Wayne Hardnett Jr., professionally known as Bone Crusher, is an American rapper and hip hop producer. He is credited as being one of the inventors of the crunk sound. In 2003, at the height of his career, his debut album AttenCHUN! reached No. 1 on the Billboard R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and his debut single "Never Scared" reached the top 10 on the R&B and Rap charts. The success of the single led him to win a Source Award along with a Grammy Award nomination and an American Music Awards nomination. "Never Scared" was the theme song for the 2003 Atlanta Braves MLB, and was featured in the Madden NFL 2004 video game.

Crunk is a subgenre of southern hip hop that emerged in the early 1990s and gained mainstream success during the early to mid 2000s. Crunk is often up-tempo and one of Southern hip hop's more nightclub-oriented subgenres. Distinguishing itself with other Southern hip hop subgenres, crunk is marked and characterized by its energetic accelerated musical tempo, club appeal, recurrent chants frequently executed in a call and response manner, multilayered synths, its pronounced reliance on resounding 808 basslines, and rudimentary musical arrangement. An archetypal crunk track frequently uses a dominant groove composed of a nuanced utilization of intricately multilayered keyboard synthesizers organized in a recurring pattern, seamlessly shifting from a lower to a higher pitch that encompasses the song's primary central rhythm, both in terms of its harmonic and melodic aspects. The main groove is then wrapped up with looped, stripped-down, and crisp 808 dance claps and manipulated snare rolls coupled and accompanied by a bassline of thumping 808 kick drums. The term "crunk" was also used throughout the 2000s as a blanket term to denote any style of Southern hip hop, a side effect of the genre's breakthrough to the mainstream. The word derives from its African-American Vernacular English past-participle form, "crunk", of the verb "to crank". It refers to being excited or high on drugs.