Early aughts icon! Chingy popularized the phrases “thurr” and “hurr” in his 2003 iconic single “Right Thurr,” but the St. Louis native wasn’t trying to create a new slang phrase.
“I didn’t really make it up or try to do it, that’s just how I talk,” Chingy, 40, told Us Weekly exclusively on Tuesday, March 31, while promoting his new single “The Woah Down.” “But even with my language, and how I speak, how I say words is how I write them. The traditional way doesn’t mean that’s correct [to me]. How I say things, that’s how I’m gonna spell it. I think it became signature just because it’s different. People were used to people saying, ‘there.’ Like, I can’t even say that if I wanted to. I can’t say it correctly if I wanted to.”
He added, “It sounds funny to me if I say, ‘there.’ It just sounds wrong to me.”
The “Right Thurr” music video also became a classic in 2000s hip hop culture — alongside the likes of “Pop, Lock & Drop It” by Huey and “Crank That” by Soulja Boy — because of its memorable chicken head dance.
“It was these three girls that used to come to this club called Monastery that I used to go to and they would get on the dance floor and they would do that dance,” Chingy said noting that the year was around 1999. “Nobody knew what they were doing and everybody was just like, ‘You see these girls?’ It always stood out.”
The “One Call Away” rapper explained that one of the dancers performed the choreography in Nelly‘s 2002 “Hot in Herre” music video but the dance didn’t blow up until she did the moves in Chingy’s “Right Thurr” music video.
“I think it was the song, the feel of the song, everything just kind of went together and I kind of made it more famous,” Chingy said. “I don’t know if people really took to it when she was doing it in there [‘Hot in Herre’], but when she did it in ‘Right Thurr’ and everybody was doing it, it was a craze and it blew up. But I can’t credit myself to say I made it up. I made it famous but it was these three girls that did the dance in this club that made it up.”
While Chingy looks back at the start of his career with fondness, he’s now excited for the release of his latest single, “The Woah Down” featuring pop-country duo Meg & Tyler, and promises his fans will “love” the track.
“It started with an idea in my head of a track,” Chingy recalled. “We were in Nashville and so I knew I was going to record with Meg [Linsey], and Tyler [Cain] later on that day and when I got there, I just got on the beat machine and started putting down the beat. I told Tyler to lay some guitar down on it, and he laid some guitar down on it. And Meg, she had a title ‘Woah Down’ and wanted to make a hook. So me and Meg kind of collaborated on a hook and I told them, ‘Fire up the mic’ and I went in there and kind of freestyled my vocals, and me and Meg laid the hook down. That’s how the song came about.”
“The Woah Down” is available on April 24.
With reporting by Kayley Stumpe
