Switched on Pop - In Defense of Crunk

Episode Date: October 3, 2023

Twenty years ago, the song "Get Low" by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz and Ying Yang Twins was released; in the years since, the song has managed to stand the test of time, becoming the paragon of what we know as crunk music. In this episode of Switched on Pop, we take a look at crunk – from its roots in Memphis and Atlanta to its sonic successors, and give flowers to the man behind it all: Lil Jon himself. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's free for iOS users. Welcome to Switch on Pop. I'm producer Rihanna Cruz. I'm songwriter Charlie Harding. And I'm musicologist Nate Sloan. So guys, lately, I've been hearing a lot of songs on the radio that carry a similarity. And I want to see if you guys can figure out what that is. Let's do it. So I heard the LA rap station Power 106 play the song, Geekleek by OGZ and Cash Kit.

which is a riff on P.D. Pablo's Freakleekleek. I really hope this is going to be about elementary school recorder. Is that what that was? I think so. I think you're cold, Charlie. Let's hear another one. Well, they played that back-to-back with Flo Millie's BTW, which is a sample of two shorts, blow the whistle.

So already I'm wondering what's up with these two tracks. But then I heard Jay Balvin's Deentes. with Usher and DJ Khalid. And I thought there's a trend happening. Ooh, I like this beat flip. I feel confident saying that is a sample slash interpolation of Yeah by Usher. Ding ding ding ding ding. All of these songs, freakily blow the whistle.

And Usher's Yeah, which is sampled on Dientez, They all carry a similarity. Do you guys know what that is? The abject terror on our faces right now suggests that we don't. I mean, they're all really fun. Okay, okay, I'll tell you. There's one man behind all of these productions. And that man is none other than Atlanta's own Lil John.

Insert, yeah, sound effect right there. Of course, Lil John is Atlanta's king of crunk. Is Crunk Music really more than just like a Lil John catchphrase? Is it a sound? Crunk music is a regional subgenre that grew in popularity out of Atlanta. So hearing these samples and these interpolations on the radio and knowing Lil John is at the center of them, it got me thinking about Crunk music as a genre. And I want to learn more about where it comes from, what it sounds like, and why I'm still hearing Lil' John tracks at. Every club, every sporting event, every place I go.

Right. Like 20 years since this music was popular. I'm excited for this because as, you know, our absence of an answer for you attest, like, I think we're not very familiar with this body of music. We're not familiar with the lineage of krunk. I'm not sure I could tell you if it's a noun adjective or verb or maybe all three. I think all three. So I'm here for this. Let's get right into Krunk music.

Crunk music at its core is party music and by being party music it follows in the long lineage of hip-hop as hip-hop stemmed from parties in the South Bronx. The term crunk itself came from black slang and the term refers to the idea of cranking something up. The first song to use the term in mainstream music is Players Ball by Outcast from 1993. So in that Andre 3000 says, I got sick crunk.

Hearing him make such a brief kind of reference to crunk here seems to signify that it's not really yet like an established style. It's more just this kind of term that's part of a larger lexicon that people are using. Well, the term has been around for a second, both in black slang, but also, weirdly enough, in a Dr. Seuss book from 1972, called Marvin K. Mooney, will you please go now? And one of the pages references a crunk car. It provides no further explanation.

But there's a photo with it that portrays a sort of do-hicky, mechanical ostrich-looking vehicle. And that's the crunk car in question. What I have to ask, is crunk in the Dr. Seuss used as a rhyme? Does he invent a word in order to, enable a rhyme scheme, or to Nate's point, is Crunk here being used as an adjective to describe the car? Again, a completely made-up adjective because it's Dr. Seuss. I think the latter. It's definitely just made up. It's not even for a rhyme. Language is so creative. I love it. So we got Players Ball by Outcast in 93 using the word Crunk. Going forward a few years,

some early notable Crunk songs come from not Atlanta where Outcast is from, but Memphis, we have the song Get Em Crunk by 3-6 Mafia. That goes hard. And from about the same time, we have Tommy Wright the 3rd's Getting Crunk. So we have Get Em Crunk and then Getting Crunk. There's got to be Got Crunk. It's a trio.

No, no, Charlie. Somewhere in there. Just stop you there. Okay. So we have the word crunk being used in both of these songs, both coming out of Memphis. But these songs are not the Crunk music that we know today. These tracks use the word, but are

dark, gritty, lo-fi have some elements of horror core, which was the sound of Memphis hip-hop at the time. It's different than the crunk music that's happening in Atlanta, where the genre moves into dance-based party music and proliferates through artists like the Ying-yang twins. This is sounding more like party music to me. As you pointed out, you know, the 3-6 mafia track, that was like a little spooky. Yeah. Had that scary horror music piano sample. This feels more like inviting everyone to get on the dance floor and have a good time. Definitely.

And dancing is central to the work. That song by Ying Ying'i Twins was just called Whistle While You Twerk. Of course, directly addressing the dance move of twerking. And other crunk songs do the same. They have directives that listeners can do. A song like Cry Mobbs, Rock Yo Hips, also comes to mind. So, you know, we have acts from Atlanta like Ying-Ging Twins and Crows. up. But as we mentioned up top, one of the most significant figures and the point of convergence

for the genre comes to be Lil John. In 1997, he releases his album, Get Crunk, Who You Witt, the album with the East Side Boys. And that features songs like Get Crunk featuring the Eastside girls and shake your booty. And you can hear in these songs a sonic similarity to his Memphis predecessors. Similar to the music from 3-6 Mafia, these early Lil' John songs are, like you said, Nate's spooky a little bit. You know, they carry a very ominous tone to them. I feel like those high, whiny, digital-sounding synth lines remind me of like John Carpentery horror soundtracks. Having that persistent whiny note does give this kind of fearful quality. Over time, Liljohn dons the title King of Crunk.

And with the East Side Boys, Liljohn proceeds to make Crunk his brand with records like 2000s. We Still Crunk, 2002's Kings of Crunk. 2004's Crunk Juice, not to mention his 2011 Greatest Hits record, Crunkist Hits. Did he ever make an energy drink? He must have, right? Crunk energy. Crunk, Crunk Energy drink. I'm about that I'm...

Wow, I forgot about this. Nothing like turning a tagline into a business empire. He's a smart guy. So we've talked about the history of Crunk and we brought Lil John into the mix. But to understand the sound of Crunk, we should listen to what I believe to be the paragon of the genre.

Get Low by Liljohn and the East Side Boys with Ying Yang Twins. Man, this all my song. was so big. I remember going to a P-Funk concert, like a decade after this song came out, and George Clinton did a version of Get Low, and everyone was going from the window to the walls. It was nuts. This song has staying power. It's so silly, but it's so big. I have similar memories, Charlie. I mean, and listening to it now, it's still, it's a huge song. I mean, it, like, rattles your proverbial speakers the minute. it starts and it just like thunders through the entirety of it.

I would love to hear how this song not only represents like a certain, I don't know, maybe commercial apotheosis for Crunk as a style, but also how it codifies some of the musical language of this genre as well. I also think that it's a song which became a mainstay for limbo. and if you're going to try to get lower and lower under the bar, you don't want a song which is going by too quickly. I don't know. Well, it's five minutes and 34 seconds,

which I feel like is a very long song. That's a long party song. That's why you're sweating. You're doing this for a while. Okay, so crunk music is slow. It's extremely long. You can dance easily to it. What else does it have?

Well, so it relies heavily on base forward electronic synthesizer usage. and they're all over get low, particularly in the clip that we just listened to. Right, there's like at least three layers of synthesizers in there. You have the really low, 808, boom, boom. Then there's a sort of like mid-layer, really crunchy bass, like a-gag-gag-gag-gat kind of thing. And then there's a higher lead moment as well,

and they're all in conversation with each other these three synthesizer sounds. Yeah, you're right, Charlie. And I hear those notes as synthesized horns. It kind of sounds like brassy trumpets just playing in your ear. From like a really cheap keyboard workstation, totally synthesized horns in the lead. Yeah. Exactly.

And even the whistle noises on the track, the whistle percussion, sounds like it's just buttons on a drum machine. Yeah. You know, and I think that's really cool because it sounds like everything is electronic and even coming from the same machine. It's designed for the club. You know, it's not a song that's reliant heavily on fidelity. It's what's loud enough to get the people going in the club.

But speaking of the percussion, there's also canned handclaps in there that are very apparent at the start of the song. Yeah, the handclaps from the 808 drum machine with a little ambience in there, bring them to life. Are these real handclaps, Charlie, or are they processed? No, no, no, no. Those are absolutely from a rolling drum machine. Like, those are the clap sound.

So I think it's safe to say that there's no analog instruments in here. It's all just synthesizer programming. No recorders. Yep. Save for the voices at the beginning, I'm not sure if that's Little John in the evening and twins doing this kind of like do-op thing. Dumb, dumb, dumb, do-d-d-dum. So they're kind of like doing a little baseline there with their voices, which I love. And I don't know that I always totally clocked until we're listening to the song right now.

That's a cool choice. I didn't even clock the doo-wop connection. That's a really great synthesis to make, Nate. That doo-wop-y, bassy vocal at the beginning can also be related to a thing in the song that's an embodiment of crunk music overall. And that's the idea of the electronic ostinado in the song. So at the beginning, we have the bass vocals going, do-loom-boom-boom, boom, boom. While the synthesizer behind them is going,

but-um, but-um, but-um, but-um, and that repeats throughout the entire song. I love you dropping this ostinado term here, because this is maybe more of a figure from classical music, But basically it describes any kind of repeating motive in a song. So maybe an equivalent in like jazz would be a riff. And maybe in pop music, we might call it a hook. But these are all forms of ostinati, like some repeating musical motive that happens again and again. Ostinati?

That's the plural of ostinado? Yes. Like Panini. These aren't Osinato who have been bad. Charlie, I don't even know what to do with you right now. Okay, Rihanna, please continue. I'm going to take some deep breaths. Anyway, the ostinado is an important part of music in general, like you said, Nate.

When it comes to hip-hop and pop music, it can be a hook, but it's also present in the instrumentals of a lot of pop songs. The ostinado in Dark Horse by Katie Perry became. a source of litigation when Katie Perry was sued specifically over the eight-note ostinado that repeats throughout the track. I'd even go so far to say that an ostinado shares a modern definition with the loop in hip-hop, thinking of a track like Drake's Energy, which uses the same few notes over and over and over again for the entire three-minute runtime. Look, I got enemies, got a lot of enemies, got a lot of people trying to drape me on my energy

So taking it back to get low, we hear the song's Ostenado in the first few seconds. Wait a minute. Are you saying that riff continues for five minutes and we don't get bored of it? Yeah, it goes through for the entirety of the song, even when the song starts moving into directives in the back half of the track. There's our dance instructions. Exactly. And that brings me to a big signify. of crunk music, the lyrics.

Like mentioned before, directives are a big part of crunk because it's a genre that is working in tandem with dancing in the club. Get Low is full of these directives, thinking even of the title, right? Like you drew the comparison to Limbo because Get Low literally is a direction, you know? Right. It's one of those few songs where when it comes on, people all follow the instructions and everybody gets low whenever the chorus comes in. It's kind of magical that a song could instruct the whole dance floor to move in a particular way.

Thinking about the director of the song to get low, that has a sonic analog here. I mean, we've been talking about it. It has these low textures, these like subterranean bases, these booming drums. It's a song that is literally getting low. This song has a super long chorus, but the whole hook, essentially is telling you where to move. To the ground. You know, it's telling you to get low,

but then it's saying to the window, to the wall, et cetera, et cetera. I can't believe I'm saying this, but I think it is a much more poetic way of saying, move to your left, move to your right. Yeah, and Charlie, let us not forget the poetry of the sweat dripping off your balls. Oh, yeah, exactly.

Which I think is maybe a quote from Shakespeare. if I'm not mistaken. Rihanna, recover us. I keep having to do that, don't I? I feel like I've been pretty well behaved. It's my colleague here who is just spinning us off into juvenile tangents. But please, crack music, let's get serious. I personally see these directives continuing that connection with the early days of hip-hop,

where, as we previously said, hip-hop was founded to be danced to. And there's a lot of songs in the early years of hip-hop that foster a call and response relationship between the performer and the audience. One of my personal favorites is The Breaks by Curtis Blow. So on your hands up in the sky and wave around from side to side, if you deserve a break tonight, somebody say, all right. So on the contrary to conscious rap or lyrical-based rap, the performer is responding to the audience, the audience is responding to the performer rather than the performer just simply talking to

or rating to the listener. Right, it becomes this participatory experience. And while I was researching these directives, I found a crazy connection. So let's go a little deep on the window to the wall bit. Please. That part, as iconic as it is, is actually an interpolation. Wait, really? Yes.

What does it interpolate? It interpolates a DJ Smurf song from 1990. And DJ Smurf, aka Mr. Collapark, is an important part of the Atlanta music scene. He founded his own record label, Calla Park Music, and was even featured on Bubba Sparks's single Miss New Booty that also features the Ying-Yang Twins. Call it Port Bubba Sparks. But you're saying that DJ Smurf originated this idea from the window to the wall? He didn't come up with it, per se, because it seems like it came from the black fraternity party scene in the night. But DJ Smurf was the first artist to put it in a song.

It's called To the Walls and the similarity is striking. Wow. I mean, that sounds like the Get Low sped up remix. Like, that's just Get Low. Or I guess Get Low is, yeah, obviously an interpolation. So that track, To The Walls, came out in 1995. Get Low was released as a single in 2003. So that interpolation firmly roots Get Low in,

in nearly a decade of Atlanta hip-hop. But even though Kruk is in Atlanta sound and it's pulling from these touchstones of Atlanta hip-hop, it's still incorporating these larger styles and sonic signifiers from the larger American South. It's bringing in the sexual lyricism and electronic instrumentation of Miami's genre, Miami Bass. Most songs for Miami-Base are a little bit too explicit to play here,

but one of the same songs is a track like Two Live Cruise, shake a little something. First of all, that's awesome. Second of all, maybe you could hear Kronk is sort of a slowed down and like kind of spaced out version of some of that Miami-based sound because it's still got these like

ostinado rhythms, but it's like a lot chiller and sort of laid back. Yeah. And in addition, it's also pulling call-and-response elements from New Orleans bounce music. An early bounce hit is MCT Tucker and DJ Irv's Where Day At? And it uses the same chant as another Lil' John production from the Ying Yang Twins.

Of course, that's Salt Shaker featuring Liljohn and the East Side Boys. And sidebar, the idea of twerking in and of itself, because we hear it mentioned in a lot of these songs, is a term that comes from New Orleans music with the act of twerking resulting from bounce. So in Krunk, we have Atlanta, but we also have Miami, we have New Orleans, we have Memphis hip-hop, as we previously talked about. And this geographic diversity within the genre perhaps contributed to its popularity and later its legacy. We'll get some more of that after the break. Maria, you have a podcast now and you need to start acting like it. What's the first step as a podcaster?

Well, you have to ask lots of questions. I'm Maria Sharpova. and I'm hosting a new podcast called Pretty Tough. Every week, I'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition, work ethic, and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness. I have a few pretty tough questions for you. Okay.

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So I was curious as to how the sound of Krunk became so influential. I decided to talk to an expert, Atlanta music journalist Christina Lee, who, while also putting me on to the DJ Smurf connection, gave me some insight on the popularity of Kronk in the early 2000s, Lil Jon, and. the importance of Get Low. I mean, when I think of the early 2000s, just like the sound that's coming out of the time, I usually think of boy bands, to be honest. You know, this is the era of like TRL. You know, this is the era like Usher. Usher was not getting Crunk prior to Get Low.

Like, let's be honest. Christina describes the sound of Crunk music as raw and rambunctious and points out how unlike it was that the genre would become such a force in the world of pop music. It just didn't make any sense at the time. The fact that, like, Britney Spears went up to collaborate with Ying Gang twins. The fact that Usher felt the need, or the people around Usher, rather, felt the need to kind of, like, refresh his sound a little bit at a time when he's, like, one of the biggest selling R&B singers out there. That feels huge. That feels huge.

It felt, I mean, even just kind of. looking back again at how Krunk started super rough around the edges. Like, it just seems like a really unlikely story to me. I also asked how the sound of the genre changed between Get Low and then Usher's Yeah, featuring Lil' John and Ludacris. Well, at the time, Little John was already thinking about this idea of like trying to create hybrids with Krunk. There was even songs prior to that, or at least one song prior to that, where they were

testing out the Krunk R&B sound. And let's be honest, it didn't quite catch on. The fact that I don't even remember what the song was is probably like a testament to that. But, I mean, it kind of showed the unlikely, I guess, range that could be accomplished with this. Because at this time, you had the expectation that it's all about, like throwing elbows.

You have the folks like crime mob, like, knuck a few buck. There was, like, one expectation for how you're supposed to behave with a crunk song. But now with the likes of, Usher, you could get Crunk at a wedding. And like, that's a crazy possibility to me. Yeah, totally.

So we talk about Yeah, right? I personally did not think Yeah was a Crunk song prior to having this conversation with Christina. But it's apparent when you listen to Yeah. Aside from the fact that Atlanta rappers, little Johnny Ludacris are featured on it. It has all the hallmarks of Get Low. It feels like it's almost the same production.

You have the 808 low bass. You have the mid-range synth-Asonado sound. We have directives to dance. It's in a slow, very danceable rhythm. Got all this call and response. In this case, we do have a recorder or some kind of flute, an organic element. Did you mention the ostinati? I think I did, the Austenado bass, yeah.

But what about the booby-bootie? That's what I would identify as the ostinato. Yes, Rihanna, that to me connects to get low with a... Actually, there's kind of even a similar kind of pattern there. Ting them back to back, mate? Wait, now I can only hear, yeah. Bo-dum, bo-dum, bo-dum, bo-dum, bo-dum, bo-dum. Yeah, nice, Rihanna.

And then, yeah, is do-do-do, do-do. So very similar melodic motion there. But it's a little more poppy. It's a little more like synthed out and like in your face in this way that I could see they're deliberately probably saying, let's take this regional crunk sound and like blow it out for the masses. And it doesn't seem to have anywhere near the depth of innuendo, which we barely just touched on in the, you know, from get low. Innuendo? Are you using that word correctly?

I think it's overt, uendo. There we go. we go. There is some reading of the dance directive lyrics, which are even more sexual than we got into, but we don't need to go there. I just want to

be clear that you don't think sweat dripping down your balls is an innuendo. No, it's the window to the wall part. Innuendo to the wall? Oh, God. You did this. You did this. You brought us to this place. No. Rihanna, the parents are fighting

again. I'm going to rope you guys back in with something you said earlier, Nate, about yeah, sounding more poppy. And as Christina stated, this was a kind of hybrid of crunk and R&B. Another song that does that is Sierra's One Two Step. The Crunk elements aren't necessarily as overt as they were in Usher's track, but there's a simplistic crunk R&B production here. We're leaning heavily on the electronic elements, the hand claps, the drum machine. The directives. Exactly.

And similarly to other crunk songs, there's a lot of directives. This is a faster dance vibe, but yeah, I can hear those elements. And to bring it into the 2010s, One Two Step carries a lot of similarities to Tenosh's All Hands on Deck, which feels like One Two Step's spiritual successor and also could classify as a Crunk song. All hands on deck All in the front, all in the back just like that. I'm going to blow your minds again. Clear Austinato.

Lots of directives. Back in the right tempo. Right. It's simple. It's sparse. It has these club directives. And much like one two step, it doubles down on the electronic elements in Crunk and incorporates, like we've talked about, the ostinato. Another Krunk successor, other than this Krunk R&B hybrid that we've been talking about,

is the Atlanta subgenre of ringtone rap or also known as Snap Music. It stems from Krunk. You could hear it a little bit in these examples of Sierra and Tenache, but there's sparse production switching Krunk's handclaps to snaps, like you pointed out, and taking it down to just the 808, the high hat. the bass, main groove, and a vocal track. Thinking of a song like the classic Laffy Taffy by D4L. Or even crank that by Soldier Boy, who is also from Atlanta.

You could hear in both of these tracks, they have the same signifiers that Krunk does. Club directives, you know, shake that Laffy Taffy, crank that. There's distinctive vocals. You know, they're a little bit goofy in both of these examples, but the production is sparse, so the attention is on the directives. And bringing back in DJ Smurf, aka the man who originated the to the window to the wall refrain, he's the one that's credited with discovering Soldier Boy.

So there's these long connections in Atlanta rap at this time between these artists. This is so cool to hear these familiar songs kind of in a new light. as part of this larger legacy of this crunk style. The crunk continuum, if you will. I'll take it. Okay. You got one W today, Charles. Now, if this represents like this cool assimilation of crunk into mainstream pop,

how else did this go down? Because I have to imagine some of the other sort of mainstreaming of the crunk sound may have rankled some of its originators. Like, it can't have all been these rosy collabs and, you know, paying fealty to the genre. Where did the Crunk legacy go awry? Well, so when I was younger, I listened to a lot of warped tour core scene music. And I have been privy to a genre that unfortunately is known as, scrunk or alternatively, crunk core. And the word scrunk, stay with me here, is a hybrid of

screamo and crunk. Right. So like warped tour, like pop punk, hardcore, emo stuff, somehow mixing with the crunk sound. I really wish that that term came from Dr. Seuss, and unfortunately it doesn't. Scrunk definitely sounds like it. But yeah, Charlie, it brings post-hardcore and combines it with the electronic elements of crunk music. A group that has become the most emblematic of this crunk chorus sound is a band called Broken Side. Here's their song, Get Crunk. This is like the vodka Red Bowl of pop music. It's like going in two opposite directions that are not healthy for you.

overly sweet, but also medicinal. I don't know, maybe a metaphor is ridiculous, but this is not a good combination for me. It's almost like this takes those horror core roots of Krunk that we heard at the very beginning of the episode and like smashes them back on top of the sort of classic Krunk sound. Wow. Yeah, I think calling it Krunk Core is not a bad name

because a song like Get Kunk has all. the sonic hallmarks of crunk music. It's built on an ostinado with these pre-programmed beats, and there's lyrics that are directed at the audience. There's screaming vocals, and the aesthetic leans more seen than anything else. But, you know, at the end of the day, broken cider telling the audience to get crunk, whatever that audience is, and whatever that means. The watered-down version of crunk core was even moved in. to the mainstream by 303, who didn't scream their vocals, but definitely continued the white boyification of the jodra. And it's apparent in their deep cuts, particularly this track

off of Want called I'm Not Your Boyfriend Baby. It's like what kid rock was to rock and hip hop in the 90s. Yeah, it's interesting because a lot of hyperpop artists cite 303 as an inspiration. And you could even see bits and pieces of this, you know, genre trickle down in the music of artists like 100 gecks and their song 100 decibel cloud. Yeah, it doesn't have the awesome thought about those vocal chants definitely feel

Krunk-ish. Wow, that's amazing. I'm not going to say anything bad about any of these, what you called the white boyification of Krunk, Rihanna. not to say that I don't see it maybe as like kind of watering down some of the original style. But as you said, you know, it might also be like opening it up to new audiences. And I would be interested in knowing like do these bands, how are they recognizing some of the forebears of this movement? Are they sort of like erasing the history?

Are they honoring it? I feel like we're still wrestling with this idea of the legacy of Crunk and even Lul John as an artist. So I thought I'd go back and ask Christina Lee. What's interesting is that so much of the criticism surrounding Crunk at the time is precisely about trying to find out what the expiration date was going to be because the sound was just so specific. And Atlanta in particular is just so prolific with coming up with different sounds, like different artists.

It just seemed very likely that like something like this wasn't going to last very long. When you think about Crunk, like it's always usually in conversation. with how, like, Crump precedes snap. Snap music being like this really spare type of pop music where it is all about dancing. And you don't necessarily, you're still at the club, but you don't necessarily want to throw elbows. And then when you have the likes of GZ coming into the fold and, like, bringing what's going to become known as trap music, they're looking at Crunk music as being like, well, okay, how do we even answer to this? The answer is that we can't.

We're going to just do something like completely different. So, so much of the conversation around Crunk is about, like, well, how? How long can this really last? Like, honestly, when are we going to get tired of little John saying, yeah? And yet, Rihanna, Crunk might have been a short-lived movement with longer influence. But here we are again. You're hearing it on the radio. It's having yet another life.

So I guess we can all go get Crunk. Give me all the Crunk interpretations. I'll all gladly listen. I'm going to crack up in a Crunk juice. Yeah, maybe I thought of Crunk is kind of this novelty or something to kind of joke about. But no, this is a serious musical movement that continues to impact the sound of pop music. Rianna, thank you. And thank you, Christina, for shining light on this crunk phenomenon.

This episode was brought to you by AMP, Amazon's live radio app. Switched on Pop is produced by Rana Cruz, edited by Art Chung, engineered by Brandon McFarlane, illustrations by Ira Scott Leap, community management by Abby Barr, our executive producer is Nishak Kerwa. Remember of the Vox Media Podcast Network and a production of Vulture. You can find more episodes of SwitchOnPop anywhere you get podcasts, our website SwitchedonPop.com, and you can reach out to us at SwitchOnPop at any social media platform to tell us what crunk is in your ears. Or alternatively, what crunk interpolations you're hearing on the radio.

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