68. Lil' Jon – Get Crunk (2004)

Hip-hop was born in New York, and that's where all its big stars came from until the end of the eighties, when California started to challenge its dominance. In the nineties, the hip-hop world was a battle between the East Coast (more serious, artistic and political) and the West Coast (gangsters, bitches and hedonism). Meanwhile, the South established itself and started to challenge them both, with hip-hop that was more danceable, dealt mainly with sex and used lyrics that were even racier. Out of this scene came crunk, a style based on dancehall-like beats, music made mainly with synthesizers, and rap made mainly of exulted shouts. The term "crunk" is a combination of crazy and drunk, and was originally used mainly to describe the feeling of mixing alcohol and weed, and the music gives more or less the same feeling. This style reached the peak of its popularity in the middle of the decade, and raised southern hip-hop to the stature of a serious contender to the crown, to the chagrin of many in the hip-hop community, who regarded crunk as a loud and tasteless debasement of the art-form. The jury is still out.

Crunk intrigued me as another case of merger between hip-hop and dance, but no record I've heard really did it to me, until this one. Lil' Jon is the High Priest of crunk, and this anthemic record makes it somewhat more understandable to me. The heavy synth has a mind-numbing effect, the drum machine enhances the disorientation, and the shouts drown you in the experience. In this mental state, the flow of the rap sounds exactly right, and the rest fits in as well. Give me more records like that, and I too will get crunked.