Team Soulja Boy

J sends me a link to Kanye West's blog that posts the two videos. The first is Ice-T blasting Soulja Boy, saying he singlehandedly destroyed hiphop, and then goes on to say how far hip hop had come only to blow up because of Soulja Boy's song. Then Soulja Boy comes back at him. His response starts out like this:

“This nigga Ice-T is old as fuck. This nigga old enough to be my grandfather. He’s the forefather of my nuts. I Wikipedia’d this nigga, he was born in 1958. This nigga says he’s from the west coast, nigga, you was born in New Jersey! Mr. Tracy Lauren Morrow, you was born three centuries ago, my nigga.”

Kanye comes to Soulja Boy's rescue, and now I feel kind of cheap that I'm only now saying something, since it takes much less courage to be on Team Soulja Boy after Kanye West takes the first step. But I'm with Kanye on this. My main inclination is to support anyone who is financially successful, because financial success in music is statistically so rare as to be impossible. So this kid put something together that was really valuable to a lot of people, and I respect that personally. But, two, what's the big deal? The guy writes several songs that people like, which means there is currently most likely a very large market for this certain kind of music. But it seems to me that it speaks to rap and hip-hop's vitality and flexibility that it can have so much diversity - people like him, Eminem, Lauryn Hill, Pharrell Williams, Kanye West, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Beastie Boys, Lupe Fiasco, 50 Cent, Snoop, etc. That's not even the slice of the iceburg. The genre is just so mature that it can have so many different tribes of music within it, and engender music that supports a range of the human experience, that no single musician or style dominates it anymore. Here's what Wikipedia says is the secret to Soulja Boy's success, incidentally.

Critics and hip-hop figures such as Snoop Dogg, 50 Cent, and Jermaine Dupri cite Soulja Boy as artistically typical of contemporary rap trends such as writing for the lucrative ringtone market, and the ascendence of "Southern hip hop", emphasizing catchy, mindless music that discards rap's traditional emphasis on message. Soulja Boy identifies his goal as making upbeat, party-themed music that avoids the negative, violent image that he sees in most hip-hop.

Here's the last thing I'll say about Soulja Boy. At Christmas this year, my 13-year-old niece taught my 62-year-old mom how to do the "Crank Dat" dance, and then my mom, me, my wife, my sister, and my 13-year-old niece commenced to do the dance in the kitchen for about a half-hour. Why can't this just be what it is? Fun.