Crunked Up

The crunk reference in the title points to a transatlantic conversation Benga was conducting in his production — taking the American South's trunk-rattling bass aesthetic and running it through the dubstep template, the result being something heavier and stranger than either tradition alone. The bass here is enormous and deliberately ugly in the most satisfying way, distorted at the low end in a manner that suggests the speakers themselves are struggling, the tone somewhere between a growl and a groan. The tempo is locked in the halftime dubstep groove but the energy reads faster, more urgent, the percussion hitting with a crispness that cuts against the bass's murk. There is a humor buried somewhere in the production — the track knows how excessive it is, and that self-awareness gives it a swagger that purely serious club music often lacks. Benga was operating at a moment when South London dubstep was asserting itself on an international stage, and this track has the confidence of a scene that knows it has found something genuinely new. The production is not subtle and does not want to be; it is maximalist within a spare framework, every element doing outsized work. This is music for the opening moments of peak hour in a warehouse, or for a car stereo turned far past the point of wisdom, the bass frequencies compressing the air in the cabin, the track doing exactly and only what it was built to do.