[electronic music playing]
[narrator] By the late '90s,
the South was beginning to assert itself as hip-hop's new power center.
OutKast and the Dungeon Family gave the region shape
and brought it props,
and No Limit and Ca$h Money gave it bounce,
and brought in dollars.
Their success was obvious,
and their impact immediate,
but simultaneously, just beneath the mainstream,
maverick hip-hoppers across the South were experimenting with new sounds
that were so unique, it would take years for their impact to be understood.
This is their story.
This is the Southern Lab.
[police siren]
[hip-hop beat playing]
Ask any Houston hip-hop head about their history,
and they'll tell you that H-Town was making hip-hop from the get-go.
♪ I'm up early 'cause my nigga don't sell dope after night time ♪
[narrator] At the time,
Houston was known as the home of hardcore and horrorcore hip-hop,
popularized by the now infamous Geto Boys.
There was a movement building on the south side of town,
a slowed-down sound that took hip-hop records
and dialed the speed way back.
The locals called it "chopped and screwed."
♪ Pimp C, bitch Holla at yo' bitch ♪
♪ Now on my team ♪
[Bun B] If you put out a rap record in Houston after '95,
nine times out of nine, there's some kind of reference
to the "slowed-down, screwed-up" sound.
♪ Slowed down screw tapes that knock ♪
♪ Blowin private stock ♪
[David Banner] Because it was so slow,
I didn't know what to think when I first heard Screw.
I was really high at the time,
so, it was a little bit more acceptable for me,
because I was high as shit.
♪ Fifth wheel and grill Candy Seville ♪
♪ My, my, pill, pill Workin', workin', wheel, wheel ♪
[Paul Wall] It's so hot down here, man.
You can't move too fast, man. You're gonna crash out, you know?
You gotta move at a slow pace.
The music go hand in hand with that.
Also, Houston's real spread out.
So, our culture is a car culture
where you drive from one place to the next.
You've got to cruise slow when you're riding them big Cadillacs.
[interviewer] Is there something about the city of Houston
that made them embrace that sound?
It was ours.
The city was having its own rappers.
It got its own style,
and you can ride to it, man.
So, it just took over, man.
Everybody was on that.
♪ We ghetto, ghetto boys That's why we act this way ♪
♪ Tryin' to see a million dollars Hoppin' these niggas don't blast today ♪
[narrator] Chopped and screwed's origins were hidden right in its name.
The "chopped" was a nod to the records being cut up,
but the 'screwed, ' that came from its pioneer,
a soft-spoken turntable maestro
who promoted the sound through his mixtape empire: DJ Screw.
♪ Court is, court is civil ♪
♪ In the middle of reality ♪
♪ Unsolved mysteries riddle ♪
♪ Knockin' over fat cats ♪
♪ And gettin' my bits My bits and kibbles ♪
[narrator] Decades after Screw made his first tape,
there's still a shop in Houston dedicated to this music,
and its caretaker is this man:
Screw's cousin, Big Bubb.
[music slowing down]
[Shad] How did Screw get started developing the sound
that he's known for today?
[Big Bub] As far as I can remember, Screw had always been a DJ.
[rap beats playing]
When we were young, we used to make mixtapes
and sell them at school for lunch money.
And my sister had one of them little record players,
the little plastic kind that you can adjust the speed to,
and I think we had Mantronix, "Fresh Is The Word."
♪ Mantronix is the crew that you must hear But please don't get concerned ♪
[Big Bubb] And that's the first time that I, myself,
experienced him actually slowing something down.
[speed of music oscillates]
But Screw got to a point.
He was like, "I'm gonna make a whole tape slow."
And I'm like, "A whole tape?
Well, that's on you if you wanna do it, then."
["Fresh is the Word" playing slowly]
♪ Mantronix is the crew that you must hear But please don't get concerned ♪
[Big Budd] It was, like, kind of overwhelming.
And then, you know, you gotta catch on to it and you're like,
"Man, that's kind of nice."
♪ Fresh is the word That's how I'm described ♪
♪ And so sweet is the rap And what I prescribe ♪
[Big Budd] And then, on top of that, Screw started chopping.
The chopping came from, like, taking a handclap,
scratching it with another track,
and you get, like, the after effect.
[mimicking rap beat]
Like that.
♪ I got 25 lighters on my dresser, Yessir ♪
♪ I gotsta get paid ♪
[Big Budd] Some of the stuff that he did on the mixes that he made,
it'd just have us tripping now, you know?
♪ Twenty five lighters on my dresser, dresser ♪
♪ I gots to get paid, paid ♪
[Big Budd] For me it was more the mixing,
and the blends that he would put together, you know.
Who would think to put these two songs together
in the way that he do.
It would probably be a song that you never heard before,
and Screw would make it your favorite song.
The thoughts of what's in this man's head while he doing this,
it's, like, phenomenal, man.
It can't be explained.
[chopped and screwed music playing]
[Bun B] The first Screw tapes, before there was rapping, was just music.
You would go to Screw's house,
and, say, for 10 dollars you could buy a tape.
For 12 dollars, he would shout you out on a tape,
and I think for, like, maybe 15 to 20 dollars
you could actually get on the mic and shout your hood out.
And eventually, it turned into some tapes being just all freestyle.
♪ I got 25 lighters for my 25 foes ♪
♪ 'Bout to break the mic Then break 25 mo' ♪
♪ 'Bout to rip the track Wit 'bout 25 flows ♪
♪ And I'm pimpim' like a mac Wit' 'bout 25 hoes ♪
[Walker] He had people freestyle on the tapes.
That gave them an opportunity to shine.
That gave them an opportunity to talk about who they were,
where they were from,
the streets that they drove down.
All these different things came alive on their tapes.
Some of the first ones were Fat Pat,
ESG,
C-Note, Big Pokey.
[Big Pokey] Before you know it, we were kinda just that Screwed Up Click.
We were just a bunch of cats from the south side,
and see, we'd just all be at Screw's house.
And we were in there pretty much freestyling this stuff
off the top of the head,
but we were just talking about stuff that we do on the regular, every day,
and everybody in the city could relate to it.
♪ 'Bout 25 yellowbones home ♪
♪ Do 'em bad and make 'em 25 phone home ♪
♪ Call daddy ♪
[Lil Keke] The whole screw culture was based upon the life
that we were looking at outside.
The cars, the parks,
the slab kings.
[Michael Watts] A slab is a car that you built from the ground up.
You get a car,
no motor, no nothing.
You resurrect the car from the dead.
♪ Pop my trunk and yep yep yep ♪
[E.S.G.] Different hoods rode different colors.
Botany Boys rode candy black.
Yellowstone rode candy gold.
My partners rode candy blue.
♪ I'm shootin' spiders off my rims ♪ 'Cause I'm ridin' on fours ♪
[Paul Wall] The rims, we call them 'swangas, '
"pokas" or "fo-fos," "eighty-fos."
Being hood, we don't say "fours," we say "fos."
We don't ride on "swingers," we ride on "swangas."
[C-Note] We were rapping about having money, having those cars, you know.
When the lean came, we were rapping about drank.
♪ And niggas don't understand That we be drinkin' the norm ♪
[Matt Sonzala] Here in Houston, they call it "lean," "drank," "sizzurp."
It's basically a mixture of codeine cough syrup with promethazine.
It's a downer, it slows you down, mellows you out.
They mix it with sodas, they mix it with candies
to kind of get the flavor better,
and it becomes almost, like, the drink of choice.
♪ I'm throwed in the game Southside playas, screwed up click mayne ♪
[Paul Wall] The syrup and the music, man, it's like when you eat a steak.
The wine brings out the flavors in the meat.
It's kind of how the syrup do.
The syrup brings out the flavors in the screw music.
And vice versa.
The screw definitely brings out the flavor of the drink.
Then you get to enjoy both.
When Houston came with its signature sound,
with the screwed up, slowed down,
the lean kind of just fit right into it.
You got to sip lean, smoke some weed and listen to screw,
and then you'll be like, "Yeah, I get it now."
♪ Comin' down the boulevard Can you see me ♪
[Paul Wall] As people start to understand the culture,
the music clicked to them,
and they're not just looking at it like we're saying some country bullshit.
We're actually talking about something that has meaning.
You know, we're real lyricists here.
We just got a Southern accent, you know what I'm saying?
We're talking in a language that a lot of people don't understand,
but we're really saying some shit.
♪ Every day, all day with Poly and Silk ♪
♪ Pints of lean in two liters With a fat ass grip ♪
[interviewer] Very few people were really there in the house making music.
Could you describe for us what that was like?
It was like you were coming into a fortress
or some kind of compound or something, you know.
The whole front part was surrounded with burglar bars.
So, you couldn't just walk up to the door and knock on the door.
Once that gate opened then, you know, you were allowed to walk in there
and knock on the side door, which was burglar-barred also.
You'd get to the Screw house about 6 PM.
Come through the burglar bar on the side.
You're going to see crates of records everywhere on the floor.
Bunch of big speakers everywhere.
Now, the fun begins.
♪ H-town, H-town Watch me go ahead, clown ♪
♪ Don't order their vocabulary Or ledger write down ♪
♪ Pimp the man in a minute, Writin' platinum shit ♪
♪ Witness this large conglomerate Called the Screwed Up Click ♪
You get your cups... boom, boom, boom.
Now, the talking, after all these cups,
the talking is a little more slurred by now.
♪ You feelin' me, the intensity on this M-I-C ♪
...and, chop!
Right, Big Hawk.
I'm on fire, man! You better leave me alone!
We don't record the music slow!
The freestyles in the music are fast, just like you hear it in the club.
When Screw gets through with it, he slows it down,
and then you hear it.
♪ Pimp the man in a minute, Writin' platinum shit ♪
♪ Witness this large conglomerate Called the Screwed Up Click ♪
[Big Pokey] The tapes, man, they'd take a long time.
Maybe we got to Screw house by nine, ten 'o clock at night,
and we'd come up out of that bitch at ten 'o clock in the morning.
Screw used to sleep on the turntable, just like this.
- "Screw!" - "Back up."
[narrator] Screw's sound spread across Houston at an analog pace,
tape to tape and hand to hand,
but the reaction of virgin ears always followed a script.
First, confusion about what they were hearing,
which made way for head-nodding appreciation
of Screw's molasses-like mixes.
And what began as a South Houston curiosity
was about to blow up.
Do you have any particular tapes or any particular freestyles
that you were a part of or that you listened to that...
Well, "3 'N The Mornin'." We broke the barrier with that.
Me and Screw were the first ones to put a chopped up song
in full rotation here, "Pimp Tha Pen."
♪ I'm draped up and dripped out Know what I'm talkin' 'bout ♪
♪ Three in the mornin' Gettin the gat out the stash spot ♪
This became a phenomenon, man,
and everybody wanted to be a part of this.
I was 17 years old, getting $2000 to sing that one song.
[C-Note] Screw sold a lot of records off that album, independently.
Big units, a hundred thousand copies.
That kind of established us in the music industry.
People were starting to open their eyes and look, like,
"Yeah, those guys down there are making some noise."
Next thing you know, these tapes became law.
They're everywhere.
And it started to be a Texas thing, not just a Houston thing.
Then it started to be a Southern thing.
Screw used to literally open up his gate at seven 'o clock,
literally doing 1500, 2000 cassettes at $10, in two hours' time.
It got to a point where he had
to set a certain time, you know what I mean?
Like, "Hey, nobody come over here 'til seven 'o clock."
There were lines around the corner, man, like a block party.
Like, people everywhere, cars everywhere.
The police was on his road, they thought Screw was a big dope dealer.
With that, he was forced to open a store.
♪ Showin' naked ass In the great state of Texas ♪
♪ Home of the players, So they'll never be no flexin' ♪
[Big Bubb] That's when it really jumped off, man.
People had a tangible place that they could come to,
with set store hours and everything.
♪ So 1996 you hoes better duck ♪
♪ Because the world gon drip candy and be all screwed up ♪
[narrator] After a decade of hustling tapes,
Screw and Screwed Up Click had become legends in the South.
They now had their own home,
a devoted following,
and huge ambitions.
Unfortunately, the relentless lifestyle of all-night work and lean sessions
was about to exact its toll.
[Big Pokey] It was crazy, 'cause I remember, that night,
I got that call, like, early morning,
and it was like, Screw dead? What?
[C-Note] It's a very touchy subject for a lot of people.
They really don't like to accept the way that my guy passed.
I really don't know the actual cause.
You know, I heard he may have had heart problems in the past
and stuff like that,
but, of course they're going to swing it more towards the lean.
[Bun B] Screw never intended that you had to be high to listen to screw music.
That was always a big misconception,
that you had to be sipping on syrup and smoking weed,
or smoking fry or something, to get into screw music,
and that was never the case.
It didn't spread through drug use, you know.
It spread because the sound was good.
You know, we grew up from toddlers, man,
and to see all the things that he had been through,
from then 'til now, you know,
I couldn't let it just go.
When Screw called me in later on in life for the store,
he needed somebody he could count on.
He needed somebody that he could trust.
Screw asked me a question.
He says, "Bubb, you here 'til you find you another job,
or 'til you do something different,
or are you here for life?"
I'm still here.
[screwed up beat playing]
♪ Twenty five lighters on my dresser Yessir ♪
♪ I gotsta get paid, paid ♪
[Walker] You drive around Houston today
and you'll see DJ Screw's face painted on walls,
you'll see people wearing his shirts,
you'll hear his music in the streets.
His legacy is very much alive,
and the sound is global now.
Really, so many people have adopted and adapted Screw's sound.
Anytime you hear hip-hop music, that's slowed down,
that influence comes from him.
♪ Twenty five carat diamonds in my ring ♪
[Big Pokey] I just hate that he didn't get a chance to see the love that he got
from the whole hip-hop community.
This shit evolved from a couple of cats just hooking up, going to Screw house,
and now, you got big artists,
Future, Drake, all of them.
They talking about our lifestyle.
You know, it's actually beautiful.
It's a beautiful thing.
[narrator] The influence of Screw's chopped and screwed sound
would take years to be fully appreciated,
but in hindsight,
the Screwed Up Click changed the texture of hip-hop forever.
But, Houston wasn't the only Southern city quietly crafting hip-hop's future.
The same could be said for the city on a Mississippi River bluff,
a place that's been called "Soulsville,"
a city steeped in musical tradition,
but shrouded by a dark legacy:
Memphis, Tennessee.
[John Shaw] Memphis has always had a little rough edge to it.
This place can be very oppressive.
It can feel oppressive.
It's a place where nothing ever succeeds.
[DJ Paul] Memphis was, at one point, like, probably still is, the robbery capital,
the unemployment capital...
Which kind of go hand in hand when you think about it.
But, you know, it rains a lot where we from
and it's... It's gloomy a lot.
[thunder clap]
Whoa!
Lightning, right behind you.
[thunder clap]
How would you explain the energy, the history,
to someone that doesn't know anything about Memphis?
Well, you know, Martin Luther King got killed in Memphis
and, you know, they make sure they let us know
that Dr. Martin Luther King was killed right here in Memphis, Tennessee
at the Lorraine Motel.
["We Can Fly Away" plays] ♪ We can fly ♪
♪ Fly away ♪
[Zandria Robinson] We all grew up with those stories from our parents.
And so, that led to a tremendous amount of guilt and shame
that we were that city that killed King.
Whereas, Atlanta is the birthplace,
but Memphis is the assassination place.
Always behind in some ways,
but also always innovating, sonically.
We could throw a rock, and we could hit a person
who could sing like we've never heard before in life.
♪ Take me Take me down ♪
[MJG] This is the home of blues, rock 'n roll, Elvis Presley, of course.
This is the home of Stax Records, you know.
You know, everybody's uncle or cousin, daddy, momma,
somebody used to sing or be in a band.
We bleed music around here.
[Gangsta Pat] Stax, it was just like Isaac Hayes used to describe it.
It was just more soulful and more deep rooted.
Memphis was a more, "You feel my pain" type of soul, you know?
And, you know, I can make it sexy and gangster at the same time.
The artists that were creating and moulding the sound at the time
were just expressing their pain and what they were going through in music.
People are sad,
and that sound, it's our city's sonic history book.
And it's the blueprint for
how we got this hip-hop culture that we have.
[narrator] Despite the city's rich musical history,
Memphis' transition from soul and blues to hip-hop was far from a straight line,
because, by the mid '80s, the labels and musicians
that had long made Memphis a music hub were now gone.
♪ DJ Spanish Fly ♪
♪ A word ♪
[narrator] Hip-hop would need to chart its own path,
and it would do that via an extensive hand-to-hand, lo-fi tape scene
that was led by a Jheri-curled DJ obsessed with 808s and eerie sounds.
[rap beats playing]
[interviewer] Yes, sir.
What's up, man?
Hey, what's happening, baby?
Thanks for doing this.
[Interviewer] So, why did you start making mixtapes?
[DJ Spanish Fly] Well, I got kicked off the radio
for playing 2 Live Crew, "Throw the 'D.'"
- That'll do it. - Yep.
So, I started DJing at this club called Club No Name.
I was playing those underground songs
that the radio would not play.
And if it didn't have that 808 beat,
leave it over there.
The guy's son, who owned the club when I was DJing,
he started showing me how to pretty much do a radio show on cassette.
Looping, cutting, all that, to create your stuff.
So, I said, from then on,
what I'm gonna do is put these songs on the cassette.
So I put them on the cassette and let it roll.
That's what I did, and it rolled.
[808 beat playing]
[Kingpin Skinny Pimp] When I first got onto Spanish Fly,
it was through tapes.
The real Memphis fans were listening to nothing but Memphis music only.
[Gangsta Pat] Spanish Fly, man. He was the blueprint.
At that time, the DJs really had the cassette market covered.
In order to get your stuff out there,
you had to go to somebody like Spanish Fly or Squeeky,
DJ BK, or Zirk.
"Hey man, put this on your mixtape."
Once they put it on that mixtape,
everybody got a chance to hear it,
and that's how they would break records.
[La Chat] You know, we had some local rappers.
We had Gangsta Pat, Pretty Tony.
We had Al Kapone.
Scarface Al Kapone, how did I forget him?
He was one of the great lyricists.
Memphis was on fire.
We didn't really know nothing about the mainstream artists,
to be real, when we were growing up.
We were bumping nothing but Memphis underground tapes.
Mixtapes back then were an epidemic thing.
You know, people had it in their beauty shops,
they had it in their clothing stores, gas stations.
It was epidemic.
Spanish Fly was, like, my hero of the mixtape game.
When I used to go to drop my tapes off to the tape store, man,
Spanish Fly would be in there, man.
He'd be dropping off stacks of them.
You know, that motherfucker, probably had about five, ten bands.
Going to every store, picking up five, ten bands.
I used to be like, "I wanna be like him."
Crazy.
That boy getting that money. Goddamn. Shit.
His mixtape used to be $25 at the club, man.
That shit selling out everywhere.
- Wow. $25? - $25.
I ain't met a DJ to this day that has sold a mixtape for $25.
You tell me where he at.
Crazy. That's crazy.
Shit.
Shouts out to Fly.
[Spanish Fly mixtape playing]
♪ Get your Spanish Fly most definitely ♪
♪ Coming out the street Just for you people to see ♪
♪ The way I run my mouth As I ran about ♪
[DJ Spanish Fly] What eventually happened was, I did a song called "Gangsta Walk,"
just to fill up some space on the tape.
These guys would come in the club,
they started doing this little dance to my mixing and scratching.
[DJ Spanish Fly performing]
Everybody just started going in a circle, just like that.
And when I'm up in the DJ booth, you could feel the wind.
So, I'm paying attention to what they're doing.
It's buck jumping. That's what it is.
I pretty much stamped it "gangsta walk," and they just ran with it.
♪ What you can say for short talk The real lean is called the Gangsta Walk ♪
"Buck jump" is getting buck, going in a circle like that.
Like, you know? When you just do that.
And then, "gangsta walk" would be more like,
you just kind of throw your arms, you know, just walking in a circle,
but still, like, with a hop to it.
Man, it would be a thousand kids for three hours, nigga.
Just this. That's it.
["Buck Jump" playing]
[DJ Spanish Fly] I'll never forget the time
when we were shooting a commercial for the club,
and LL Cool J and them, they were here for that big concert.
I'll be damned. [laughs]
LL on the floor, going round in circles.
He was like, "Cool. I kind of like this."
And I was like, "Yeah."
♪ The Buck Jump is cool It's hard as hell ♪
♪ DOC did it and so did LL ♪
The whole club could be going round in a circle, you throw a song on
that ain't "gangsta walk" material, they're going to stop.
Instantly.
If it wasn't that tempo of the gangsta walk,
if they couldn't gangsta walk they didn't want to hear that shit.
In Memphis, we've got a, like, dark music vibe.
That's sort of, like, our gangsta music out here.
That's our "gangsta walk" music. You feel what I'm saying?
[Gangsta Pat] Spanish Fly, he's one of the fathers of the Memphis sound.
That's the sound that Three 6 blew up off of.
It made it a lot more wicked than it was, you know?
It was already sinister, but they made it way more sinister.
♪ Gangsta walk Gangsta walk, yeah ♪
[narrator] The Memphis mixtape scene would set the city on a path
that was defined by big bass,
and dark notes.
[hip-hop music playing]
And in Elvis's Whitehaven neighborhood,
two brothers with a penchant for horror flicks and the macabre
would push the sound to its limits.
Thank you so much for doing this.
So, we'd love to start with what inspired you to start making music.
[DJ Paul] DJ Spanish Fly was my guy.
The thing about him,
versus a lot of the other ones,
is he rapped as well.
He had a song called "The Gangsta Walk,"
and you would see a hundred motherfuckers, just Jheri curls,
going in circles, just gangsta walking, man, twisting.
Man, the energy was amazing, man.
I'd just started making up beats and mixtapes.
[interviewer] You came right away with the dark style.
What was influencing that?
[DJ Paul] Lord Infamous, which is my brother.
We were always fans of horror movies.
We'd fucking sit up and watch Friday the 13th,
and The Texas Chainsaw Massacre and Halloween all the time.
I think that kind of brought on the darkness of our sound.
Juicy would come over my house and get me to program beats with him,
and we'd just, kind of vibe with each other.
When Three 6 Mafia was trying to come up, selling mixtapes,
I would tease in our records.
So, like, I would play, like, some NWA.
You know, some Ice Cube, or some Public Enemy or whatever.
Then I'd sneak in a Lord Infamous song.
After a while, by the time I got to my other volumes,
it was all our songs.
We were selling those cassette tapes for $4 a tape.
We were selling thousands of tapes,
and I was still in high school.
I was in high school sitting on like, $200,000.
For real.
I was just, like, savage with it.
I would just go to school, and I'd just pull up on the curb.
Like, right there at the door.
And they'd be like, "Paul, you got to move your car."
And I'd be like, "Fuck that car."
Just crazy.
And they eventually kicked my ass out. I got in too many fights.
Then, when I got kicked out of school, my momma told me,
she was like, "You wanna use your Auntie's address
and go to County, or you wanna try this rap shit?"
I said, "I wanna try the rap shit."
Me and Juicy put together $4500 and made Mystic Stylez.
That $4500 turned into $45 million.
And that was the best decision I ever made in my fucking life.
♪ Bustaz get so dazed and amazed As Lil' Fly's enchants ♪
♪ Memories of smoked out loced out Puffed out as them demons dance ♪
[Gangsta Boo] Three 6 Mafia wasn't, like, a group until Mystic Stylez came out.
It was more of a collective.
So, everybody was just rapping together.
Paul and Juicy brought the beats.
They brought the ideas,
and they was really fucking good at that.
Like, our songs sounded like a movie.
♪ Mothasuckas often wonder What to call this shit ♪
[Gangsta Boo] For me, the early sound was "gangsta walk" music.
We had the gangsta mixed with the sinister,
mixed with the Memphis sound.
It was just, like, we meshed everything together.
I was rapping with fucking five psychopaths.
I wanted to be as sinister as possible, so I bought a witchcraft book,
and my momma kicked me out of the house when she found it.
[interviewer] Wow.
Yeah, she put me out for about a week,
and I had to... I had to burn the book.
It spoke to a different generation of Memphis.
It was, like, this young,
cocaine-snorting, gangsta-ass, Memphis shit.
There's no God.
It's all debauchery.
The rhyme patterns on their tracks were different.
What made it so great
is it just didn't sound like anybody else.
I knew we had a style that ain't nobody really can fuck with,
because that shit was hard to me.
Like, the horrorcore style.
The flow, the beats were stupid beats.
So, when we all got together,
we already knew we were going to take over Memphis.
There were people in Memphis that wouldn't buy a CD player
until Three 6 Mafia went on CD.
They wouldn't buy it.
They were like, "I don't want a CD player in my car,
I'll just keep on listening to cassette tapes."
And when Three 6 Mafia went on CD, that's when they bought CD players.
- Wow. - And that's a real fact right there.
♪ Tear the club up, Tear the club up ♪
[DJ Paul] Back then, me and Juicy both ran clubs,
and we would test chants that I would come up with in the club.
And I was at the club one night, packing up the equipment.
I was like, "Man, that club was so crazy."
And he was like, "Yeah."
I was like, "We tore that motherfucker up."
And I was like, "Man, that would be a good song, man,
'Tear The Club Up.'"
We went right back home that same night,
three, four in the morning, and made a song out of it.
♪ This for all you playa haters Who be talkin' that ♪
♪ The Three Six show no love, Put some hurt on a trick ♪
[DJ Paul] That was, like, the beginning of, like...
crunk fight music.
If you looked at me and Juicy's production styles,
he was more, like, laid back and I was more, like,
"Rock this motherfucker! Private project, my nigga!
You gonna fall when the stereo pumping."
You're like... It was, like, more, like, crazier.
And I guess that was 'cause I did cocaine back then.
That probably had a lot to do with it.
[interviewer] That'll do it.
♪ Tear the club up, Tear the club up ♪
Tear da club up! Tear da club up!
The bass... The boom in it, once it hit you,
it just automatically make you, you know,
you ain't got no choice but to get crunk.
Crunk means let's get wild, let's get buck.
It was Memphis slang.
It was a word that, you know, that just came from Memphis.
And Three 6 been tearing the clubs up.
♪ Tear the club up, Tear the club up ♪
They're giving us instructions.
Tear the club up.
People, girls, everybody emptying out bottles and everything.
They'd gangsta walk with bottles in hand, upside down.
Empty bottles.
Like, it's the craziest thing you ever wanna see.
[Gangsta Boo] "Tear Da Club Up" really broke boundaries
because we were like the black rock group.
Mosh pits, fights, just all kinds of crazy shit.
Everybody was behind us.
We put Memphis on the map.
Memphis, as a city, is just now starting to get the credit.
I hear a lot of music right now
that's a direct derivative of Three 6 Mafia.
[DJ Paul] We were a huge influence in music.
I don't want to toot my own horn, man, but to me,
I think that Three 6 Mafia is probably the best rap group of all time.
♪ Tear the club up, Tear the club up ♪
[narrator] Years after their debut,
Three 6 Mafia would call themselves "The Most Known Unknown."
It was the perfect nickname for this influential crew from Memphis.
And, in a lot of ways, summed up the work of all of the Southern innovators.
Still, regardless of their recognition,
the sounds they originated were stealthily spreading through hip-hop,
like an echo with no clear origin.
♪ East side players don't give a fuck West side players don't give a fuck ♪
[narrator] But, the South deserved more than an echo.
They needed someone to shout
that they were changing the sound of hip-hop,
and they'd find it in a hard-partying, megaphone-carrying DJ from Atlanta.
♪ Get crunk, get crunk Get crunk, get crunk ♪
[Lil Jon] Let me get a bottle of water.
My voice gonna be cracking and shit. I've been hollering.
Thank you so much.
It's all good.
What did you listen to growing up?
When I became a teenager, I was skating and stuff.
Skateboarding opened my mind up to different types of music.
When you go, like, hang out with some kids and skate with them,
somebody got a boom box,
they might be playing Minor Threat,
or somebody might be playing Bad Brains.
So, that's how I got into reggae,
punk music, rock music.
I mean, I'd listen to everything, man.
I started DJing because I used to have house parties at my house.
And one of my boys,
he used to DJ all of the parties in high school, and I was just, like...
in awe of how he could control the people with the music.
And then he went away to the Navy,
but I kept going.
And by the time he came back, I was the man in Atlanta.
When I was hot in Atlanta, DJing,
when I wasn't DJing, I was just out all the time.
He was always the most exciting person in the club.
He used to walk in the club with a megaphone.
His job was to make sure that you heard him
more so than you heard anybody else.
[Lil' Jon] I'm living in my ma's basement, DJing,
basically getting drunk and high every day,
just living the fucking life.
Me and Jermaine got cool
because he came to me one day, was like,
"Yo, I see you be out all the time.
I see you know everybody.
I want you to come and do A&R and street promotions for me."
I was like, "What the fuck is an A&R?"
And I was like, "Alright, cool. Fuck it."
I got to learn every aspect of the music business,
because we were such a small label.
And while I was at So So Def, I put out my first song
with the East Side Boyz.
Basically, we were in the club,
and we used to roll, like, 20 deep.
We just started chanting "Who u wit?"
And I went and got on the mic and started chanting it,
and the whole club started chanting it.
I was like, "Oh shit. This shit made everybody go crazy.
We need to make a record out of this."
Two, three days later, Jon called me, had the beat on the phone.
A lot of bass, a lot of 808.
They were like, "Do that chant again."
I did the chant, everything went perfect,
and from that, we just started recording.
[Lil' Jon] We went in the studio wanting to make something
for Atlanta people to get turnt up to.
Hella 808, but it was, like, a monotone beat,
and it wasn't no music.
You know, it was no raps.
It was just all chanting.
But, it got motherfuckers hype as fuck.
♪ Who you wit', Who you wit' ♪
♪ Who you wit', get crunk Who you wit' ♪
♪ Who you wit' Who you wit' ♪
[Lil Jon] I took it to the 559.
The 559, in its heyday,
was the centrepiece for Atlanta clubs.
If your record wasn't playing in the 559, you weren't hot in Atlanta.
I can't remember the DJ's name,
but he was like, "I love this song.
I'm gonna play this five times a night."
♪ Who you wit', get crunk Who you wit' ♪
♪ Who you wit', Who you wit' ♪
♪ Who you wit', get crunk Who you wit' ♪
♪ Just, just drop Just drop, just drop ♪
[DJ Mars] When he came out with "Who U Wit?"
I was saying to myself,
"That's the same shit he used to do in the club."
All he did was just take the flavor that he was rocking in the club
and put in on the record,
and his entire thing was energy.
♪ Lil' lower now, lil' lower now ♪
[Lil Scrappy] The chants and the beats
and the way they were doing it,
it's the vibe, man.
It's feeling, it's anger, it's emotion.
But I'm talking about extreme. Like, out of your body.
Like, the chants are taking me somewhere else.
Because chants are damn near ceremonial.
[Lil Jon] When you hear somebody chanting, we can take that back to Africa.
You know, the whole village chants,
and it gets the village riled up,
getting you ready to go to battle or whatever the fuck.
So, the chanting got people amped up,
and they couldn't control that energy.
They had to... You turnt up, you know what I mean?
[Kaine chanting]
Back then, like, that was just getting crunk.
[Kaine] And that's what you did when you got into the club.
[D-Roc] This is what people don't understand.
It's like, are you understanding the words that are coming out of my mouth?
This is how it started.
Crunk ain't nothing but us getting hyped to our favorite song in the club.
[Lil' Jon] That's when we started using the term "crunk music."
Like, we make crunk music.
We're not rappers.
We ain't got no book of rhymes.
We just come to get the club crunk.
It just exploded.
I mean, "Who U Wit?" blew up so big for us, regionally.
I think that definitely was the change in Atlanta
because nobody else is doing records like that.
♪ Where you from? Where you from? ♪
♪ Get crunk, get crunk Where you from? ♪
♪ Where you from? Where you from? ♪
♪ Get crunk, get crunk Where you from? ♪
Crunk music was almost an excuse
to come through and elbow a motherfucker in the mouth.
But, the cool thing about it is,
it is better to get that energy out
in a microcosm that can be controlled,
and then the energy can dissipate,
than me actually going to do something.
And, that was crunk music to me.
[Lil' Jon] It's a release, man. You had a hard week, you had a hard life,
you had a hard whatever.
You could go to the club,
go and wild out and release all your frustrations in life
and have a good time.
[Lil' Scrappy] We were doing what regular hip-hop was doing,
saying what the fuck you wanna say.
So, crunk music gave you an extra little...
You know, a little lean on, like,
I can say what the fuck I wanna say, because I'm doing it like this.
I mean, it's the energy.
I don't know what the fuck I said. What happened? Don't know. I was crunk.
I don't know, I'm sorry.
I just got crunk real quick.
♪ Represent your click, Represent your click ♪
♪ Bia bia Bia bia ♪
[Lil' Jon] I was always smart enough to understand America loves culture.
They want to be a part of it without being a part of it.
I wanted to show people how we did it.
And I think that's what America gravitated toward.
I didn't know it was gonna be what the fuck it is now.
[crunk music playing]
Ay, ay, ay, ay! All y'all strippers gots to go
We taking over this club tonight. Lil' Jon, East Side Boys
Ay, ay, ay Let's get this thing crunk
At the time, there was a lot of people making music
that sounded like shit in the club.
When my record came on,
I wanted the record before that to sound low,
because my shit was mixed so good
and the 808 was so big
and the production just sounded crazy.
All of my records,
I would push them to the limit, push them to the edge.
I would mix them
so they just sounded ginormous in the club.
♪ 3, 6, 9, Damn she fine ♪
♪ Hoping she can sock it to me One more time ♪
♪ Get low, get low Get low, get low, get low ♪
I started to get better with my production.
Whenever I would make an album I'd just go to the store
and buy some new gear.
I hadn't really heard anybody use, like, basically a techno kind of synth
on a hardcore rap song.
[crunk music playing]
[Lil' Jon] The synth and the 808 matched so well together,
and that definitely became my signature sound.
♪ To the window, to the window To the wall, to the wall ♪
♪ Till the sweat drop down my balls Till all these bitches crawl ♪
[DJ Smurf] "Get Low." That was the personification of what crunk became.
When you saw them crazy motherfuckers in them videos,
you saw what crunkwas.
It's almost like if somebody could take the term "lit,"
and make a whole life out of it.
That's what Jon did.
He took it and made a genre of music out of it,
and took it to the world.
We were watching MTV, and we were sitting at home.
It came across the bottom,
"Lil' Jon & The East Side Boyz, Get Low, number one song in the country."
Pick that phone up,
"Hey man, why we sitting at home?
We got the number one song in the country!"
Then I knew we really made it when we did a show
and the white women started popping up,
showing their titties.
- Remember that? - Yeah.
White women popping up showing their titties.
- I said, "Hey, we made it." - We there!
- [Big Sam] Nigga, we made it! - Yes!
♪ To all Skeet, skeet, skeet ♪
♪ To all Skeet, skeet ♪
♪ I got, I got what? I got what? ♪
♪ Yeah ♪
When you do crunk songs, you have crunk ad libs
to hype up the crunk vocals.
Yeah!
What?
Because when you're turned up, you go what?
Okay!
Dave Chappelle thought it was funny
that I do these ad libs on all these songs,
and ran with it in a skit, and that pushed it over the top.
He made it where people are gonna be screaming at me 'til I die, shit.
Lil' Jon & The East Side Boyz.
[performing "Get Low"]
♪ 3, 6, 9, Damn she fine ♪
♪ Hoping she can sock it to me One more time ♪
[Ian Burke] Because that was such a big crossover record.
You had the Yin Yang Twins,
had all the white people saying "Skeet skeet,"
not knowing what it meant.
Everybody like, "Skeet, skeet."
You'd hear it on the radio.
It's like, they're talking about ejaculating on people's faces.
♪ To all skeet, skeet, Skeet, skeet, skeet ♪
[Ian] And they're playing it without bleeping it!
That's when you're like, sitting back, laughing to yourself, going,
"Okay. There it is."
You know what I'm saying? We really changed the game here.
Everywhere I went, it was,
if you didn't have a drumbeat, you ain't poppin'.
You know what I'm saying? Like, you had to have a drumbeat.
Look at where it came to,
to now, people can go up and sling dreads and jump on the stage
and the whole crowd is gonna jump with them.
[Fat Joe] You know, the energy that Lil' Jon brought the hip-hop genre,
is out of this world.
It's like punk-rock rap.
He was the original energy god.
He was bringing them club bangers.
You listen to the radio
and every single song is an Atlanta song.
You be like, "Yo, what the fuck happened?"
[Lil' Jon] "Yeah" is definitely the peak of the crunk sound going to another level.
[imitates crunk melody]
That shit was number one in I don't know how many countries.
Top five songs of the decade.
Still gets played, still gets people crazy.
Crunkhelped to break Southern music majorly.
Every Southern artist,
we were making records for our communities.
We weren't trying to get onto the radio.
We were just making records for us.
This is why the South wins.
Because we don't give a fuck about trying to please nobody else.
♪ Get low You scared, you scared ♪
♪ Turn your eyes to the floor You scared, you scared ♪
♪ Let me see you get... ♪
[narrator] Lil' Jon and his crunk contemporaries
brought an entirely new sound to hip-hop.
One that smashed the charts,
and penetrated pop culture.
But, crunk's success represented something bigger.
Because while Lil' Jon's impact was immediate,
the work of Three 6 Mafia, Spanish Fly and DJ Screw was just as instrumental
in influencing the next generations of hip-hop.
And, more importantly,
proved that the South was now the center of innovation in hip-hop.
But, as has always been in this culture,
somewhere, someone else is dreaming up a new sound.
[hip-hop beat playing]