Soulja Boy—real name DeAndre Way—was raised in Batesville, Mississippi. As a teenager, his uncle gifted him a demo copy of FL Studio. In 2005, he registered an account on the online music service SoundClick, and began sharing his songs on the site.[10] Primarily by means of trickery and false advertisement, he executed various schemes to increase his brand name recognition, and soon expanded his artistic reach to MySpace and blogs. He misled users on the peer-to-peer platform LimeWire by changing his songs' metadata to whichever songs were popular at the time, in an attempt to reach out to more listeners.[11][12] Within time, the rapper began to garner a significant number of streams and shares.[13] His songs stylistically emulate the sound of Atlanta hip hop in the mid-aughts, particularly the briefly popular snap music fad that occurred in the Atlanta hip hop scene during the late 2000s.

In 2006, the phrase "crank dat"—a lyrical invitation to dance—became a small phenomenon in mainly online hip-hop circles; users uploaded videos of different dance routines set to an increasing number of songs with the title phrase. An early version of the song, titled "Crank Dat Dance Remix", was uploaded June 14, 2006 to SoundClick;[14] another iteration, titled "Crank Dat Jump Rope", debuted a month later.[15] "Crank That"—as publicly titled upon major-label release—was self-produced by Way in the unregistered demo copy of FL Studio, utilizing only the software's most basic library of sounds.[16] The song is musically repetitive and sparse, incorporating snaps, a steel drum pattern, centered around a meaningless chant: "Yoooouuuulll!"[17] Way reportedly wrote and recorded the song in ten minutes.[18] The original recording of the song was made at Way's home,[19] and subsequently revised and updated for its final release. Way first posted the song, along with an instructional how-to, to his MySpace on February 25, 2007.[20]

The song grew in popularity steadily, attracting the attention of music producer Mr. Collipark, who initially balked at its unexpected recognition.[21] The song led Soulja Boy to sign with Collipark's imprint on Interscope Records, who released the final, professionally-recorded song on May 2, 2007 in the U.S.; a global release followed on June 27.

For some personal history, this is the first version of Crank That that I heard while I was in school, and the one that I prefer to this day.