Soulja Boy—close up

With the same internet that gave rise to his career, Soulja Male child is digging his own grave.

soulja

Emery Little

Soulja Boy's human relationship with the internet is a complicated one.

I was 12 years one-time when I first heard "Crank That (Soulja Boy)." In that location was a violent hailstorm raging exterior of the local Boys & Girls Order where I was attending summer camp, and while we were all locked indoors until the conditions cleared up or our parents came to take usa home, several of the counselors agreed to pop a copy of Dance Fundamental into the visitor Wii system to help us endure the wait.

Hearing "Crank That" for the first time was similar being brainwashed into an all-sectional way of beingness, solely accessible to believers in the swagger it exhibited: it was more of a chant than an intricate array of bars, more of a visual experience than an auditory soundscape, more of an open-ended commemoration than a one-way flex—merely more anything else, information technology was simple . Information technology was catchy. Simply considering it seemed every bit if anyone could, I wanted to exist just as swagged out equally Soulja Boy when I grew up. I sat wide-eyed, staring at the tv screen, my slightly older peers religiously reenacting the trip the light fantastic moves in my peripheral vision—jump-crossing legs, touching toes backside backs, hopping on unmarried anxiety with arms outstretched backwards like collective Supermen. Though my dad arrived to take my sister and I home several verses before the video game was over, by midnight that night, I had memorized the entire song.

Soulja Boy's initial ascension to prominence banked on this accessible quality—anyone who wanted to participate was allowed full entry into his promising new revolution. Where previous decades saw hip-hop culture strictly adjoin itself to corresponding gang scenes and street politics, losing favor with protective parents nationwide, 2007's "Crank That" marked one of the first times in the 21st century that yous could spot preschoolers dancing along to a nautical chart-topping rap song—with their caregivers not merely supervising, but recording on their cell phones. Soulja Boy'due south emergence into the world of gimmicky culture both coincided with and epitomized a novel blog era, i that had just begun to stem from burgeoning ties betwixt urban music and the internet (which was, at this point, no more than 2 decades onetime). All of a sudden, fans from all around the globe were in touch on with each other. Just a couple of years prior, i substantially had to continue their weird music opinions to themselves, only with the appearance of the world wide web, ideas and fandoms began to proliferate at celebrated levels.

"Throughout the early 2000s, a couple hundred superfans flocked to 2 parallel, overlapping web forums—the official Star Trak forum and the rawer fan-site theneptunes.org—to swap behind-the-scenes info, post unreleased ring demos, and soak up knowledge that they'd go on to pour into their ain creative endeavors," former New Yorker editor Matthew Trammell wrote in an article about forums dedicated to the band North.East.R.D. "Many frequent users went on to lead global cults of their own: alums include M.I.A., Drake, Janelle Monae, Tyler, the Creator and more. N.Eastward.R.D's forums not just served as a talent incubator but also planted the seed for the industry's full turn toward the net as the main means of music distribution, criticism and debate, and direct-to-fan appointment."

"Crank That," in and of itself, was simultaneously an epitome and beneficiary of the internet's unfurling manner of performance: anybody was included; traction sprang from consumer rather than producer; there was more room for chat between rapper and audience, and less room for the rapper telling the audience how cool he was. When Soulja Boy howled "Youuuu," he was talking to you . When he told you lot to watch him "creepo that Soulja Boy," the virality depended on you lot relaying the message to someone else. And even betwixt the lines of brash declarations like "yous can't do it like me," there existed a subconscious "but I'd like to see you try." Soulja Boy loved (and lowkey invented?) the cyberspace. The internet loved (and lowkey invented?) him back.

Simply now it doesn't. Terminal month, Soulja Boy tweeted a link to purchase an NFT depicting him every bit an aroused ape. While his original tweet capped at effectually 500 likes, the outset reply—a meme that read "NFT artists be similar: this flick goes hard, $4,500 to screenshot"—is, as I write this, at 1.4k likes and counting. It wouldn't be the first time that Soulja Boy has made a fool of himself on the very platform he in one case championed. Other examples, painful to recall equally a longtime Soulja Male child apologist, include his obscure video game console " SouljaBoyGame ," the impassioned Breakfast Club bluster that turned him into a recurring hip-hop punchline and an overall embarrassing Twitter beef with the WWE wrestler Randy Orton.

Over a decade removed from his internet-dependent rise to glory, Soulja Male child seems to have cast all cocky-sensation into the same void his legacy is dying in. Like the starved Nintendogs that rot abroad on our dustied 15-year-quondam DS systems to this mean solar day, his dignity is thrust more and more irrecoverably into dearth every time he opens his mouth. It'southward a archetype case of male child-who-cried-wolf: at a certain point, people realized that he wasn't saying anything of substance anymore and simply stopped listening.

Information technology's fifty-fifty come up to a point where the dynamic constantly plays itself out on a micro-scale. I, along with many others, for instance, used to alive for his brazen assertions that he was the "first" to do a host of things. Hip-hop accounts photoshopped images of him setting foot on the moon; his tweets went viral; annotate sections began to agree that it was fourth dimension to give the man his flowers. Simply once he had the people's attending, he started overusing the joke. Then, his "I was the kickoff" statements started becoming completely wrong … and at some levels, outright disrespectful . Soulja Male child's career at large has taken the same exact pitfall: He attracts an audience. His oral cavity starts running. Then—straight out of the classic fridge prank call—he can't catch it.

So what if he just closed the void?

If Soulja Boy had never spoken again after 2007, it is very probable that we would consider him two things: a one-hit wonder, and a legend. One of the few common truths of the 20th century and the net era alike is that in one case an creative person stops talking, the audience starts desperately trying to fill in the gaps—and not according to objective realities, but instead to whatever upholds the terminal image of the creative person they're familiar with.

When MCs like Kendrick Lamar and Frank Ocean go quiet for years on end between groundbreaking albums, their silence contributes to a certain untouchable mystique, one that renders the possibilities limitless while leaving their legend intact. Nothing an external figure says about, or does to, a musician tin definitively and totally tarnish that musician'south perception—if it could, being a music critic would exist a great culling for someone like Marker David Chapman—because at the finish of the day, until the artist opens their mouth, it'due south all just hearsay. Perchance Pitchfork says they're working on a new project. Then, peradventure that i YouTube aqueduct run by your ex's music-head friend says they're hiding out in Nippon. And peradventure a pair of Twitter users are going at it most whether they're remastering demos or taking time off to focus on family. None of it is of whatsoever value until the figure themself is there to give the final discussion.

In a climate where more than opinions are flying around than ever before, any shot at long-term respect requires a solid, coherent legacy onto which these opinions can latch. A common adage advises that information technology is "better to remain silent and be thought a fool than to speak and remove all doubtfulness." In this sense, Soulja Male child has committed the greatest sin: not simply did he speak later on 2010, merely practically every time he did so, information technology was nonsense. We didn't have to know he was a bum. But—fifty-fifty if you lot've been rooting for him all forth—there's no longer any dubiety left.

Soulja Boy is living proof that, for as much as the music industry has changed, one'due south music nevertheless has to be able to speak for itself. Only in order for the music to speak for itself, one must actually let the music speak. For the by ten years or and then, Soulja Boy hasn't been letting his music breathe. It'southward not like he'southward a bad rapper. His 2007 debut album "Souljaboytellem.com" was the soundtrack to some of my richest childhood memories; over 10 years later, his earworm single "She Go far Handclapping" is a TikTok darling .

Nevertheless Soulja Boy'southward trouble isn't his music; information technology'south his oral fissure. For every footstep he thinks he climbs up the internet ladder he pioneered, the previous rung falls out from beneath him—and past the fourth dimension he gets the sense to end talking and expect downwardly, there volition be nowhere left for him to become.

Back on World, the same kids who danced forth with his music videos ten years ago will have grown up. They volition crane their necks at the spectacle flailing in mid-air. They will shake their heads in disapproval. Then they will go back to what they were doing.