ILM hero K.S. reviews Crunk Juice

I didn't actually see this in the paper, i just copy+pasted the KS article.

Lil Jon, who hails from Atlanta, is an inventor of crunk, a Southern hip-hop style that has emerged as one of the most radical developments in the last few years of pop music. And with numerous hits to his name - with his own group, the East Side Boyz, and with songs he has produced for artists like Usher, Ciara and his Atlanta protégés the Ying Yang Twins - Lil Jon has become the latest super-producer to challenge hitmakers like Timbaland and the Neptunes. He has succeeded in large part by operating outside hip-hop's sonic rulebook.

On the surface, crunk doesn't sound radical. Its hallmarks are spiky drum-machine rhythms, shouted one-line choruses, and Lil Jon's growled interjections of "Yeah!" and "O.K.!" But strip away the yelping, and the real centerpiece of crunk is revealed in the form of buzzing keyboard melodies - a kind of sound that has never really been welcome in hip-hop before.

On "Get Crunk," a spindly, sickly tone wobbles between major and minor keys. "Salt Shaker," which Lil Jon produced for the Ying Yang Twins, uses a bouncing, synthetic bass line and falling glissandos: weird, electronic sounds that would be more at home in underground German techno than in chart-topping hip-hop. And while the vocal refrain to "Yeah" is heady, the real hook is that plaintive three-note riff, which cuts through the air like a bomb-shelter siren.

Lil Jon's keyboards aren't just surprising. They're perverse. He breaks from hip-hop tradition by choosing a sound and a technology borrowed from European rave music and from English new wave artists like Gary Numan and Thomas Dolby. Hip-hop culture has often positioned itself at odds with electronic dance music (in "Without Me," Eminem dissed Moby with the line, "Nobody listens to techno") and the antipathy has created a technological divide.

While synthesizers - electronic instruments that manipulate electrical signals to create sounds that mimic instruments or that are brazenly artificial - often anchor dance-music forms like house and techno, hip-hop has relied almost exclusively on the sampler, a device capable of reproducing any sound, whether recorded or played live. Sampling has allowed artists as diverse as De La Soul, Public Enemy and Kanye West to harness the history of popular music for their own reinterpretations.

As royalties required to clear popular samples have skyrocketed, perhaps Lil Jon's preference for drum machines and vintage-sounding keyboards is nothing more than an economic decision, a way of making beats without paying big bucks to copyright holders. But his unabashed reliance on sounds so alien to hip-hop culture seems like a turning point. Making no secret of his sources, Lil Jon claimed in an interview with Scratch, a hip-hop production magazine, that he was influenced by the rave music he heard in Atlanta strip clubs.

Eminem might have been right, up to a point, when he mocked Moby. But thanks to Lil Jon, techno may have the last laugh.

xp

All those points are OTM. There was actually a lot that didn't make it into the final cut, including long bits about not only Miami bass and electro but also Los Angeles G-funk (which, to my ears, has done the most with squealing synthesizer leads) and, indeed, "Planet Rock." But those bits got edited out. Ultimately the hook came down to a dichotomy between synthesizers & samplers, but unfortunately that'd be a complicated story to tell in a production magazine much less in a sidebar in the NYT.

Anyway, I'm not trying to pass the buck, and I don't mean to slam my editor over there at all, because she had her reasons for angling the piece as she did. (ILM readers may read the NYT, but most NYT readers are not detail fanatics of ILM proportions, for better or for worse.) But a lot of these things were at least touched upon in the first draft (including a reference to that Mobb Deep "She Blinded Me With Science" song that I wish had been preserved as well).

Thanks for listening and please don't take my Kompakt-4-Life chain!

(actually there is one in the sitting room but it's my flatmate's and I don't know how to use it)

It's relevant to bring this up because it helps to recognise how crunk is different from a lot of its forebears. To simply reduce crunk to either bounce X rave or just part of the electro-bass-bounce continuum is to elide over what makes it particular and unusual in and for itself. I think taking a too rigid position about what is at stake sonically in crunk can only distort and skew yer listening somewhat.

(one thing I would say is that crunk is not entirely anti-sampling and indeed the possibilities of crunk + sampling strike me as potentially very exciting - see "Rubberband Man" obv)

(also the correct dance music reference for crunk isn't german techno but K-Klass's "Let Me Show Ya Love" k thanks bye)

Good point! In that same David Banner interview in Scratch, he talks about how when he was starting producing he would look for really weird sounds to sample, and even mentions Sun Ra I think!

Probably won't get any broadsheet column inches for journalists but, nevertheless, is quite an attractive take for someone beyond the BS of wanting to over-analyse and intellectualise everything (the mere fact that people are trying to intellectualise the most instinct-driven form of hip-hop for years is itself quite quaint).

The MOST techno crunk album I've heard, by the way, is probably the second Ying Yang Twins one (as far as extended electronic parts with no words go, anyway). Though I'm sure there's many I've never heard.

Also, I'm wondering whether what Tim says about Miami bass here applies, in his mind (if he's ever heard it) to Maggotron's stuff (which seems pretty thick and viscous to me, though I have no idea whether we'd be using those adjectives in the same way): "Miami Bass isn't really synthy in the same way as crunk. What appeals about crunk synths are how thick and viscuous they are, sorta flushed (with lust? drugs? hypnotic?)."
xp

see, ya really need to hear some baltimore trax. crunk fits nicely for me in the bass/bounce/whatever continuum. bass always sounded like music from mars too when put up against nyc/cali rap.like planet rock's baby bro and then some. and i always heard lots of techno in it. (and bass was and is all over the place soundwise. i often wonder what people are thinking of when they mention bass. what era. what performer. ya know? also a music with a rich and varied sampling history.)

And I think everyone here likes crunk because of its instinctual elements, no one is trying to take that away or overintellectualize it, just figure out where all these crazy alien sounds are coming from.

You ever wonder why mentasm stabs and rave noises wind up in hip hop? The reason is that after 10 years of those sounds being on records they are all presets on the rompler those guys are using. Lil John sounds ravey because he is using an Emu XL-1 instead of just the Planet Phatt or Mo' Phatt rompler which the hiphop guys are *supposed* to use.

Go to guitar center and scroll through the presets on a Fantom, or a Triton, or most importantly a Motif, and you will find all these really familiar bread and butter dance sounds. The crossover isn't coming from the records, producers are just grabbing patches from the "dance" banks instead of the hip-hop r&b banks.

I haven't heard any Maggotron stuff Chuck! I'm fully prepared to revise all my statements if they turn out to be way off-board.

I should note that I love Miami Bass but for mostly different reasons to why I love crunk - crunk rarely strikes me as interesting rhythmically but miami bass almost always does. It always annoys me that more dance producers don't take their cues from miami bass more - apart from random stabs by Basement Jaxx or Layo & Bushwacka etc. there's precious little. The entire breakbeat community would improve a gazillion times if they started to take more cues from Quad City DJs etc.

still, the feature on him from Scratch mag deals with all that, at least briefly, and is definitely worth a read.

and yeah, i didn't mean to discount the sampling in lil jon's music either, especially since the new one is the most sampling-intensive records he's done yet, if i'm not mistaken...

the popularity of these alien sounds have less to do with their origins, and instead on the present context. specifically, in a post-pharrell/post-post prince world, don't lil' jon's productions sound disorienting enough to stop tracing their debts to one particular influence?

as IF lil jon figures making r+b necessarily requires GOING soft.

luckily there isn't a problem w/those tracks!

Original Draft:

"The rave is back – at least on record. But what strange records: the buzz and howl of archaic synthesizers, played with a teeth-on-edge timbre last heard in London's acid house clubs of the early '90s, today come from hip-hop – especially the Southern variant called "crunk," which is essentially the invention of the Atlanta producer Lil' Jon.

Synthesizers – electronic instruments that manipulate electrical signals to create sounds ranging from the simulacral to the brazenly artificial – often anchor dance music forms like house and techno, but they have rarely been the centerpiece of hip-hop. Although Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" famously sampled the German group Kraftwerk's proto-techno keyboards, and Los Angeles "G-funk" soared on Dr. Dre's squealing tremolo lines, hip-hop's cornerstone is the sampler, a device capable of reproducing any sound, whether recorded or played live. Early hip-hop tracks accompanied rappers with drum machines, but those fell out of favor as the break beat – a sampled drum fill generally lifted from vintage funk, soul, and even rock records – became hip-hop's gold standard. [Note: I'm aware that this is way reductive. -PS]

Lil' Jon, whose productions have underpinned some of the year's biggest hits – Lil' Jon and the East Side Boyz' "Get Low," Ciara's "Goodies," and most notably Usher's ubiquitous "Yeah" – has reintroduced the synthesizer to rap music. Lil' Jon's signature may be the group chants of songs like "Who U Wit?" – shout-along choruses that recall the macho bonding rituals of East Coast hardcore punk – but it's the synthesizers that make his hits so infectious. The vocal refrain to "Yeah" is heady, but the real hook is a minor-key riff that cuts through the air like a bomb-shelter siren. The staccato figure is a dead ringer for the "stab," a classic techno ornament immortalized in the detuned wobble piercing Joey Beltram's rave-era tune "Mentasm."

What's most intriguing about Lil' Jon's icy pokes and glissandos is the raw, unprocessed quality of his sounds, which often hover just out of tune of each other, creating a delicious friction. While the programmer-musicians of electronic dance music and most current hip-hop alike spend hours tweaking their patches to mask their sources, Lil' Jon's tones sound like they come straight out of the box. Anyone might come up with the same unvarnished kazoo sounds within five minutes of sitting down at a keyboard store's display model, but the roughness only adds to the devil-may-care quality of crunk, in which spontaneity is expressed not in tricky wordplay but in the brute force of barking in unison.

Lil' Jon's productions lean heavily on Miami bass, a regional strain of rap music that overlaps with techno in its preference for sharp, spiky rhythms programmed on primitive drum machines and bass synthesizers. Like Chicago's acid house music, which was born with the Roland TB-303, a single instrument was responsible for the development of the Miami bass sound, the Roland TR-808. (In England, a pioneering rave group paid homage to the instrument by naming itself 808 State.) The 808, with its crisp handclaps and dull, trunk-thumping bass drums, is at the core of Lil' Jon's tight, mechanized funk, in which hi-hat rolls uncoil like springs.

While hip-hop culture has often positioned itself at odds with electronic dance music – in "Without Me," Eminem dissed Moby with the line, "Nobody listens to techno" – Lil' Jon makes no secret of his debt to rave culture. In an interview with the hip-hop production magazine Scratch, he rhapsodized about the Novation Bass Station, a staple of dance-music production, claming that he was inspired by the synthesizer sounds of "rave/dance music" he heard playing in Atlanta strip clubs.

Lil' Jon's new album, Crunk Juice, deviates somewhat from his work so far, sampling the heavy metal band Slayer and the punk group Bad Brains – and employing, on one track, the jerky, futuristic rhythms of the Neptunes, a group whose hyperkinetic, cut-and-paste productions blur the lines between the synthesizer/sampler dichotomy – but on tracks like "What U Gon' Do," unapologetically canned strings and otherworldly bass frequencies reassert the primacy of vintage gear. While Lil' Jon and his collaborating vocalists are shouting out an unholy racket, he lets the machines do the talking."