid-1990s, crunk was variously defined either as "hype", "phat", or "pumped up". Rolling Stone magazine published "glossary of Dirty South slang", where to crunk was defined as "to get excited".
The term was in part popularized on Late Night with Conan O'Brien in 1993, though it was spelled differently and used in a different context. Writer Dino Stamatopoulos came up with the term "krunk" to epitomize the most offensive word to ever be said on network television, with the joke being that network censors, baffled by the word, were unable to cut it from the broadcast. "Krunk" became a recurring theme on the show between Conan and various guests. Ice-T was one of the first guests to use the word on air, as it was joked that the word was not offensive sounding enough, and Ice-T was the one person who could make it sound offensive.
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