Crunk is a genre of
hip hop music originated by
Three 6 Mafia in
Memphis, Tennessee in the early 1990s and gained mainstream success around 2003–04. Performers of crunk music are sometimes referred to as "crunksters". Crunk is often up-tempo and one of Southern hip hop's more club-oriented subgenres. An archetypal crunk track most frequently uses a
drum machine rhythm, heavy
bassline, 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 a slang past-tense form, "crunk", of the verb "to crank" (as in the phrase "crank up"), but has also been popularly assumed to mean "cronic-drunk", or "crazy drunk", after association with Crunk Juice, a brand of strong alcoholic beverage associated with the music genre. The term also means getting hyped or excited.