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Was soulja boy ahead of his time? He basically defined middle school hip hop scene for me living in the suburbs. The sloppy/upbeat lyrics of all his songs definitely predate the bieber/boyband craze. Was the 2010s just echoing the entire movement that he started? Was soulja boy essential in the late 2000s to start this whole craze, or would he be better placed as a breakout star now, competing with drake? The hiphop genre was extremely barren at the time. What was there, tpain, lil wayne, usher, pitbull? As far as crank dat goes, it's insanely catchy, which I would almost entirely blame on the excellent use of the steel drum. The lyrics are nothing special, but compared with other stuff at the time it seems a bit more interesting.

Soulja boy came out at a troubled time in internet culture, switching many people over to youtube to watch "crank dat" for the first time, yet his music videos include AOL instant messenger and flip phones. "memes" weren't even real yet. Compare crank dat to black and yellow, a song mass-consumed and over-memed to the point where the artist disappeared. Yet it seems like we've come full circle with crank dat: it was a cultural phenomenon like gangnam style (but on a smaller scale), now being used as some kind of "throwback meme" (souja bane, that crank dat vid, "what him rolling down the street, watch him rolling to the beat").

"Kiss me thru the phone" is definitely the one song I can find not just "i have money and get hoes" that seems fairly well done. Could soulja boy have succeeded in the more critical world of twitter and spotify defining genres these days? I argue that he COULD, and think he was trapped in the crunk age of music where he didn't belong. But who can say how different the world would have been without the crank dat.

Your doing the lords work

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