This is Lil Jon’s world, and the rest of us are just living in it. When people say this sort of thing it’s usually to indicate a celebrity’s level of industry clout and/or swagger, but in this case it’s actually kinda true. The period of time during the mid-aughts when Lil Jon and crunk music dominated the zeitgeist continues to reverberate throughout pop culture. He was the first superstar to make his name by kicking down the barriers between rap music and what would come to be known as EDM, creating a hybrid that’s more or less defined the sound of our current decade, and the club-wrecking hedonism that he so effectively promoted has become pop’s default stance. If Lil Jon had never existed, rappers would probably be popping molly and rave kids would probably be wilding out to southern rap music, but the catalyzing effect he had on these phenomena can’t be underestimated.
Since the track has no real radio presence as far as I’m aware, it must be digital streams like this that have put “Turn Down For What” halfway up the Hot 100. And since Columbia seems to be taking an extremely hands-off approach to promoting it, whatever virality it’s achieved has probably been the work of club DJs, who, between their rising profile as a group and Billboard‘s use of numbers not connected to radio and retail when compiling its charts, are now able to make songs into chart-level hits in a way that they never have before. I suspect you can give some credit for this to Lil Jon as well.
