Outtakes from our convo with the crunk king

On his HGTV show, Lil Jon Wants to Do What? “Season 1 was like, get your foot in the door, get your bearings. Now we’re doing some crazy builds right now. We’re doing eight houses at the same time. We just finished our first one two weeks ago. They’re very creative. That’s one thing I pride myself on is being creative, me and my partner. We don’t want to give anybody white walls. And we feel like we have a di erent kind of energy for HGTV. And fun fact, we brought the youngest demographic to HGTV ever for our first season.”

On possibly moving to Las Vegas, permanently “[Steve] Aoki was pushing me on that years ago. He’s got this crazy freaking house with foam pits, and he’s jumping o the roof into the pool. He’s like, ‘You should move out here, man.’ I’ve thought about it a couple of times. But Vegas is the playground. You can’t lay your head where the playground is,” he says, laughing. “But maybe I’ll eventually get a house here. Who knows?”

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) 22 LAS VEGAS WEEKLY 3.9.23 to see who’s in the room, what they’re reacting to or what they’re not reacting to, and he takes that into account in his performance.

“When you go see a Lil Jon show, he entertains,” Kundu continues. “And he’s very nice to everybody, from the busboys to the waiters to the managers to the sound guys. He’s hospitable, and he makes everyone have a good time.”

Lil Jon likes to kick o his club sets amid the crowd, “and I start with ‘Shots,’” Jon notes, “because people come in here to party. They gotta get their shots right away.” It’s also not unusual to see the DJ pouring the liquor himself as he parties on risers surrounded by clubgoers. He makes it a point to sneak all of the crunk standards in too—from “Get Low” to “Snap Yo Fingers”—because some fans aren’t as familiar with his revered DJ run.

“Most people are surprised at how good of a DJ I am,” he says, smiling. “I can play something for everybody, from Latin to hip-hop to house. Any kind of music. I can play it just as good as the top DJ in that genre.”

Jon began DJing in the early

1990s, well before he was a Grammy award-winning artist or the go-to producer behind some of Usher and Ciara’s biggest hits. Jon played clubs around Atlanta, meeting So So Def Recordings producer Jermaine Dupri along the way and joining him to recruit other rappers. When Lil Jon stepped out into the limelight with The East Side Boyz in the early 2000s, he did so as the face of Southern crunk.

“We’d just go into the studio and try to make good records,” he recalls. “The rst song we recorded was a song called ‘Who U Wit,’ and that basically started us as crunk artists, because we didn’t rap on the song; we were just doing chants. From there we developed … into having ‘Bia Bia’ and ‘What U Gon’ Do.’ It was always rowdy club music, and then it got rowdier.

“But,” he quickly adds, “I also understood that you got to make records for the girls. That’s why we had ‘Get Low.’ That’s why we had ‘Lovers and Friends.’ It can’t just be rowdy all the time. You just gonna hang out with testosterone all day and night? No!”

Lil Jon pushed DJing to the side as he ascended his crunk throne. And then one night, at an afterparty in the late 2000s, the rapper discovered DJ Spider, whom he credits for getting got him back into his crate-digging craft. By then, he says, it was time.

“After the crunk era, I was fried from producing so much,” he explains. “Through DJing, I met [Steve] Aoki, and me and Aoki got together with Laidback Luke and we did ‘Turbulence.’ But before Aoki, I did ‘Shots’ with LMFAO, and I did ‘The Anthem’ with Pitbull. All of those records got me into the EDM world.

“Then I ended up meeting DJ Snake, and we did ‘Turn Down for What’ and that was the No. 1 EDM song of the year for 2014. All of this stu is crazy, because the biggest record of my career was, ‘Yeah.’ Then 10 years later, I have ‘Turn Down for What.’ It’s unheard to have a run this long.”

And Lil Jon has no plans to slow down. He’s revamping his Hakkasan club set, promising it will “change the game up a little bit and bring back some things that people don’t do anymore in the nightclub.” Pressed on the topic, he leans in to say, “The only thing I’ll give you is shhh, because the party’s so crazy, you can’t tell everybody what happened. It’s that wild.”