From the coffee shop reputation of Arrested Development to the derriere-obsessed punchlines of Sir Mix-A-Lot's "Baby Got Back," there was lots of rap on the pop charts suddenly. Whether or not it accurately reflected what the streets were bumping is debatable, but it was Into such a climate that came two backwards-clothes wearing 13-year olds from Atlanta armed with a monster hit. That hit came courtesy of the teenage wunderkind producer guiding their musical destinies.

Jermaine Dupri was the son of music producer/manager Michael Mauldin; Jermaine was a prodigy who'd danced for Whodini as a kid on the Fresh Fest Tour and come up watching his father in the music business. “That’s a value that you don’t really understand until you get older,” Dupri said in 2013. “It’s like a hidden advantage that I had that other people don’t have. I got the opportunity to see Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis in the studio before I was ever a producer. A lot of the stuff that I saw is like a documentary in the back of my brain. [But] in the beginning, a lot of that stuff I didn’t even think about.”

"I thought I was a local celebrity after Fresh Fest," Dupri would recall to Creative Loafing decades later. "But nobody knew who I was. In my neighborhood, people knew I had been on the tour, and knew I had gear that nobody else had, but I wasn't a real celebrity. There was no Atlanta scene then. There were producers from out of town coming here to work with other artists, like Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, who came to work with the S.O.S. Band. There wasn't really anyone here doing anything, though, except MC Shy D. He was the only rapper from Atlanta who was trying to do something from the city. I met Shy D back when I used to dance. He wrote my first rap, so I guess you can say he got me into rap."

He'd produced the Atlanta trio Silk Tymes Leather's debut album It Ain't Where Ya From, It's Where Ya At in 1990, but the project saw little success. It was shortly after that project that, during a trip to Atlanta's Greenbriar shopping mall, he saw two kids who were drawing a crowd. As he walked over to see what the fuss was about, he discovered that everyone was drawn to these two young boys decked out in some of the most stylish clothes and the latest sneakers.

"I had never seen no little kids look like me. That's what it was," Dupri told PEOPLE in 1991. "They had on almost better gear than me. Almost. Fresh new sneakers. I was like, 'Wait a minute. How old are these kids?'"

"These kids" were Atlantans Chris Smith and Chris Kelly, sixth graders who hadn't even considered a music career beyond the regular adolescent daydreaming. "We thought about it," Smith explained to the Washington Post. "But you know, everybody thinks about that stuff. But you don't really think about it too much—because it might not happen. But two years later, we got a record contract." 

"My mom had seen Silk Thymes Leather in Jet magazine," Kelly said in 2013. "And [she] recognized them walking around the mall. And Jermaine saw us, too. We got to the car and my mom said, "Y'all should get an autograph!" We was like, "Naw." But we went and asked them who they were. Everything just kind of went from there."

Dupri set about crafting a sound and an image for the boys. As he was writing the songs for what would become Kris Kross, Atlanta's music scene was suddenly bubbling. Antonio "L.A." Reid and Kenneth "Babyface" Edmonds had launched their own label, LaFace Records, in the city; and Dallas Austin was rapidly becoming one of the most in-demand artists in music. Dupri introduced Kris Kross at an Austin event for TLC, who Dallas was producing. Left Eye of TLC played a major part in working with Dupri and Kris Kross, and they'd all become friendly as up-and-comers in the ATL.

"Left Eye was the heartbeat of me trying to do things, her and my conversations and her and Chris and Chris’ conversations with her," Dupri said in 2021. "In the end, that was the crew — Ian [Burke], Left Eye, Chris and Chris and Jermaine. We were the unstoppable team that didn’t have nothing — that was the first So So Def!”

"From the start, they had the attitude already. They came to me with that attitude—little kids that's got themselves together. It just needed to be polished," he told PEOPLE in 1992. "People might say, 'Okay, Kris Kross, they cute.' But it took like two years to get these kids together. Their rapping skills went from terrible to excellent. In four years, they should be terrors."

Dupri's early ideas for Kris Kross songs were introspective and hard; he wanted to write tracks about "Lil boys in the hood," (an idea that would find it's way onto the Totally Krossed Out song of the same name), and there was an attempt at a love song featuring Left Eye that was eventually scrapped. Dupri would eventually find inspiration after going to a concert and seeing how every one was, quite simply, jumping. It sparked the producer to craft a simple party song, taking a Jackson 5 classic and melding it to middle school Hip-Hop charm of the Chrises.

Totally Krossed Out showcases Dupri's flair for polish and hooks. Like contemporaries such as Naughty By Nature's Kay Gee, J.D. is a producer, even in this early stage, with an ear for street grooves and a gift for pop sheen. Naughty's influence is obvious throughout ...Krossed Out; as that New Jersey trio had drafted a new blueprint for infectious rap records with their debut album, released the summer before "Jump" hit airwaves. But you can hear a much more prominent R&B-leaning sensibility, something Dupri would explore soon enough with his next several acts.

On their debut album, Chris "Mac Daddy" Kelly and Chris "Daddy Mac" Smith play their personas well, as Dupri's declaration that they'd grown into capable rappers bears out. Songs like "I Missed the Bus" and the aforementioned "Lil Boys N the Hood" manage to fit their tween images without going too cutesy; and they are believably sincere even as they're putting across Dupri's words. Totally Krossed Out is an assured debut for Dupri and for his two young proteges. It's evident throughout the album that Smith and Kelly are capable of summoning the panache and cadence to make Dupri's bars and music work.

Second single "Warm It Up" followed "Jump" onto the Billboard Top 15, peaking at No. 12 in June 1992. The infectious track repeated much of the winning formula of "Jump" and it helped push Totally Krossed Out past the four million mark. Kris Kross was suddenly everywhere. They would go on tour with Michael Jackson throughout late 92 and early 1993 as part of his blockbuster Dangerous Tour; and they made an appearance as teenage gangbangers in an episode of the hit NBC sitcom A Different World.

Kris Kross was suddenly one of the biggest acts in music. With fame, came detractors. Seemingly overnight, there was a plethora of teen rap acts and many of them, most notably Da Youngstaz and Illegal, seemed to relish the chance to take shots at Kris Kross. Da Youngstaz debuted just months after "Jump" and Illegal would show up the following year, and they both blasted Kris Kross on songs and in interviews.

Teen idol status has also newfound territory for the boys. Everywhere they want, all over the world, Kris Kross was mobbed. Dupri had seen the effect Kelly and Smith could have on crowds when they were just too well-dressed 12 year olds. Now, they had hit records and a huge marketing machine behind them.

"Yeah, they’re always all over us,” said Smith about their female fans in an interview with Entertainment Weekly in 1992, with Kelly adding, ”We’re interested. That’s why they call us Mack Daddies. It also means you get a lot of babes.”

The mega success of Totally Krossed Out would prove hard for Kris Kross to duplicate. The album would see three more singles ("The Way of Rhyme," "I Missed The Bus," and "It's A Shame") but they wouldn't fare as well as the duo's first two. By the time Kris Kross released their sophomore album, 1993s Da Bomb, their maturing voices and backwards-pants image suddenly were liabilities. They would release 1995s Young, Rich And Dangerous before splitting.

Dupri would go on to launch So So Def Recordings and shepherd the careers of multiplatinum artists like Xscape and Da Brat; eventually also launching stars like Lil Jon, Jagged Edge and Lil Bow Wow. The label would become an Atlanta institution, as the forays made by Dupri with Kris Kross (and the success of TLC, who dropped their debut album less than a month prior to Totally...) laid the foundation for the city to become a musical hotbed.

Kris Kross would reunite in 2013 at Jermaine Dupri's So So Def 20th anniversary concert to rave reviews. But Chris Kelly would be found dead from an overdose on April 29th, 2013 at the age of 34. 

“You just kind of freeze,” Smith said in a 2014 interview with XXL. “For me to just look back and think about it, I just froze. I probably froze and the whole world just kind of went silent. I really don’t remember anything too much from that moment that I first got the news. I don’t remember a whole lot after that, ’cause your mind just goes. I just locked myself away and I didn’t want to be around anybody. I tried to absorb it the best I could. I never lost anybody that close to me in my life. Somebody that everyday of your life, we were brothers.”

It's understandable why Kris Kross can often be dismissed as a rap novelty act. But it's important to note the importance of Totally Krossed Out and recognize that the album's greatness is about the craftsmanship of Jermaine Dupri. At eighteen years old, Dupri wrote and produced an album that sold four million copies and featured two Top Ten pop hits. He was doing what Hurby "Luv Bug" Azor was doing and he was almost a decade younger.

The success Dupri saw with Kris Kross and Totally Krossed Out paid immediate dividends; as Columbia offered the producer his own label. In 1993, Dupri launched So So Def Recordings, and the label would go on to drop some of the most successful Hip-Hop and R&B releases of the 1990s and 2000s.

And you shouldn't scoff at the legacy of Kris Kross. Dupri clearly holds his first major musical success in a special place. And he believes the duo's impact on music, business and culture should be more recognized.

“You can’t think of nobody else in hip-hop in ’92 that was wearing baseball jerseys. So, that means that after 1992, wearing baseball jerseys, football jerseys, basketball jerseys, all of that came from me and Kris Kross,” said Dupri in 2021. “But the industry that we in, they don’t actually frame it up like that. We don’t get the credit that we supposed to."

The death of Chris Kelly is a sad epilogue to the story of Kris Kross. Child stardom can be infamously cruel, and Hip-Hop is certainly no exception to its pitfalls.

“I never really [see] producers chasing what I’m doing or what I’ve done,” Dupri told Rolling Out in 2013. “I don’t hear producers talking about having labels anymore. I don’t see young producers coming out with their own artists. I see young producers just producing people that are already out. I could’ve gone to LaFace or whatever label was popping when I first did Kris Kross. But from the day that [they] became a platinum group, not one time did I go to Los Angeles to chase these other record companies. My goal from that point was to create more Kris Krosses. I don’t really see people doing that [anymore]."

It's important to remember how it all started. How much promise was there on Totally Krossed Out, and how Jermaine Dupri built on that promise. His talents exploded onto pop culture in a way that few others have; a teenager building a chart-topping act out of two younger kids he met at the mall. It sounds like a dream. But that dream was the spark that built So So Def. So So Def redirected Atlanta's musical destiny, and soon, Dupri would be drafting hits for megastars like Mariah Carey and Janet Jackson. That all started with Totally Krossed Out.