If there is one word to adequately describe Soulja Boy’s success, that word is “inexplicable”.
Hip-hop perpetuates its own hackneyed aspects. Soulja Boy, as far as I can tell, is an overblown mockery of several of these aspects. He’s ridiculously exaggerated to the extent that you think, there’s no way this guy is possibly serious. And yet he is.
“Horrendous miscarriage of pop culture” approaches the magnitude of his failure.
It’s often said, mostly in majority circles, that minorities give credence to their own shortcomings and stereotypes.
No.
Soulja Boy alone accounts for the presence of these things. Yes, there is an issue of concurrency with this statement: Soulja Boy appears to have originated after the origination of most black stereotypes. However, this is but an illusion.
I believe his cultural deadweight is so powerfully stupid that it can’t be restricted by the limits of time, and thus was able to affect culture of the past in an abominate, exponential manner. The chicken laid its own egg, if you will. Except someone neglected to ruthlessly smash the egg before it hatched in a shower of platinum and oversized sunglasses.
Soulja Boy is something of an extremist in that not only did he release a self-titled album, he released a self-titled song. That isn’t the extreme part. The extreme part is it’s complete shit. In a very literal sense, Soulja Boy has bottled up massive amounts of his own bodily waste and successfully sold it at premium rates to the American public.
Here’s the chorus of aforementioned song. Please note that I merely copied this from the first search result for the lyrics, because I dare not attempt to decipher the song word for word on my own. (I speculate that such a foolish endeavor would endanger my mental health and compel me to wear oversized airbrushed t-shirts. Plus I don’t think KFC is open at this hour!)
Soulja Boy off in this hoe
Watch me crank it
Watch me roll
Watch me crank dat Soulja Boy
Then Superman dat hoe
Now, watch me you…
(Crank dat Soulja Boy)
Now, watch me you…
(Crank dat Soulja Boy)
Now, watch me you…
(Crank dat Soulja Boy)
Now, watch me you…
(Crank dat Soulja Boy)
If you’ve somehow escaped the sonic agony that is this song played over speakers, I feel it’s necessary to point out something key to understanding how painful it is to listen to. The instrumental for the entire song is six notes on a steel drum repeated over and over. I think there’s some other crap in there too but I can’t really remember and I don’t feel like listening to it again to check because it makes my ears bleed. And man, I hate it when my ears bleed.
It would be a gigantic understatement to say this song lacks meaning. This song not only lacks meaning, it defies meaning. It’s an existential black hole from which no conceivable purpose may arise. Musically, it divides by zero, and yet months after its release it’s still getting plenty of air time. Oh, and the album went triple platinum, too.
I really do hope this song dies. Quietly and very soon. And I hope to see Soulja Boy buried with it. Alive.
