Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz release 'Get Low' — crunk goes national
BME Recordings / TVT issues 'Get Low' by Lil Jon & The East Side Boyz, featuring Ying Yang Twins, as a single from the Kings of Crunk album on December 17, 2002. Produced by Lil Jon, the track's distinctive combination of pounding 808s, hyperkinetic synth leads, call-and-response shouted hooks, and explicit dance-floor lyrics defines the crunk sub-genre's mainstream commercial template. The song peaks at #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in 2003 and becomes inescapable on US pop radio through most of that year.
Why it matters
Crunk had been an Atlanta thing for several years before this song. Three 6 Mafia's Tear da Club Up Thugs material in the late 1990s was crunk-shaped. Lil Jon's prior catalog (Get Crunk, Who U Wit: Da Album, Put Yo Hood Up) had been the architectural underground. The crunk movement was already happening. What "Get Low" did was take all of it and put it onto Top 40 radio, then onto every wedding-and-bar-mitzvah dance floor in America for the next decade. The shouted call-and-response hook ("to the window, to the wall") became one of the most-played-at-functions sequences of the 2000s. Lil Jon's production fingerprint — the 808 kicks, the squealing synth lead, the abrupt drum-fill transitions — defined the Atlanta-club aesthetic that would later, slowed down and minimized, become trap. You can hear the inheritance line directly. Crunk was loud. Trap is quiet. The bass is the same.
Branches
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