Advocating for Soulja Boy’s comeback.
Soulja Boy is an innovator. He opened up lanes for younger rappers trying to do new issues in rap music. He’s most likely the most effective rapper not named Kanye West to make use of the Web for advertising and marketing. Soulja Boy bit quite a bit kinds from artists in his circle. Soulja Boy is an unabashed capitalist. Soulja Boy doesn’t appear to care about his music anymore. Soulja Boy actually wants a brand new Gucci headband. All these items are true after which some.
Ten years in the past, Kanye West was the one to inform us we had been all improper about Soulja Boy when “Crank Dat” and “Yahhh!” had been racking thousands and thousands views on YouTube and we had been rolling our eyes. “He got here from the hood, made his personal beats, made up a brand new saying, new sound and a brand new dance with one music…” Kanye wrote on his blog. “If that ain’t Hip Hop then what’s?”
Regardless of a near-supernatural capacity to soak in sounds and kinds at a fervent tempo and an exhausting work ethic culminating in lots of upon lots of songs, Soulja has by no means been in a position to retain consideration onto his musical work for lengthy. It at all times appears to return in the direction of his antics or his questionable monetary achievements.
Soulja Boy’s actual expertise does not essentially lie in music, it’s in gross sales. Each story instructed about Soulja Boy finally ends up going again to his beginnings as a self-produced DIY rapper, importing his music to LimeWire and creating an enormous fanbase on MySpace just by immediately interesting to followers in a means they weren’t anticipating from a soon-to-be-popular musician. “It’s really me, different artists have their workforce or label tweeting and speaking to followers however I at all times thought it was dope to talk to the followers immediately.” He instructed Forbes in 2014. By doing so, he leveraged the ability model advertising and marketing and made social media a necessity for brand spanking new artists trying to get observed within the digital age. All so he may promote some rattling ringtones.
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In his own self-produced documentary Soulja Boy: The Movie, Soulja Boy unleashed the philosophy that underlaid his continued relevance when he claimed that he wasn’t into computer systems, simply into making a living. He’s not completely improper; the previous decade has seen the rapper strive one million completely different concepts moreover music: hoverboards, appearing, e-sports leagues, a style line, a document label, light-up sneakers, signature e-cigarettes, sandwich franchises and now, his personal line online game consoles and a SouljaWatch. Soulja is the proto “rise and grind” American entrepreneur who simply so occurred to fall right into a ten-year gap making rap music.
It was 2015 when the Soulja narrative started to subtley change from joke to savant, beginning proper round when Drake carried out “We Made It” on the Coachella stage. Whereas Soulja later carried out a sequence high-prile beefs and publicity stunts that appeared to go nowhere, folks lastly started to attach the dots together with his exhaustive discography and the acts he impressed. Three years later, Large Draco himself is arguing those self same factors in a radio station broadcast in New York Metropolis. “They mentioned I killed hip-hop and now they doing precisely like I did and I am being shunned upon.” He mentioned through the now legendary Breakfast Club broadcast. “I am the rationale y’all doing this. I am the rationale why all these artists have social media. Y’all ought to thank me. Each artist within the recreation, all y’all document labels, y’all owe me 5 %, bro. … Y’all gon’ respect it.”
Self-mythologizing is nothing new for Soulja Boy. The final spherical conversations and discussions concerning the legacy his debut album souljaboytellem.com had the rapper reply with an album named The Greatest To Ever Do It this previous summer season. Soulja tends coming again to remind us about his legacy when he has one thing to plug – when he is about to make/shut a sale – on this case, it could have began together with his doubtful on-line retailer SouljaGame consoles. However, a number of days after his viral Breakfast Membership interview, Soulja Boy confirmed up at Yams Day as a particular visitor, re-enacting his meme’d radio look and performing “Crank Dat”for a thrilled viewers. He could not have come again within the conventional sense having a monster hit like Tyga did however he did it in probably the most Soulja Boy means attainable.