Lil Jon is hard at work on his first solo album, "Crunk
Rock," but the artist is taking his time with the TVT project, expected sometime
in the second quarter of the year. The new track "Snap Yo Fingers" featuring
E-40 and Sean Paul of the Youngbloodz topped
Billboard’s Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart last August, and some fans were confused
when an album never followed.

"I dropped ‘Snap Yo Fingers’ because I was going through the drama with
TVT Records, and I wanted to show people that I didn’t go anywhere," Lil
Jon tells Billboard. "TVT and I eventually settled our differences. So
I was caught between a rock and a hard place, because it was really the first
single for ‘Crunk Rock.’ So it was either promote the record for a nice look
in the marketplace, or we don’t do anything and start from scratch when I do
put my record out."

Lil Jon looked into ending his TVT contract in late 2005. However TVT met his
demands, which he won’t discuss, by spring of 2006 and he remains signed to
the imprint. Choosing the marketplace option, Jon promoted "Snap,"
and is now back in the studio prepping "Crunk Rock."

"It’s not a compilation," Jon says. "But it’ll have a lot of
appearances, like how Dr. Dre does his records. There’ll be
a hip-hop side and a rock side. It’s a mixture of all the sh*t I’ve done. Like
Run-D.M.C. rapping over a hard rock track, I’m going to go
back to some of those hard guitars over hip-hop beats. I won’t do a Metallica
song, but I’ll take a Metallica riff and put it over a gangsta beat." A
few tracks that have already been recorded are "Lil’ Wayne
and Ciara on a song together called ‘Roll Call,’ me and Three
6 Mafia [on a song] called ‘Act a Fool,’ me and R. Kelly
on a song called ‘Myspace,’ and Nate Dogg has a song too but
I don’t know what that’s called yet," Jon says.

"Act a Fool" has already appeared on Lil Jon’s MySpace site. "It
had almost 500,000-600,000 hits in like 24 hours and the song is building in
the clubs," he enthuses.