okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

Okay given my criticisms of Soulja Boy I am subscribed to his channel on YouTube. Frequently in posts I try to take what I’ve learned through those videos to offer some depths to my arguments for and against his music. For example a while back I may have been the first, or the only individual, to talk about his desire to want to go to college. That was around a year ago. Well today there is another blog where he talks about putting forth a positive image, first off apologizing to the parents of his fans but being careful not to use the word role model and suggesting that parents still have the responsibility to be one to their kids.

Apparently he wasn’t aware of how many fans he had or the impact that he had on their life. This is interesting and all, especially after such disparaging ignorance about slavery in which he expressed gratitude for his forefathers bring brought over as his generation would not have ice and tattoos. Interesting considering what type of circumstances Africans mine under so the world’s wealthy could have diamonds and jewelry. The tattoo thing I’m still trying to figure out, I’ll let you know when I have an answer.

This is also considering what he told Ice-T to do after the former rap star tried to call him out. All of that aside, Soulja Boy may have been frustrated with trying to defend what the uninitiated consider to be his overnight success. He already had hundreds of tracks he was working online through the social networks before he got signed. Like most, he had perfected his hustle, regardless of what you think of it. Would rap stars, particular fallen idols from the nineties who struggled to offer the most complex rhyme schemes in the history of the genre who hadn’t come anywhere close to making the money he has off of one record, be happy for him? Of course not, was he naive to think that they should be? Unfortunately so.

In his own defense, many of those artists came about in era when rap had finally achieved mainstream success and being unapologetically confrontational was chic. No apologies or explanations for your schtick was in order and no were ever forthcoming. Soulja Boy has been compared to Will Smith, for example, or acts like Kid N’ Play; neither of which were all that positive or negative, in fact they comfortably sat on the fence and hid behind the fact of having created fun party music. Soulja Boy is more directly a descendant of snap; post “crunk” rap advancing from an era where getting “hype” in the club, even if it meant drunk lewd behavior and fighting, was the order of the day. Songs talking about never being scared to confront someone, or beating someone down, were the metaphors for what appeared on the surface to be meaningless rap lyrics.

Soulja Boy came about at a time where snap music was supposed to take over the party rap scene. Some of these artists were better artists than the crunk rappers some were worse. The metaphors were the same, but somehow with Soulja Boy’s lack of lyrical complexity serious issues began to arise in the rap community among the older set, who were already tired of the simplicity of the beats behind D4L and other snap groups. Soulja Boy’s metaphors, if there were any, appealed to Generation Y, and seemed to convey the “me” attitude. Lyrical dexterity was not an issue in Soulja Boy’s music; the beats were simple and appealed to the most basic primal urges of it’s listeners. The music itself was good, and began to grow in complexity later on after Soulja Boy had been signed and you can see the differences in some of the singles off of his new record.

Yet lyrically, Soulja Boy is still challenged, and then there is his amazingly brilliant ignorance that make the beauty pageant contestants seem like Einstein. Sure there was profanity, many of which were empty attempts to create a medium for the few metaphors that can be found in his music. Having listened to his songs I can’t honestly think why anyone who actually hears him out would actually think that he is promoting any negativity other than materialism, which seems to be his primary vice. You don’t even get a sense of hedonistic sexuality in his music, which seems to be one of the tenements that hip-hop is built off of.

Which brings us to all of this about being positive and whether it is rhetoric or not. Regardless of what happens, a precedent has been set. If Soulja Boy fails his fans in that way, or whether or not other artists take up this cause remains to be seen. Given the current climate of the industry this may make headlines for those intellectuals that follow every little thing artists that appear to be cut from the fabric coming off of the machine of the industry, mainly bloggers and music journalists, but it may not show through on the music or may be downplayed. You know the usual tripe up front, followed by more thoughtful cuts that are never released, sort of how Lil’ Mama was pigeonholed. Here’s to hoping that is not the case …