Soulja Boy better than Mozart?

Published in the Thursday, November 1, 2007 Edition of The Height
By Ryan Malone

The historical significance of Soulja Boy is not hard to divine. After the abrupt and tragic exodus of Jibbs from musical relevance, Soulja Boy selflessly filled the gaping void in our lives that only a teenage novelty rapper could. Most importantly, at a time when America's river of submissive creativity had seemingly run dry, a savior emerged to bestow his messianic wisdom upon us. Personally, I've found the only downside to these glorious revelations is that between "supermanning," "heismanning," "doin' da heizman," "spidermanning," "supersoaking," and my personal favorite, "superfanning," I've barley had time to eat, sleep, go to class, or write essays without using most or all of these terms.

At the tender age of 17, Soulja Boy has composed more songs about cranking things than Mozart did in his entire life. I'm not saying he's better than Mozart; I'm just saying he has more talent. In fact, I would go so far as to say Soulja Boy is the greatest rapper since MIMS. If he maintains his torrid pace, scholars will one day speak of him in the superlative terms once reserved for the likes of Lil' Boosie and Hurricane Chris.

The only beef I have with Soulja Boy is nomenclatural. "Soulja Boy" is an innovatively phonetic moniker that looks great painted on sunglasses, but it lacks a sorely needed element of grandiose self-description. A young DAndre Cortez Way would have been better served to proclaim himself "Mr. Cleo," because his powers of prognostication are second to none, except possibly Miss Cleo.In "Crank That," the Soulja makes it abundantly clear that he's "jocking on them haters." When we consider that before he started cranking that, Soulja Boy was not famous and therefore probably had relatively few haters on which to jock, the lyric takes on a predictive quality. For reasons laymen will never entirely understand, Soulja Boy deftly managed to anticipate haters' eventual emergence from the critical woodwork. Incredible.

We can only hope this urban oracle foresees more hits on the horizon. If not, I just don't know what we would do. Losing Sean Kingston was hard enough, and he taught us neither a dance nor a way to turn our childhood nouns into theoretically more adult verbs. Barring the triumphant return of Lil Rob, his absence would be unmistakably felt.

Here is the first of what I'm sure will be many masterpieces from the greatest musical mind the world has ever known: Soulja Boy.  It even has a shoutout to Robocop in it!