Alvin Wang--Crunk

This strange new word is used either as a noun or an adjective. In either case, the origin of ‘crunk’ is only partially known and its distant etymological roots have yet to be uncovered.

When used as a noun, it refers to a genre of Southern Black hip-hop music that gained popularity in the 1990s in places like Atlanta and Memphis. In 1993, the artist Outkast released a track Player’s Ball which used this term. In 1996, Tommy Wright III’s album On the Run included a track titled Getting Crunk. Rapper and producer Lil Jon further popularized the word with his 2004 album Crunk Juice. When Rolling Stone magazine published a glossary of Dirty South Slang, crunk was defined as ‘to get excited.’

There is a generational quality to the term’s usage. If you never heard this term before, you are most likely a person of a certain age (like me). If you are familiar with this term and are my age (or thereabouts), it is likely that you first heard this term from a much younger person.

Hip-hop artists borrowed the term from Africa-American slang in which the adjective crunk derives from the verb phrase “to crank up.” In this sense, crunk can refer to someone who is ‘crazy drunk.’ Lil Jon even promoted a highly potent cocktail by this name. According to this etymology, crunk may be a portmanteau — a novel word that originates when two words are blended based on their meanings and sounds. Common examples are chortle (from chuckle and snort), brunch (from breakfast and lunch), and spork (from spoon and fork).

What remains a mystery is how Dr. Seuss came to use this term two decades before people started getting crunk. In his 1972 children’s book Marvin K. Mooney Will You Please Go Now!, Dr. Seuss introduces the playful notion of a ‘crunk-car’ which is propelled by the car’s legs and feet (see introductory illustration). He never mentions how he came up with this whimsy. However, his crunk-car should not be confused with the ‘Flint Mobile’ which transported the cartoon character Fred Flintstone around the prehistoric town of Bedrock. The Flint Mobile didn’t have its own means of propulsion, so Fred Flintstone used his own legs and feet to supply the ‘horse power’ needed to get around town.

Because I am a person of a certain age (born in the 1950s), I didn’t hear of this term until my students started using it in the early 2000s. I heard it primarily used as an adjective as in, “Yeah, he got really crunk at the party.” It’s one of those words that suggests its own meaning even if you never heard it before — perhaps due to its nature as a portmanteau. Also, its meaning’s relevance to me may be due to the fact that it aptly describes some of my early encounters with alcohol. Yes, I admit it; there were times when I was crunk even before I knew it was a word.

The first time I got crunk was in my junior year of high-school. One summer evening, I was hanging out with a couple of buddies when we decided to raid our parents’ liquor cabinets. We didn’t want our parents to find out so we devised a plan. Each of us would go home and pour the contents of various liquor bottles into a peanut butter jar. We took only a wee bit from each liquor bottle so that no one would notice any missing alcohol. In the end, we came together over a jar filled with a potent brew of mysterious alcohol contents.

We decided to rendezvous after midnight when our parents were all asleep. Our destination was a community golf course a few blocks from my house. It was a simple matter for us to climb over the chain-link fence that separated the golf course from our neighborhood.

The three of us sat down on the 18th green and started to drink. It was revolting. None of us had experience with hard liquor and our first reaction was shock and revulsion, ‘How can our parents drink this stuff?’ The liquid was vile and it burned. Nevertheless, with the notion that drinking was what grown-ups do, we soldiered on and finished the jar of liquor.

You’ll forgive me if I’m light on the details concerning our moon-lit escapade on the golf course. It just that the details escape me now as it did then. I was in a drunken haze with no recollection of how I managed to get home and fall into bed. I was definitely crunk and didn’t know it.

The next morning, all hell broke loose. My parents roused me from bed and it was then that I realized what a hangover was. It was my first hangover. I felt sick, dizzy, and could barely stand. My eyes wouldn’t stay open and I couldn’t speak. I just wanted to die. Except I couldn’t die until my parents stopped yelling at me. They figured out that I had drunk alcohol not only because of my hangover, but because sometime in the middle of the night I had consumed half a watermelon that I found in the family refrigerator! Evidently, in my drunken stupor I became so dehydrated that I had an enormous helping of the watery fruit — of which I had no recollection. Yes, I was truly crunk.

I graduated from high school and went to Brockport college in upstate New York. My high-school buddy, Ed went to a local community college nearby our childhood homes on Long Island. We stayed in touch. During the summer of my freshman year at college, I returned home on Long Island to make some money. Ed also had a summer job — we both sold ice cream from Eskimo Pie trucks along separate routes in Queens, New York.

One evening, after a day working the ice cream trucks we decided to go into town and have a few drinks. A few drinks turned into a lot of drinks. It was late when we left the bar. No one was out and the streets were dark and quiet. As we were walking to Ed’s car, we stumbled across several boxes labelled ‘ice cream.’ There were about a dozen boxes stacked on the sidewalk in in front of an ice cream parlor. The boxes were cold to the touch. An early morning ice cream delivery!

Ed and I decided that as ‘ice cream men’ we were in the best position to decide how to put this product to good use. It is safe to say that the decision we reached while in an utter state of stupidity and drunkenness was not sound. Nevertheless, we took the boxes, loaded them up in the trunk of Ed’s car and drove home. During our drive home, we must have sobered up a bit because we ended up throwing the boxes away in a dumpster. We thought that would be the end of it.

Wrong.

The next morning, the police were at my door. Evidently, the streets last night weren’t that dark and quiet — someone spied our ill-advised caper and took down the license plate to Ed’s car. We were busted.

Next morning, I had to go down to the police station for questioning. I was scared and my parents threatened to put me in jail if the police didn’t. The scene in the police station played out like a TV crime procedural. Two plainclothes detectives sat across the desk glaring at me. They wore ties. They had questions. After establishing my identity and whereabouts the previous night, we proceeded to establish a timeline for the crime. When the ‘interrogation’ was finished, one of the detectives sat back and said, “You’re free to go now.”

I was perplexed. Having just admitted to a crime (felony?) were they really going to let me go? I asked them. One of the detectives responded, “Well, the owners decided not to press charges if you reimburse them for the stolen goods.” Both detectives stared at me long and hard, “And there’s one other thing,” they looked at each other and exclaimed, “There’s no evidence! The ice cream melted!” They started laughing. Not with me…at me.

Clearly, getting crunk is not the uplifting experience one should aspire to. And you would think I would learn from my two previous times getting crunk. But I was young and dumb and can recall yet another time I got crunk in college.

There is a tropical flowering shrub called ‘angel trumpet’ that grows in Florida. In season, the plant is covered with long, yellow or white flowers that look like trumpets. In the right climate, these plants can reach the size of small trees. The Swedish botanist Linnaeus classified this plant as belonging to the datura genus which includes jimsonweed and belladonna (also known as nightshade). The U.S. government warns that members of this genus are dangerously toxic and highly psychoactive. They’re found in abundance all over South Florida.

While at Brockport college, a small group of us decided to take a road trip to Key West for our Spring break. We yearned for the sunny warmth of the Florida Keys after enduring the cold, dark winter of upstate New York. So our motley band of four long-haired hippie dudes packed our car with camping gear and drove down the east coast without stopping. Lying on a sandy beach was our goal. Another expressed purpose of our road trip was to get crunk even although the phrase we used back then was “getting wasted.”

Back then, our preferred means of getting crazy drunk involved either cheap beer or wine. A favored brand was Rolling Rock beer that sold in small green ‘pony bottles.’ If you really wanted to splurge, Miller High Life was the way to go. Back then you could also find a bottle of wine for under a buck. Usually, we’d go for Ripple’s Pagan Pink or Boone’s Farm Strawberry Hill wine. We stayed away from MD 20/20 (Mogan David’s ‘Mad Dog’) concord grape wine because it was actually too sweet and syrupy for us. But if you wanted to impress someone (like a first date), you’d get a classier rosé like Mateus which cost almost two bucks but came in cool, pear-shaped bottles.

We discovered pineapple wine in Key West which tasted remarkably like the eponymous upside-down cake laced with alcohol. We were hooked. Combined with cheap Mexican weed, it quickly became our preferred means of getting wasted during our holiday break. Such was our intent one late afternoon as the sun was banking toward the horizon over the Gulf of Mexico. We were smoking weed and imbibing liberally from a bottle of pineapple wine. At some point, I turned back to our campsite while my stoner buddies wandered through a quiet Key West neighborhood.

Several hours later, my buddies stumbled back to our campsite with the most incredulous tale of their suburban escapade. The campfire kicked up sparks of burning mangrove wood as we passed another bottle of pineapple wine and joints around our deeply inebriated band of gypsies. No one was clear-eyed. Crazy Al and a buddy named Fred began recounting their adventure of walking crazy drunk through a tropical neighborhood of Key West.

It seems that shortly after I left them, the group stumbled upon a most wondrous sight — the largest angel trumpet tree ever! It was huge and it was covered with flowers that sparkled like gold streamers gleaming in the final rays of sunset. The tree was so enormous that it dwarfed the small, block house that was on the property. My buddies immediately appreciated the significance of this glorious botanical specimen by eating its flowers.

Deciding to ingest flowers from a plant that is recognized as being potentially toxic and psychoactive was probably an injudicious use of their college education, but they consumed the flowers anyway. Two flowers each according to Crazy Al. If you ate three, you go to jail!

And then they started tripping. Furiously. It was getting dark and they soon got lost wandering a suburb of Key West. No surprise here. After all, it was night, they were drunk, stoned, and tripping in a strange neighborhood. What could go wrong?

Consuming three flowers is what could go wrong. In his eagerness to get as high as possible, Fred ignored Crazy Al’s warning about consuming more than two flowers. Fred ate three. By the time the full force of the hallucinogenic flowers kicked in Fred was operating is his own separate reality which ended up with him attempting to destroy the front of a motel. The police arrived and arresting him for trespassing and creating a public nuisance. Fred was promptly escorted to the city jail where he was locked up for the night. We had to bail him out the next morning. Yup, eat three and you go to jail.

Crazy Al ate only two flowers, but his hallucinogenic adventure was just as trippy. Throughout the evening, Crazy Al’s teeth starting to fall out! In a panic, he starting to pick up his teeth as they fell to the ground. The next morning, upon waking he reached into his pocket and discovered that he had been collecting cigarette butts instead of his teeth. His teeth were still in his mouth. This is what two flowers can do to you.

Somehow, they managed to find their way back to that huge tree covered with angel trumpets. A sense of relief came across my buddies as they could now find their way back to our camp site. But their elation quickly turned to shock and confusion when they realized that the small, block house that was on the property had disappeared! All of them were certain that this was the tree that supplied them flowers, but where was the house? They walked around several streets looking, but never found it…perhaps a reminder of life’s many mysteries? Crazy Al described it as a sublime experience that revealed the transient nature of perception and reality. (We recently read Carlos Casteneda’s 1972 autobiographical book Journey to Ixtlan which recounts his experience with hallucinogenic plants (datura!) and an indigenous shaman in the Sonoran desert).

After listening to Crazy Al’s explanation, I wasn’t convinced. Instead, I thought that my buddies’ shared experience was the fevered product of addled minds sharing the same mind-altering drugs during the night when visual acuity is diminished. But I let my buddies regale themselves with the notion that they had experienced some sort of magical realism. I wasn’t about to crash their shared, fever dream.

In looking back at that time, I still think of my buddies’ experience as a group hallucination powered by a potent mix of alcohol, drugs, and social contagion. The psychoactive alkaloids found in the datura genus opened the doors of misperception (apologies to Aldous Huxley who wrote Doors of Perception). Combined with copious amounts of pineapple wine and weed, there can only be one conclusion: my buddies were crunk out of their minds.

Note: The Oxford English Dictionary (OED) finds that the earliest use of ‘crunk’ was in the writing of Thomas Cooper in the late-1500s. At that time, cruck was an intransitive verb that referred to the hoarse, harsh cry made my a goose or crane. The OED further states that this word is now obsolete and with unknown origin (maybe it’s an onomatopoeic term like ’buzz’ or ‘meow’). Moreover, it appears that later usage of this term by Black hip-hop artists was not derived from the 16th century term. After all, what musician or singer would ever want to evoke a goose while performing? Only someone who is crunk would do that.