From Memphis, Cranking Up the Crunk

In his pursuit of crunk glory, DJay performs three songs -- two of them Kapone's: the urgent title track and the belligerent, plot-pivotal "Whoop That Trick."

Howard recorded his own vocals, and rather credibly so.

But Kapone doesn't cede the spotlight entirely: A festive scene in a skate-rink parking lot is set to the rapper's own recording, "Get Crunk, Get Buck" -- so named for the spasmodic and suddenly ubiquitous southern-rap subgenre that fuses seething, thugged-out lyrics with repetitive chants, foreboding bass lines and combustive beats. (The Memphis strain, of which Kapone is among the originators, is known as both "crunk" and "buck.")

All three Kapone compositions are featured on the "Hustle & Flow" soundtrack released earlier this month, with the maddeningly infectious and very much misogynistic "Whoop That Trick" a leading candidate to become the third single. (It's also the song whose titular refrain you're most likely to repeat for days -- mostly against your will. Don't say we didn't warn you, readers.)

There's also the surest measure of success: Kapone's "Hustle & Flow" songs are available as ringtones, yours for just $2.50 per at MTV.com.

The sudden exposure is heady stuff for an artist who has achieved little national notice since he began peddling his debut album, "Street Knowledge," in 1992.

By Kapone's estimates, he has sold "close to 100,000 copies" total of his four solo albums and a half-dozen compilations -- all of them released through Alkatraz Productions, an incorporated business with exactly one full-time employee: Alphonzo Bailey (Kapone's given name). Good work if you can get it, but hardly the stuff of crunk legend.

The most recent album from the kooky, self-proclaimed King of Crunk, Lil Jon, for instance, sold 363,000 copies in a single week last year -- plenty enough to elicit one of those absurd exclamations (Yeah!! What?!! Okay!!) that have come to define Lil Jon to the point that comedian Dave Chappelle now mocks him at every turn.

Not that Lil Jon cares. Chappelle gets the chuckles, but Jon's crunk gets the ladies buck naked. Seriously: Crunk is the soundtrack of choice at southern strip clubs. "Records start in the strip club," says Jason Geter, president of the Atlanta rap label Grand Hustle. "If the girls don't dance and get wild and the guys don't start throwing out a lot of money when your record comes on, it won't get played anywhere else."

Ah, the things to which Kapone can look foward.

"I've always done it on a small level with a little fan base," he says, speaking in an easy southern drawl that belies the aggressiveness of his recordings. "I'm hoping this movie gets me more love and attention."

The subtext, of course: more money!