Iosef Tarasov: stunned Oh. He was the one you sent to kill the fing Boogeyman. Well John wasnt exactly the Boogeyman.Discover new music on MTV.HIP-HOP fans love to bemoan the state of the art. Then suddenly one day he asked to leave.Get the latest music news, watch video clips from music shows, events, and exclusive performances from your favorite artists. I once saw him kill three men in a bar, with a pencil. Something you know very little about.Turning on the local news or reading the newspaper was an anxiety-driven event. Everywhere I turned was bad news. I know I am not alone in confessing it was a dark time for me and my sanity. (Atlanta), Juvenile (New Orleans), Trick Daddy (Miami) - bearing one exhilarating hit after another.Unless you live under a rock, you would have missed the Global Pandemic since March of 2020. Over the past year, radio stations across the country have been hijacked by a string of rebel yellers - Petey Pablo (North Carolina), Lil' Flip (Houston), Young Buck ("Cashville," Tenn.), T.I. But perhaps even hard-core curmudgeons will agree that 2004 has been great fun, thanks in large part to the vociferous Southern hip-hop stars kind enough to take over the pop charts.
And from Britney Spears, who hired Atlanta's Ying Yang Twins, to the Roots, who recruited Houston's Devin the Dude, acts from all genres have decided that their albums aren't complete without a cameo appearance from a guest star with an aversion to terminal consonants.No one has done more to help this year's Southern takeover than Lil Jon, the screaming, pimp-cup-holding Atlantan who also happens to be one of the country's most exciting, and most successful, electronic composers. Even the most proudly parochial New York City street vendors do a brisk trade in Southern hip-hop mixtapes. The once-dominant East-Coast hip-hop establishment accounted for only 24.1 percent. A recent article in Vibe magazine found that they accounted for 43.6 percent of hip-hop radio spins this year (through October). Find many great new & used options and get the best deals for Usher Feat Lil Jon Ludacris Yeah 3 Vers Advance CD at the best online prices at eBayThis is isn't a new trend: Southern accents have been ubiquitous in mainstream hip-hop since at least the late 1990's, and the biggest Southern hip-hop acts, like Missy Elliott (Virginia Beach) and OutKast (Atlanta), have been so successful that many listeners don't even think of them as Southern rappers: they're pop stars now.But whereas they once worked to join the hip-hop mainstream, now Southern rappers are the hip-hop mainstream. Markem 5400 repair and troubleshootingTo ensure the album's success, Lil Jon recruited some two dozen guest stars - make that three dozen, if you spend the extra $5 (as you probably should) for the deluxe edition, which is packaged with a remix disc and a DVD.Like many Southern hip-hop stars, Lil Jon knows the importance of a great party chant, which is just as well, since he doesn't really rap. The disc is credited to Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz (those are his backup shouters). His terrific, reliably frenetic new album is "Crunk Juice" (TVT), and like just about everything he does, it's a collaboration. That same year, he also released his debut single, "Who U Wit," which helped turn the rather chirpy sound of bass music into something slower and meaner and more volatile. In 1996, he put together the bass-music compilation "So So Def Bass All-Stars," a classic of the genre: it's a riot of nearly infrasonic bass lines and furious drum-machine beats. And midlevel record executive, for Jermaine Dupri's So So Def label, he was intrigued by the Miami-bred hip-hop offshoot known as bass music. The one-word answer can't be printed here, nor can it be broadcast on the radio, where you are likely to hear, instead, a half-recognizable blur: they could be shouting, "Shoe!"Ten years ago, when Lil Jon was an Atlanta club D.J. The current Lil Jon & the East Side Boyz single is "What U Gon' Do," where the titular question is posed again and again. The Ying Yang Twins became stars in their own right that's why Ms. The group's 2002 breakthrough album, "Kings of Crunk," had an even better guest list, and it included Lil Jon's first mainstream hit, "Get Low," with the Ying Yang Twins, which congealed around Lil Jon's typically efficient refrain, "To da windooooow! To da wall!"Since then, crunk has been everywhere. But he did a lot to perfect it, thickening his beats by adding unexpected synthesizer lines: a raucous roar here, an unexpectedly dainty whistling sound there.For their 2001 TVT Records debut, "Put Yo Hood Up," Lil Jon & the Eastside Boyz further improved their formula by inviting an impressive list of rappers to join them the album spawned a hip-hop hit, "Bia' Bia'," in which Lil Jon's shouted provocations (the only one that can be printed here is, "You scared!") alternated with pugnacious verses from Ludacris, Too $hort and Chyna Whyte. And it was thrilling.Lil Jon certainly didn't invent crunk by himself. In the background, you could (barely) hear an artful arrangement of hums and sighs and false starts. With "Yeah!" Usher proved that Lil Jon's monstrous synthesizer lines were surprisingly well-suited to mainstream R&B, and Ciara's "Goodies" was even bolder: a high, gleaming keyboard note slid down an octave and back, then up an octave and back, while Ciara's multitracked voice half-whispered the lyrics. Crime Mob has a hit with the marvelously titled elbow-throwing anthem, "Knuck if You Buck."Somewhere along the way, Lil Jon made an unexpected discovery: crunk beats work for lovers as well as fighters. There were 10 tracks by the tough-talking Atlanta trio Trillville, including the riotous, chest-pounding hip-hop hit "Neva Eva." Even better were the 11 tracks by the so-called prince of crunk, Lil Scrappy, who turned a set of eerie, theremin-inspired Lil Jon beats into a marvelous mini-album that has spawned two hits so far, "Head Bussa" and "No Problem." In August, BME released the addictive self-titled debut from a young, co-ed sextet called Crime Mob, whose absurdly belligerent rants evoke the gleeful mayhem of an out-of-control classroom. In February, the label released its first CD, a 21-track split. Chappelle, as Lil Jon, would bellow on his show "Yeah!," "O.K.!," or "What?" Many parodies rely upon exaggeration, but that wasn't possible in this case.So it's reassuring to hear, on "Crunk Juice" - the name is an advertisement for Lil Jon's energy drink - that the peripatetic star remains an inventive, detail-obsessed producer who is pleased to know that he can shred nightclub speakers and seduce pop listeners with the same filthy keyboard line. He received a big boost when the comedian Dave Chappelle parodied his mane of dreadlocks and his monoverbal outbursts: Mr. The sound is great, but the name needs work.)All the while, Lil Jon was becoming more firmly entrenched in the celebrity constellation, and if his shtick seemed a bit one-dimensional - a gleaming pimp cup, some gleaming sunglasses, those gleaming teeth - it was certainly effective. That explains the head-spinning eclecticism: it's good for business. Among other things, this album is Lil Jon's calling card, meant to inspire the next round of freelance work, which should keep him busy even if "Crunk Juice" isn't another commercial smash. In fact, the track sequencing is sometimes willfully perverse, as when a head-banging, Slayer-sampling rant (produced by Rick Rubin) crashes headfirst into "Lovers & Friends," an almost comically light piano ballad sung by Usher. When Lil Scrappy shows up to rap his verse, Lil Jon runs the first few lines through a metallic-sounding voice processor, as if Scrappy were emerging from the guts of one of the producer's synthesizers.Suffice it to say that this isn't exactly a concept album. ![]()
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