Whatever happened to Lil Jon?

He was the self-confessed King of Crunk. He loved to get crunk, he loved to crunk it up, he drank crunk juice from his crunk cup, he overdosed on crunk. Heck, he probably munched on crunk cereal with his crunk teeth for breakfast.

So what the crunk happened to Lil Jon?

Back in 2002, the rapper - known for shouting obscene, explicit lyrics like, "From the windows, to the walls, till the sweat drips down my balls" - was inescapable. If you needed a guest rapper on your track, Lil Jon was the guy you called.

I called him up once to rap on my song Get It On, but he was too busy. His manager said I wasn't crunk enough. Sniff.

His mates were pretty crunk though. He hung out with guys with equally ridiculous names, like The Eastside Boyz, the Ying Yang Twins and Bone Crusher in some kind of crunk gang. These were the guys everyone wanted to get crunk with.

And he had awesomely terrible, ultra-repetitive songs that all sounded the same, but people loved them. The blurry video for Get Low has 26 million hits on YouTube, while What U Gon Do has four million. There's no accounting for tastes, especially when crunk is involved.

Those tracks were from Lil Jon's 2002 album Kings of Crunk. But since 2004's Crunk Juice, there hasn't been even a peep of a crunk from Lil Jon - not a Twitter crunk, not a Myspace crunk and not even a Facebook crunk. It begs the question, where does a crunker go when he's finished crunking?

So what happened? His official website is down, and Wikipedia reports record label issues. Lil Jon's new album Crunk Rock - supposedly an awesome medley of rock and crunk - has been on-again and off-again since 2005, but now has a release date set for this year.

His new single, the incredibly dated Give It All You Got, has just a paltry 292,000 views on YouTube. Did Brokencyde steal his thunder?

I miss you Lil Jon. I miss the days I used to get crunk while blasting crunk and partying with my crunk friends, wearing our crunk shirts and drinking crunk juice.

Bring back crunk, I say.

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