Soulja Boy and the destruction of hip-hop

Jono Cowgill - cowgiljm@plu.edu Mast Op-ED Columnist

“If someone be up in your face and you don’t wanna hear it just be like Yahh, trick Yahh!”
The dubiously poetic opening words of Soulja Boy’s most recent single, “Yahh,” ring in your ears. Compare this line to a verse on Nas’ album “Illmatic.” “Time is illmatic keep static like wool fabric/pack a 4 matic to crack your whole cabbage,” and you begin to wonder what happened to rap.

With an impressive level of clairvoyance, Nas released “Hip Hop is Dead” a half year before Soulja Boy polluted airwaves across the country with “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy).”

Nas’s apocalyptic announcement was nearly correct. Hip-hop isn’t dead, but it is severely maimed. And Soulja Boy is the apex of this malignant degeneration.

Mainstream hip-hop, or pop-rap, has been around since the Sugar Hill Gang and the creation of Def Jam. But simile, metaphor, a meticulous regard to beat, and an overall harsh and introspective slant to lyrics have always played important parts in any hip hop track. From MC Hammer to Naughty By Nature, from Big and Pac to Lil Wayne and Ludacris, hip-hop has taken many turns, but always stuck to these mainstays of lyrical and philosophical construction.

Add to these popular acts the work of the likes of Tribe Called Quest, Eminem, Big L, Black Star, and the Roots, and a canon of work that deserves critical interrogation becomes defined.

In the early 2000s however, the Atlanta hip-hop scene rose to national prominence with a new type of “snap-music,” epitomized by songs like “White Tee” and “Snap Yo’ Fingers.” Soulja Boy is the apex of this direction in the genre. His beats are two-dimensional, and his choruses so repetitive that it is impossible to forget them.

It is less like music and more like advertising. He does not seem to reject this notion. The name of his debut album is “souljaboytellem.com.”

It is easy to argue that the idiocy that is Soulja Boy’s music should not matter to the U.S. It is a passing fad. Good rappers are still making good music. This is a valid position, but it fails to account for the large amount of American nose snubbing toward hip-hop.

Soulja Boy isn’t just popular for his ability to make songs that program themselves into the head, he’s also popular because it’s hilarious how stupid his songs are. This reinforces the image of hip-hop as a low class and uneducated musical genre. It perpetuates an already tired image of stupidity within black U.S. culture. It sweeps all of hip-hop into a corner of the U.S. musical scene and doesn’t allow for it to be interrogated on a highly critical level.

Writer and lecturer Michael Eric Dyson has made large steps towards bringing hip-hop to academia with books like “Know What I Mean? Reflections on Hip Hop” and “Between God and Gangsta Rap.” He did so by discussing the works of lyricists like those mentioned above.

I believe hip-hop, both as a popular phenomenon of a microcosm in black U.S. culture and as highly intricate structural and poetical verse, has much to offer the worlds of entertainment and high art. In terms of critical appreciation, it is not there yet, and as long as people like Bill O’Reilley are around, it has a long way to walk. And Soulja Boy is maiming its legs.