From Memphis, Cranking Up the Crunk

Rap's Red Carpet Rolls Out for Al Kapone

Before Al Kapone's first gangsta-walk down the red carpet -- before his homespun Memphis hip-hop boomed from obscurity into a marquee role in "Hustle & Flow" -- the rapper maintained a decidedly modest business plan:

Get crunk, get paid.

Not brand-new-Bentley, gold-cap-on-every-tooth, biggest-crib-on-the-block dollars, per se; just enough to make rent, fuel up the '88 Oldsmobile, feed the kids and avoid the grimy world of restaurant Dumpsters.

"Before I first started making a little money with my music, I was doing busboy-dishwashing stuff at Red Lobster," Kapone says via cell phone while cruising around Memphis in that 17-year-old Olds. "I'll never forget those rough days, man -- emptying them big garbage cans full of food, seven, eight at a time, your feet soaking wet, that smell. Oh, man! It's serious. SEE-REEE-OUS.

"That's why my career is a blessing. I've never sold a whole lot of albums, but I've made enough money to live and take care of my family and not have to have a job. There's a lot of people doing jobs they hate; I was one of them. And I don't want to go back."

Until recently, the 33-year-old rap careerist sold his CDs out of the trunk of his car, which is pretty crunk when you think about it. ( Crunk : It's a noun, but also an adjective. And a verb! Somehow we don't think E.B. White ever pondered this. Crunk : To get cranked-up, sans psychotropics; wild, crazy, off-the-hook goodness; hyper-aggressive rap that's not unlike punk rock for the dance floor. Use it in a sentence? "Crunk is not the most thought-provoking rap idiom, but it's got a funky beat and you can mosh to it.")

Anyway. Now here's Kapone on the guest list at Club Breakthrough, thanks to an unlikely hip-hop kingmaker: Hollywood producer John Singleton, who enlisted the rapper's help to give "Hustle & Flow" its crunk.

Kapone wrote and produced two songs and performed a third for the film about an ineffectual Memphis pimp who desperately wants to transform himself into the crunkest rapper around.

And here is one of those loopy life-imitating-art footnotes that make publicists twitch with giddiness: The movie in which the lead has a ludicrous dream of, you know, becoming the next Ludacris, could also bring As-Seen-On-MTV-type stardom to Kapone himself, a southern-rap journeyman whose career has been spent scuffling in the shadows of the underground.

The parallel is not lost on Paul Stewart, the music supervisor for "Hustle & Flow."

"This is going to be an amazing boost for Al's career," Stewart says. "It's apropos for the film."

The movie, which opened Friday, tells the story of DJay (Terrence Howard), a low-grade pimp who harbors illusions of hip-hop greatness.