Review Summary: Soulja Boy takes rap to new lows with this 49 minute suckfest.
The modern rap constituency is, well, hilarious. Hurricane Chris is 'A Bay Bay'ing his way to the bank while Rich Boy founds automotive misogyny, forcefully telling us to "throw some Ds on that bitch" all the while trying to convince us he's talking about cars. Young rappers coming out today seem to govern their sound around novelty, irony and short-lived infamy.
When browsing our resident forums I stumbled into the hipster barraged Alt/Indie subsection, and that was when I came across a thread that begged a simple but important question: is there anything White people won't listen to? While playful and facetious in nature, the query hit me hard one day when I was waiting for the bus. It was about 2:30AM and the lights in the station had been shut off when, seemingly out of nowhere, I heard the clanging of steel drums and a muffled, slurred vocal delivery coming out of a gaunt, drunk white hipster's earphones. About a week later, I was in my friend's minivan when the very same sounds came blasting out of her maxed out speakers.
Now, several weeks later, I can confirm that what I heard was the next ironic rap trend. His name is Soulja Boy, and when he's not mumbling the commands to his distinctly choreographed dance routine he's painting his name on his sunglasses and spinning his bathing apes, a "feet" we're apparently told to be jealous of. Surely you've heard his ineffable single; the inescapably intolerable, yet all the while infections "Crank That".
Lo-Fi in its presentation, the track is nothing but Soulja shouting out the moves to the accompanying dance, though to consider it an accompanying dance when it's the focus of the song is, well, confusing. "Crank That" is everywhere, and surely you've heard it, but if not I'll refresh your memory…it's the song that repeatedly cries "Superman that ho".
Yet Soulja Boy's album is just preparing to drop and the single has grown tiresome; many have learnt the dance, which is nothing more than a perverse exercise in ghetto-aerobics, and the rest have grown bored with the novelty of a young southern kid mumbling into what could only be a laptop microphone.
But give credit where it's due, as Soulja Boy has done his part to let us, nay, force us into remembering his name. Whether it's a result of the song being turned into a popular ringtone, him painting his name into his sunglasses, airbrushing it on his back or using his website as the title of his album (the official title is "souljaboytellem.com"), Souljah Boy doesn't want to be the J-Kwan of 2007. So I suppose at this point you're wondering if the album stands above it's lead single.
No. No it motherfuc
king doesn't.
Each track on the album is seemingly built off a brief instrumental snippet from "Crank That", barring a few equally terrible exceptions. In "Snap and Roll", Soulja Boy spends nearly four minutes telling us to snap and roll, while "Pass It to Arab" spends four minutes telling us to pass it to Arab. "Sidekick" consists of Soulja Boy telling us that he loves his Sidekick, wants you to buy a Sidekick and that he appreciates the T-Mail features that come with his Sidekick. At one point, Soulja actually tells the listener that he "can't believe he wrote a song about his cell phone".
Don't worry, though, it still gets worse. "Bapes" is a 3:54 minute track that consists of Soulja endlessly slurring off the line "I got me some Bathing Apes", which some may recognize as a line from "Crank That". Other tracks have Soulja Boy reminiscing about the time he Supermanned [sic] a hoe, while some exclusively focus on the fact that he is in fact Soulja Boy and that we should "tell 'em".
The few exceptions to this rule come on the apologetic "Don't Get Mad", a track that tells parents to not get mad because their kids like Soulja Boy. "Soulja Girl" is a D-grade R&B track that gives instructions on how to be a 'Soulja Girl', which is apparently as simple as "walking like that".
To try and explain just how bad the "music" is on this disc is about as much of a masochistic exercise as listening to it. The beats are a mish-mash of sh
itty keyboard loops and samples from "Crank That". The lyrics, if you can call them that, are rarely no more than the song titles repeated at different tempos followed by meandering gibberish, and Soulja's delivery is akin to what Mushmouth (Fat Albert) would've sounded like when he was learning to read. It would seem that, beyond the overblown single, this album is the one thing even ironic white hipsters will be unable to sit through.
In short, I have only this to say: Fuc
k you, Soulja Boy. Fuc
k you with a motherfuc
king stick.
