It's hard to imagine a more traumatic piece of music news than recent reports that Paris Hilton has decided to embark on a singing career: indeed, for those still reeling from John Peel's death and the demise of Top of the Pops, the idea that the charts could soon be graced by the hotel heiress and amateur porn star may be the final straw. Yet one group of music lovers must be celebrating the news: the producers and artists who deal in crunk, the sub-genre of hip-hop that Hilton is apparently keen to record. There can be no surer sign of how crunk has saturated the American public's consciousness.
It is little-known in Britain, but in the US crunk is everywhere. Over the past two years, the southern-based offshoot of hip-hop has held sway on TV shows, award programmes and throughout much of modern-day American vernacular, clothing and lifestyle. Billboard number ones, numerous top 10s, huge record sales, any number of awards, magazine covers, TV specials.
Recently, new sub-sub-genres have emerged - 18-year-old singer Ciara is known as the first lady of Crunk'n'B; dancehall has been "crunked-up"; while metal quintet Korn also tried their hand at crunk rock.
If anything, crunk sounds slightly more ridiculous than its name suggests; a thrashing, expeditious, deafening, disordered, frenzied, screeching rabble of a racket based around a crashing chorus, repetitive chants and booming bass. The meaning of the onomatopoeic term depends on whom you talk to. It's a mixture of crazy and drunk, says one website, slang, perhaps for "cranked up" says another.
According to the movement's main man though, Atlanta producer and artist, Lil Jon, the explanation is much more visceral. "You can feel real crunk in your soul," he states. "It's high-energy rap music strictly designed for the clubs. It makes you wild out," says the musician who has singlehandedly crafted three US number ones this year alone, including Usher's worldwide hit, Yeah. His own album, Crunk Juice, as part of Lil Jon and the Eastside Boyz sits directly behind Eminem and Destiny's Child in this week's Billboard chart, selling 363,000 copies in its first week. "It's a lot of energy, like black punk-rock music."
It certainly has the anarchic attitude favoured by the Sex Pistols and Bad Brains - Jon's brash brand in particular. Yet, he insists, despite creating stupidly loud songs that espouse little more than "shaking it like a saltshaker", this is no novelty, rather a music that has been carefully cultivated over time. "In Atlanta we live and die to get crunk, it's a culture, it's not just some motherfuckin' screaming on the record," he insists. "It's the way we live our lives and have done forever."
It was in the Downtown strip clubs that the music first materialised, an amalgamation of throbbing Miami bass and double-time Washington DC go-go music that took on a life of its own. In 1993, DJs, producers and rappers like Jon, 8Ball and MJG, Three 6 Mafia and UGK set out to make upfront party music and eventually, came up with a sound of their very own. "It wasn't 'bout the lyrics or none of that," Jon admits. "It was just about getting Atlanta clubs to jump. It just so happened that it spread out of Atlanta and it started a whole little thing for us."
Gradually, thanks to breakthrough songs like Bone Crusher's Never Scared and TV comedians like Dave Chappelle and Chris Rock referencing crunk in their routines, it's finally getting its due. Now, crunk artists like Jon and the Ying Yang Twins, as well as Southern rappers like Trick Daddy and David Banner, are much in demand.
These days, crunk is more than music, it's a movement. Like the hip-hop it is derived from, it comes with its own clothing, language, dance moves, jewellery and colourful characters. Much has been made of Lil Jon's appearance, which is understandable, given that the thirtysomething is 5ft 7in, sports dreadlocks and a straggly beard and has gleaming jewel-encrusted plates fixed onto his teeth. But then no self-respecting Southern artist, crunk or otherwise, would be seen dead without some form of complicated dentistry. Jon prefers the platinum-plated variety, the self-styled Mayor of Miami, Trick Daddy, goes for gold numbers, while New Orleanian Juvenile insists he originated the idea of encrusting his with jewels. "Nobody did that before me," brags the man who calls himself Juve the Great. "I thought that one up."
A million miles away from the mumbling, monotone rappers that populate hip-hop; everything about crunk looms larger than its rap counterparts. Artists like Jon and Trick are a whirlwind of manic energy, seemingly unfamiliar or uncaring of the PR-puff that permeates much pop music. "Real niggas do real things," says Trick, a man who looks like he hasn't shaved or washed in a week. "We don't need 50 bodyguards to hang in the club, we ain't gotta eat lobster all the time, just give us some burgers and fries and we good."
Like Jon, Trick has been grinding in the music business for years. He too is now experiencing platinum sales, the demands of big-name artist collaborations and has just been approached by MTV to film a cookery programme. Two weeks ago his sixth album, Thug Matrimony: Married to the Streets, practically went gold in its first week of release. "You had to get respect in your own region first," he says. "In Miami they was playing other peoples records more than they was playing ours. So I had to have a talk with all the programme directors to tell them to show a nigga some love. So now they represent and they looking out for the south." It's hard to imagine anyone daring to disagree with Trick.
Like it or not, crunk is headed to a teenage bedroom, a nightclub and a radio station near you soon. The music's foremost record label to which Jon is signed, TVT, recently opened a UK arm. "It's steadily dispersing across the Atlantic thanks in part to the connection of crunk and the UK's grime scene," says Jonathan Green, managing director of TVT UK. "The grime artists and the streets here relate to it because it's music from the clubs; it's sweaty, dirty and gritty." TVT, says Green, is already looking at pairing artists from the UK and the US. It could be a match made in heaven. "I like that Dizzee Rascal kid," Jon barks. "Even if I don't understand what the fuck he's saying."
He can talk: crunk is littered with a language and an accent that takes some getting used to; much of it is indecipherable. A broad southern splay splattered with repetitive phrases like "Okaaaaay", "Yeeeeeah" and slang like "skeet, skeet" makes for a bewildering aural experience. Jon is only too happy to explain. "Skeet means to propel a liquid. Like in sex you would skeet or cum on her stomach, her ass, her forehead, her lips."
Crunk is unbelievably lewd; in fact at times it's utterly repugnant. But it's probably no worse than the things most teenagers in playgrounds the world over are saying. As crunk explodes onto the international mainstream, one wonders how well such vocabulary will be received by, say, MTV or Radio 1. But while they are reluctant to stray too far from the core fans, there are some signs of maturity. Jon has moved his sound on subtly since 2002's Kings of Crunk; his new album experiments with laidback R&B and develops his own vocal involvement, to rapping entire verses that expound on more than a catalogue of "Fuck yous".
Trick, on the other hand, has always understood the need for balance, peppering his gun and drug talk with occasional aspirational messages. "I didn't have no one in school coming to talk to me," he says. "A lot of teachers ain't doing they job right, so I try and do it for them."
But if Jon has yet to develop lyrically like Trick, he's miles ahead in the business stakes. Unlike the Miami MC who laughs that all his cash goes on gold teeth, Lil Jon is a canny businessperson. Behind the ridiculous raucousness is an entrepreneur that owns a record label, BME, while the ubiquitous clothing label is in the works.
In much the same way pop stars know they've made it when a plastic doll that looks absolutely nothing like them is made in their honour, a rapper's ultimate status symbol is a fashion line.
With that ticked off the list, as well as a porn DVD series, customised sunglasses and the platinum-selling Crunk Juice (both drink and, before long, album) where else can Jon take the phenomenon? "Right now," he says, dead serious. "I'm working on that Lil Jon action figure. That shit is gonna be crazy."
· Trick Daddy's Thug Matrimony: Married to the Streets is out now. Lil Jon's Crunk Juice is released in the UK in January.