Tunnel banger (noun) Circa 1994-2000, a record—often hardcore and aggressive—that whipped the crowd into a frenzy during the prime-time hour after 1 a.m. at the NYC club's Sunday-night party.
To truly understand the definition of a "
Tunnel banger," you first need to know about
The Tunnel itself.
Peter Gatien's NYC nightclub was a hotspot for house music and techno in the early '90s, but it wasn't until the creation of a Sunday-night party called "Mecca" that the Tunnel would cement its place in hip-hop lore. When
Funkmaster Flex took over the party's prime-time slot—roughly 1 a.m. to 2:30 a.m.—in the mid-'90s, the "Tunnel banger" was born.
So what was the Tunnel like on a Sunday night? As Flex's warm-up DJ (along with
Big Kap),
Cipha Sounds was there for it all. The crowd? "The thugs, the drug dealers, the fukking jail dudes. Even the security guards were hustlers," says Ciph. The mood? "It wasn't a 'dance' club, people weren't really dancing," he says. "But records would just make people go crazy, hands in the sky, jumping." And the music? "The records you would not hear at any other club because they were too hard," says Ciph.
"Street records, which would usually just be album cuts, became their own genre." Yep: Tunnel bangers. This all sound kinda crazy? Well, it was—the Tunnel was shut down nearly every year because of violence, and eventually closed for good in 2001.
