Crunk What?

Photo by James Blasingame

We always had our own scene down here Memphis. Our music can be like me and MJG, where it's soul, like that modern-day Al Green shit. Or you got a group like Triple 6 Mafia, where it's some get buck shit. "Get buck" is just another term for what everybody's now calling "crunk." We said "get buck" back in the day, they say "crunk" now. If you want my honest opinion, I think that crunk music was completely influenced by get-buck music. In fact, crunk is get-buck music—period. But the origins of a slang term aren't that important. I mean, who was the first motherfucker to say "dope" or "fresh"? Was we trippin' when the term "def" went all over the world? The only time it gets played out is when corporate America takes it and runs with it: "These Pampers are crunk" or whatever. That's when you say, "OK, enough is enough. They done wore ‘crunk' out." I hope the world can see that the South is more than crunk music. We weren't built on crunk, man. We signed with Bad Boy Records recently. Working with Bad Boy ain't too different from working with Universal or Interscope. Shit looks different on the outside looking in, but it isn't. It's a regular fuckin' record label with regular fuckin' record-label problems. But it's cool. We're gonna keep pumping the dope wherever we are. And our deal with Bad Boy is very short. I gotta talk real with you. I can't sugarcoat this shit. It's like a tug of war with them right now. It's not all that we thought it was going to be, and I don't know if we're all they thought we'd be. But we did our end. With the small amount of promotion we got, we still sold like 600,000 records. We did that by ourselves. Bad Boy is a fly, pretty label. Their main focus is somewhere other than us. This is an East Coast-based magazine, and a lot of East Coast motherfuckers need to be reading this. I'm not proclaiming that Eightball and MJG are the greatest shit that ever happened to Southern rap music, but we got our own following and we do what we do. I'm happy as well that my 600,000 fans buy my record every time it comes out. Because I know a lot of motherfuckers that came out in '93, when we did, that's locked up or working at McDonald's or just ain't fucking with rap anymore. EIGHTBALL

For the record, we think that Eightball and MJG are one of the greatest things that ever happened to rap music, period.