Bone Crusher’s persona is clearly one-of-a-kind, but will a controversy behind his signature hit “Never Scared” deter his sophomore dreams? Nope. This self-proclaimed fat man won’t back down.“I am doing out-fucking-standing right now!”

A proud Bone Crusher marches into The Zone studios in Norcross, Georgia. He’s here to do some light work on the follow-up to his gold-selling album AttenCHUN! But first the 6’ 1”, 350-pound behemoth has got to get his grub on. While Bone snarfs down a huge lunch from the Atlanta Bread Company (“This place is the shit,” he says with a smile) and The Zone staff work in the background, he makes it clear he’s more than happy to talk. Aside from the ability to write catchy hooks and shake his massive tummy in a way that drives females crazy, talking is probably what this rising star does best.

“ I’m just trying to finish this album,” he says, looking clean in fresh-out-the-box Timbos, a light-blue Polo shirt and his perfectly shaped chin-strap beard. “We trying to hit them back to back, trying to do the Master P.” The new album, Fight Music, will be out less than a year after AttenCHUN! hit stores last April. “I’m hot shit now, so let’s keep going. ‘Never Scared’ still hasn’t died, so the whole album hasn’t died. Instead of letting it die all the way, we gonna keep the fire going with the new one.”

“ Never Scared” was unquestionably one of the biggest rap hits of 2003, its boisterous, guttural hook capturing just the right level of crunk defiance to make everyone from bullied 10-year-olds to burnt-out 40-year-olds get up out of their seats and move—oftentimes towards the record store. The song earned Bone Crusher high-profile appearances at BET’s Spring Bling in Daytona Beach, and Hot 97’s Summer Jam at Giants Stadium in New Jersey, and even on Late Night With Conan O’Brien. (Bone’s pants fell down during the TV performance and, in the spirit of solidarity, Conan dropped trou himself. A truly beautiful moment.) For all but the most hardcore rap followers, the “Never Scared” explosion was all the more amazing because Bone Crusher seemingly came out of nowhere.
In fact, Bone Crusher has been on the fringes of the game for more then a decade, and his hit song has a bit of a history itself.

Born Wayne Hardnett, Bone grew up in the Southwest Atlanta neighborhood of Adamsville with his mother running the household. They were borderline poor, but there was a lot of love, with Bone’s brother, sister and maternal grandparents always around.

A big kid, Bone was a natural fit for football, and he says the game came easy to him. “I was fucking outstanding,” he says of his days playing for Benjamin Banneker High in Atlanta (a school made famous by alum Ludacris’s “What’s Your Fantasy” video). “I was really a fucking pro nigga.” Whether Bone Crusher is exaggerating his exploits is hard to know. He’s a great orator and occasionally responds to short questions with rambling, multi-topic, thousand-word answers that can seem too good to be true. Still, it’s not hard to picture this guy playing Defensive Tackle at the college level.

Sadly, says Bone, “I got kicked off the team. I didn’t graduate. I was just really bad, man. I’d fight a lot. My mama was a strong woman. I love her to death, but most women can’t raise a boy… My mama was trying her best, but I gave her a couple of nervous breakdowns. I used to come home with my blood on my shirt, other niggas’ blood on my shirt. I was just a muthafuckin’ big-ass kid walking around, too big for everybody else, and I would just hit niggas. I was on a one-way trip to hell, quick. After a while she just couldn’t take it. Like, ‘You gotta get outta here.’ So I had to go stay with my father, and he rectified the situation.”

Besides football and fisticuffs, Bone Crusher, 32, was an avid hip-hop fan as a teen. “I used to DJ,” he recalls. “But I didn’t know you could make money off of that shit. I used to do everything that had to do with hip-hop. I would rap, I would break-dance, I would DJ, everything that you could do with that hip-hop shit. The thing was that I didn’t know in ’87, ’88, ’89 that you can fucking make money with that shit. I didn’t know that was why these people were making records—I thought they was just making records because they love it like I love it.”

To make money himself, Bone had to follow, at least on a part-time basis, more traditional pursuits throughout most of the ’90s. His main gig was as a chef, for the longest time at Atlanta’s once-hopping Yin Yang Cafe. Along with major performers such as Erykah Badu and Prince, the Cafe regularly hosted a band called The Chronicle, which featured Avery Johnson on keyboards. Bone would often jump out of the kitchen to drop some rhymes over The Chronicle’s funky music.

“ My pop taught me something that it took me a long time to learn.” Bone speaks pensively about his late grandfather. “He was saying to himself, ‘This boy, he don’t know what he want to do, but I’ma show him what he don’t want to do.’ He would put me in all kinds of odd jobs… I cooked, I did all that stuff. I used to hate all that shit. Then I started figuring out what I could do that I loved to do, and it all worked out.”
Bone was in the right place at the right time to make money doing what he loved. Throughout the ’90s, Atlanta grew into one of the nation’s premier hip-hop hubs, and Bone made connections with a lot of industry folk. A strong writer, he sold his first hook to Too $hort for the remix to the title track to the Oakland Mack’s 1996 album, Gettin’ It. Since then he’s written for acts ranging from Bow Wow and OutKast to the Clipse and the Youngbloodz.

Bone Crusher has been making his own records for some time, too. At first with a group called Lyrical Giants. Bone and his boys Bizar and Baby B jockeyed in and out of multiple record contracts over the years—short-lived agreements with Lil Jon’s BME, Erick Sermon’s Def Squad/EMI, JCOR, Tommy Boy. None of these deals bore fruit, other than a 1999 Tommy Boy compilation called Get Crunk!, which featured four LG tracks.
Another act Bone Crusher put in time with was Jackson, Mississippi-based Reese & Bigalow. In mid 2002, on their R&B Playa Music (Mo-Biga Entertainment), the duo released a track called “Neva Sked,” featuring Bone and Killer Mike. While “Neva Sked” was a regional hit in Mississippi, Bone got the song’s producer, his keyboard-playing homeboy Avery Johnson, to put a tighter version called “Never Scared”—still with Killer Mike and now featuring T.I. as well—on his own independent 2002 release, Bone Crusher And His Industry Friends (Break ’Em Off).