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Chapter 3: Crank Dat, innovation in a post-mixtape moment
"Soulja Boy, you single-handedly killed hip-hop." -- Ice-T, Black Ice: Urban Legends mixtape
Shortly after the release of "Urban Legends," Ice-T's rant was ripped from his mixtape and posted to YouTube where it began to circulate quickly through hip-hop fan spaces on the web. Ice-T spoke for many of his older peers when he charged the rising teenage star with hip-hop's decline. Soulja Boy's minimal party music flaunts the emphasis on lyricism and gritty sample-based production that characterizes hip-hop recordings from the late 1980s and early 1990s which Ice-T clearly prefers. Ice-T criticizes Soulja Boy for his failure to perform the hypermasculine pose, telling him to "man up" and stop "looking happy." For Ice-T, hip-hop is about lyrics and tough gangsta image complete with "khakis and straps."
Ice-T would be easy to dismiss as an odd curmudgeon were it not for numerous other hip-hop veterans voicing a similar lament. From making jokes at Soulja Boy's expense during their shows to leaving critical comments on hip-hop blogs, older rappers and fans were rapidly making Soulja Boy the "most controversial rapper in the game." (Golianopoulos 68) Why would someone so widely dismissed as a one-hit wonder trigger such anger? How could a teenager who had only released one album possibly "kill" a culture with history as rich as hip-hop?
Soulja Boy's success revealed a on-going conflict about authenticity in hip-hop culture. The consolidation of the media industries in the late-1990s limited pop representations to a very few stereotypes. As a result, a gap emerged between the most visible hip-hop commodities and the day-to-day practices of its participants. Ice-T, perhaps he benefits from the dominant images, has difficulty seeing this distinction. Instead of examining Soulja Boy's creative practices, he focuses exlusively on his manner of dress, his lyrics, and the way that he moves his body. In his criticism of Soulja Boy, Ice-T locates hip-hop culture in its commodities rather than its practices.
John Fiske called the search for authenticity amid industrial production, "a fruitless exercise in romantic nostalgia." (Fiske 1989 27) Historically, hip-hop has not been defined by a single sound or style. It is an approach to cultural production, consumption, and circulation characterized by "dialogue with the past, remixing, appropriation, communal ownership, [and] creative chaos." (Watkins 2007 TODO) The aesthetics of hip-hop performance constantly shift in response to changing social circumstances. Soulja Boy is not "killing" hip-hop, he is keeping it relevant.
To better understand expressions of hip-hop culture in the context of networked computing and digital media, this chapter examines Soulja Boy's career in three stage. In the first stage, Soulja Boy is an ambitious teenager engaged with a large community of other young digital media producers. Second, Soulja Boy is signed to a major record label and is managing his transition from community member to celebrity. Finally, third stage addresses Soulja Boy's continuing effort to negotiate the changing media environment as a young celebrity. Accompanying this narrative is a closer examination of the Crank Dat dance phenomenon with specific attention to its technological circumstances.
There are countless young hip-hop participants doing fascinating things with digital media. The reason that Soulja Boy attracts my attention is similar to the reason that I focus on hip-hop in particular amid numerous other media cultures: Soulja Boy's goals were not radical. As his pre-fame blog posts from 2006 attest, his teenaged aspirations did not stray far from the typical fantasy enshrined in the title of Cam'ron's single of that summer, "Girls, Cash, Cars." Yet it is precisely the unremarkable nature of his ambitions that makes his story worth examining. Soulja Boy did not circumvent convention in order to undermine the pop music industry. He found an alternate entryway because he wanted to join it.
Soulja Boy Stage I: From Soundclick to Collipark
Today, Soulja Boy is a hip-hop celebrity. He recently released his second full-length album and, despite lackluster CD sales, his two lead singles are in constant rotation on hip-hop radio, and ranked high on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. His YouTube channel is among the most viewed on the site and over half a million fans follow his daily routines on Twitter.
A persistent myth in pop music journalism presents Soulja Boy as a mastermind or architect of this succes. He is said to have "rocketed to the top of the Billboard charts and launched a nationwide sensation" based on an "innovative Internet marketing strategy." (Carle, Erwin) Though his story is certainly one of innovation, the internet, and a nationwide sensation, to imagine him a lone genius is to discredit the powerful influence of his peers.
Soulja Boy is an abassador and figurehead of what Watkins calls hip-hop's "digital underground." (Watkins) The habits that make him such an outlier among older hip-hop practitioners were learned among the creative milieu of media-sharing websites like Newgrounds, Soundclick, and YouTube. Soulja Boy's engages with pop media industries based on the norms of his online peer group. By exploiting the affordances of computing technologies for learning new skills, producing his own tracks, and building a sense of community, Soulja Boy carries on the hip-hop tradition of appropriating media technologies in unexpected ways.
Who is Soulja Boy Tell em?
Born in 1990, Soulja Boy spent the first decade of his life in Atlanta with his mother. Although he rejects being labeled as a geek, he fondly recalls playing video games and watching cartoons, "I was interested [in how] they make them. I wanted to go deeper." (Carle) In 2002, Soulja Boy moved to live with his father in the suburban town of Batesville, MI where he had a chance to pursue this curiosity. His father had a personal computer with dial-up internet access and the young Soulja Boy learned to make animations, edit photos, record audio, and compose music. Though he was not thrilled about the move at the time, Soulja Boy now credits his experience of multiple social, economic, and geographic settings with his innovative approached to media technologies,
"When I went to Mississippi, I had to adjust to what was going on. But it was really a blessing in disguise, because if I would've never moved to Mississippi, I wouldn't be where I'm at today. I wouldn't have had access to no computer, no internet, no camera to film my dancing. I took the hood to where the money was at. If I didn't have no money behind it, nobody would've ever known about it." (TODO soulja boy bio)
Imagining himself growing up to be a "video game designer, Flash animator, or computer programmer," Soulja Boy was also developing an interest in hip-hop and the music industry. (Golianopoulos 70) His favorite rappers, Master P and Birdman, were as well regarded for their business acumen as their music. When Priority Records sought out a partnership with Master P's No Limit Records, he set a new standard for entrepreneurial independence by negotiating for ownership and publishing rights to his artists' "master" recordings. A few years later, Birdman brokered a similar deal for his Cash Money Records label and Universal.
The first and only CD that Soulja Boy purchased in his youth was 50 Cent's first album, "Get Rich Or Die Tryin." (Erwin) Though Master P, Birdman, and 50 Cent all represent somewhat different eras in hip-hop history, Soulja Boy recognizes them all as "old-school" artists. (Miller) Of all three, 50 Cent inspired Soulja Boy to redirect his career ambitions from digital arts to hip-hop,
"All the business ventures, all the things he did. He showed me that it wasn't impossible for me to do it. Before I got into the music industry 50 Cent sold twelve million albums on his first album, his second video game just came out. He's got the Get Rich or Die Tryin' movie coming out, the Vitamin Water. All these different things. It's like, 'Man, how did he do it?' I was like, if he can do it, I can do it too." (Carle)
50 Cent modeled the use of hip-hop as a stepping stone to a range of media pursuits. With success as a rapper, Soulja Boy reasoned, he would have the resources to return to animation and video game development on his own terms.
Making music at home
As a high school student in 2004, Soulja Boy began to dedicate himself more fully to entering the pop music industry. With a copy of FruityLoops sampling/sequencing software, a microphone and "other equipment his dad bought from Wal-Mart," he began to make recordings in his bedroom. (Golianopoulos 70) Taking advantage of the raw materials produced alongside of hip-hop singles, he and his friends initially recorded parodies by rapping new lyrics on top of instrumental versions. (Erwin) With only a dial-up connection at home, his distribution of these recordings was limited to the burned CDs he would make and pass out to friends at school. (Carle)
Soon, he began to include some original tracks alongside the parodies. Following the pattern set by 50 Cent, Soulja Boy released a mixtape on CD and began to perform in the area at talent shows, teen dances, and roller rinks. His father's friend agreed to help manage the aspiring rapper and they started to push his songs to radio station program directors. The mixtape generated some interest among his schoolmates but did not stand out among the hundreds of other post-50 Cent mixtapes circulating in the hip-hop industry at the time.
Soulja Boy's father upgraded their home internet connection to broadband and Soulja Boy became an active member of several online media-sharing communities. He spent hours exploring sites like Soundclick, Newgrounds, YouTube, and MySpace publishing his creative work and getting feedback from other users. As he continued to produce new recordings, he regularly posted short diary entries about his day-to-day life. Most of these entries are still on Soulja Boy's MySpace page and, read together, present a compelling narrative about balancing his nascent career with high school life. The confessional nature of these posts drew sympathetic readers from the around the web who came by to offer support in the form of encouraging comments and cute animations left in the comments section of his profile. On September 9, 2006, for example, fourty users gave him "Kudos" and forty-three left comments on a post written in all caps titled "DOUBT ME! BUT I WILL MAKE IT!"
In addition to well-known sites like MySpace and YouTube, Soulja Boy was a particularly active member of Soundclick, a site specially designed for music producers. Like many sites, Soundclick allows users to post their work, leave comments for each other, and participate in open discussion forums. The feature that drew Soulja Boy and many other aspiring hip-hop producers was the opportunity to sell one's tracks. At the peak of his independent popularity, Soulja Boy reports over ten thousand paid downloads to his Soundclick account but, along the way, he exploited the system's open architecture to trick other users into downloading his music.
By tagging his original recordings with the names of popular artists and songs, he piggybacked on the widespread practice of unauthorized digital music sharing. (Erwin) Someone searching Soundclick for "50 Cent In Da Club" might select Soulja Boy's song by accident. Because he repeated his name so often in the song's lyrics, Soulja Boy believes that this mild deception lead curious listeners to search for his name in hopes of finding out more. (De Leon) This strategy is familiar to mixtape DJs who often follow tracks by well-known artists with songs by their friends and collaborators in order to catch the ears of new listeners.
Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)
By the winter of 2006, Soulja Boy was doing brisk business on Soundclick, garnering thousands of hits a day on his MySpace page, and performing regularly around Mississippi and Georgia. It was around this time that he recorded "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)", incorporating a looping steel pan melody, a catchy refrain, and his own quirky slanguage. Throughout the track, he instructs the listener to perform various movements: "crank it", "roll", "superman", "lean/rock", "supersoak", "roosevelt", "shuffle", and "jig." Some of these movements would be familiar to the average hip-hop fan while others, like the Roosevelt, were native to the Soundclick niche from which "Crank Dat" emerged. [fn about "superman that ho" lyric.]
Several Soundclick users were making "Crank Dat" variations around the same time as Soulja Boy, each of them working in similar bedroom studios, drawing on similar sounds, and using similar software. Pipeline, whose "Crank Dat (Roosevelt)" may predate the version made famous by Soulja Boy, reflects on the origins of the Soundclick trend,
"Roosevelt was the dance that everyone was doing [in our high school.] We didn't know who made it up so we were going to make a song for it called "Crank Dat Roosevelt." [...] We weren't even serious about rapping back then when we made that song. We made it, threw it on Soundclick.com, [and] started getting downloads. [...] We didn't know who made [up the Roosevelt]! It was just a hot dance to us!" (TODO)
Exploiting the mobility of the mp3 format across media services, Soulja Boy catalyzed and accelerated the emerging Soundclick phenomenon by cross-posting his version of "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" to his MySpace page. His friends, the Cash Camp Clique, heard the song, choreographed a dance for it, made a home video, and posted it to YouTube. Soulja Boy embedded this video in his blog on February 25, 2007 along with some cellphone videos of a more rudimentary version of the dance. Above the video of three Cash Camp teenagers dancing, he wrote "Dis is how u do da dance to my new song. Just punch to da left or right den crank it 3 times."
With little more to go on than those simple instructions and the Cash Camp video, several other fans created home videos of their own variation on the dance. Although he had been previously promoting "I Got BAPES", a song he intended to be his first single, Soulja Boy quickly recognized the resonance that "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" was having with his audience and turned all of his attention on encouraging more versions of the dance. After a few weeks, he had collected and reposted a half dozen videos of other people doing "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)", each time garnering more comments and attention to his MySpace blog. Attracted to his MySpace page by the emerging remix culture, visitors eventually played "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" more than 20 million times. (Galianopoulos 70) That number brought attention from the traditional music industry and on May 15, Soulja Boy met with Mr. Collipark, the producer of the Ying Yang Twins. Despite snubbing "I got BAPES" a few months earlier, Collipark signed Soulja Boy to a major label record deal with Universal.
The Crank Dat phenomenon
For the rest of the summer 2007, Soulja Boy remained relatively quiet as hundreds of new versions of "Crank Dat" poured on to YouTube. Reports at the time mischaracterized these fan creations as an "unexpected wave of responses and knock-offs" (Padgett) The volume may have been unexpected but to call these works "knock-offs" obscures the creative community from which "Crank Dat" emerged. Never the mastermind, Soulja Boy was its most visible champion. Each new version of "Crank Dat" enriched the phenomenon with a unique tweak, change, or twist. To imply that they were merely imitations of a single authoritative original text misses the joyful sense of discovery, competition, and innovation born out by each new video.
Even at its most off-hand, participating in "Crank Dat" was rarely trivial. Each iteration represents several highly technical operations: rehearsing the dance, preparing the scene, shooting the dancers, transferring the video to a computer, editing the footage, compressing the final version, and uploading it to YouTube; skills not typically taught in school. A desire to join the phenomenon motivated hundreds of young people to locate and learn a creative approach digital media production tools that they might never have encountered otherwise. In this sense, the "Crank Dat" trend carried hip-hop's innovative approach to technology outside of traditional hip-hop contexts.
Of all the videos, songs, and dances being shared online, "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" contained several different points of entry and thus enabled an uncommonly diverse range of potential transformations. For all their producerly quality, artifacts of the "Single Ladies" and "A Milli" phenomena primarily display intervention along the axes of dance and rap, respectively. Meanwhile, "Crank Dat" is composed of several layers, each of which invites a different type of reinvention. A remixer might radically alter the dance, dress, lyrics, beats, setting, and production technology and still be considered part of the phenomenon.
From an industry perspective, "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" is a surprisingly successful pop commodity. Viewed through the lens of popular culture, however, it is an unbounded phenomenon in which many different stakeholders are engaged in on-going creative competition. Each new artifact circulates among the web of the larger "Crank Dat" project and expresses something unique about the social and technological circumstances from which it was produced. A college sophmore at Kentucky State University and a middle school student from Milford, MA might upload recordings of a similar performance but the two videos will communicate complex information about each dancer. How does the dorm room compare and contrast with the bedroom? What are they wearing? How is their hair kept? What color is their skin? From what device is the music played back? How is the room lit? Are there other people in the shot or are they dancing alone? How do they present their gender in the video? What title and tags do they choose for the YouTube page?
The countless performances, remixes, and reimaginings of "Crank Dat" posted to YouTube, MySpace, and other sites reveals a diversity in participation missing in conventional manifestations of hip-hop culture in dominant media channels. Many, perhaps most, of these online dancers do not consider themselves "inside" of hip-hop, yet their expressive deployment of media technologies is similar in approach to the history of innovation in hip-hop. By using a hip-hop approach to play with their media environment, collaborate with friends, and express meaning about themselves and their social allegiances, these young people contribute to dismantling the monolithic gangsta image that unfairly marks hip-hop practitioners in general and young black men in particular.
Contextualizing Crank Dat
"Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" emerged amid a moment of change in the hip-hop industry. For the better part of the 1980s and 1990s, nearly all of hip-hop's most visible artists came from New York or Los Angeles. (Chang) By 2005, with CD sales flagging, industry stakeholders began to promote hip-hop music from other areas of the United States, notably the largely ignored yet wildly innovative Southern states. (Grem) Among the various regional styles afforded high visibility in this period, snap music deviated most from the conventional New York hip-hop template. With minimal drum programming and repetitive spoken or chanted lyrics, snap destabilized seldom questioned hip-hop norms like the value of complex wordplay and the use of samples from funk and soul records.
Another reason that snap music seemed alien to the New York/Los Angeles tradition is its close relationship to dance. Goofy party rappers like D4L and Dem Franchize Boyz stood in stark contrast to tracks like "Lean Back", Fat Joe's New York club anthem of the previous summer with its aloof cool-pose and assertion that "gangstas don't dance." True to the genre's name, the basic step has dancers freeze and snap their fingers on the third beat of every bar. As the music video for Dem Franchize Boyz' "Lean wit it, rock wit it" shows, snap's slower tempo and sparse aesthetic provided a simple structure within which dancers could improvise on the core snap template. Rather than engage in the boastful competitive wordplay or ghetto narratives of New York hip-hop luminaries like Jay-Z or Notorious BIG, snap artists wrote lyrics more fully integrated in the embodied experience of their dancers, directing them through well-known movements like a square dance caller or wedding party MC. The dancers, in turn, continually invented new variations on the snap step in a state of joyful competetion with one another.
Although snap music's moment of nationwide visibility had passed by 2006, a group of young producers kept the music alive on Soundclick. The "Crank Dat" phenomenon began there with silly, parodic snap songs shared among this circle. Each artist borrowed the same familiar snap beat structure and added his or her own individual take to the lyrics. Some of the SoundClick users were connected to one another in parallel on other sites and the songs, lyrics, jokes, and videos they created migrated across these platforms. Because of this trans-service network, the "Crank Dat" phenomenon grew rapidly once participants began to record and share dance steps, home videos, and referential remixes like "Crank Dat (Mega Man)."
The simplicity in snap music that drew such criticism from hip-hop traditionalists proved a fertile foundation for the young members of Soundclick. Whereas densely-layered, sample-based recordings can intimidate tenderfoot hip-hop musicians, snap's sparse minimalism is downright legible. The aspiring ear easily picks out individual drum hits and can learn quickly to recreate the basic snap music rhythm with widely available software like Fruityloops or Garage Band. Snap music is welcoming and open to deconstruction and producerly intervention.
Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)
The uncommon success of Soulja Boy's version of this simple snap track is not based on qualities unique to his recording but to the multiple points of entry presented by the "Crank Dat" phenomenon. From his encouraging blog posts on MySpace to the "How to Crank Dat" instructional video that followed his major label contract, Soulja Boy consistently diverted attention from his role as artist to the creative potential of the networked "Crank Dat" culture to be a place of innovation, competition, and diverse expression. This managing and massaging would not have worked had not Crank Dat been an unusually welcoming phenomenon from the start.
Soulja Boy first introduced "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" to his MySpace fans with the Cash Camp home video, a performance in which he does not appear. By featuring the work of online collaborators from the very beginning, Soulja Boy implicitly encourages the creation of further "Crank Dat" variation videos. Rather than get scared of his song circulating out of his control, Soulja Boy is flattered by the transformations. Recognizing the importance of active participation in hip-hop culture, he could see that the burgeoning phenomenon indicated the relevance, and therefore the commercial potential, of "Crank Dat." Fans and listeners, he reasoned, just "wanna do the same thing." (Padgett)
For a cultural artifact or phenomenon like "Crank Dat" to spread on or offline, it must reflect the lived experiences of its audiences. Through their use of recognizably Southern hip-hop signifiers - clothes, movements, slang, accents, and choice of snap music - Cash Camp and Soulja Boy demonstrated how "Crank Dat" might be used to express the features of one's local environment. Its geographical specificity first presents a side of hip-hop culture that was largely absent from MTV, BET, and other conventional channels. And, second, it offers a model by which other individuals or groups might gain visibility for their own allegiances and identities.
By altering the music, lyrics, dance, dress, and setting for their Crank Dat videos, participants have drawn a remarkable array of cultural signs into the discourse. Artifacts from video games, comics, professional sports, and anime appear alongside such abstract categorical descriptors as nerd, jock, geek, and preppy. The ability for adept young people to manipulate their cultural surround with a hip-hop approach is most evident in the mobility of ethnic, racial, and gender-based signs. Not only do young video makers self-identify and play with stereotypes in their "Crank Dat" videos but they take advantage of the discursive affordances of YouTube and MySpace to engage in discussion and debate around the videos they create.
Race play
((( TODO Crank Dat preppy version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7ZE2OzguWHo Crank Dat spiderman mixed version http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOm1VoCyuk4 )))
One striking example of the use of "Crank Dat" to express and explore the tensions in hip-hop culture is the discourse surrounding the twin stereotypes that all white people dance poorly and all black people dance well. In some parodic videos, young whites self-identify and purposefully dance poorly while in other videos, black-identified dancers may be criticized for not dancing well enough. In one peculiar case, we see a young man in silver athletic shorts, and a long-sleeve white shirt dancing in hi-top sneakers to a post-Soulja Boy song variant titled "Crank Dat (Spiderman)". The video is very low resolution and thus the image is obscured by compression artifacts. Because of the distortion, the dancers' skin color is left ambiguous, prompting several early viewers to leave comments like this one:
"lil boi u can dance 4 a white boi." (skaters28)
Frustrated by the confusion, the original poster edited the description of the video and angrily asserted his race as "black." This decision influenced the rest of the nearly four hundred comments that now almost exclusively concern his racial identity and the durability of the stereotype.
Other videos intentially draw attention to their racial coding. "Crank That Soldier Boy" is a "white version" of "Crank Dat" in which three white teenage boys perform the same choreography as the black teens in the Cash Camp clique. Although both videos were shot in similar living rooms, the white teens wear cargo shorts and polos with popped collars to constrast with Cash Camp's Dickies and oversized t-shirts. The white teens further perform the white preppy stereotype rendition by exaggerating their body language and simplifying some of the dance movements.
From the proper spelling in its title to the video's tags ("funny, white, honkey, cracker") to their faithful reproduction of Cash Camp's complex choreography, the creators clearly intended to make a respectful parody but they did not realize the extent to which racial discomfort pervaded the "Crank Dat" phenomenon. The discourse that emerged around the video reveals a persistent concern among the viewers regarding the parody of black young by white youth. Viewed over ten million times (the typical "Crank Dat" version receives just a few thousand views), thousands of angry comments accompany the "white version." They accuse the boys of mocking the Soulja Boy and Cash Camp, call them homophobic slurs, and correct the parodic changes as if they were made out of ignorance rather than parody. Though the creators of the "white version" eventually attempted to respond to these comments with a more straight-faced rendition of "Crank Dat (Spiderman)", the first video continues to attract new comments on a daily basis.
One final example of the racial discourse surrounding "Crank Dat" is evidenced in a video that is no longer available on YouTube. Titled "The Whitest Black" version, it features a young black dancer who appears largely unfamiliar with the dance and looks fairly uncomfortable as he stumbles his way through. The video was presumably posted by acquaintances of the dancer to tease him for his poor performance. That they chose to name him the "Whitest Black" dancer not only calls forth the stereotype of whites as bad dancers but also suggests closer reading of his surroundings. Whereas most of the "Crank Dat" videos discussed in this paper are shot in anonymous living rooms and bedrooms that could be in almost any U.S. home, the "Whitest Black" dancer is shot on a bright green, well-manicured lawn in front of a short stone wall and large BBQ setup. Does teasing one another for being white takes on new significance when we observe the friends living in what appears to be an affluent subdivision?
"Crank Dat" is not a platform well-suited to serious discussion of race. Rather, the prevalence of racially-charged discourse in and around the phenomenon reflects a widespread anxiety about race - especially among its young participants. By using video cameras, personal computers, and the open frame work of "Crank Dat", these teens explore their day-to-day performance of race. It is up to the adults in their lives - parents, mentors, and educators - to take seriously their creative uses of technology. The young hip-hop participant approaches media and communications technologies as an expressive toolset with which to make sense of his or her social surround.
Crank Dat Fandoms
In addition to signifiers of race, gender, and class affiliation, "Crank Dat" participants draw on their participation in countless other overlapping popular cultures. "Crank Dat (Spiderman)" is only one of hundreds of "Crank Dat" variations to explicitly link fandom of television, film, gaming, and comics to hip-hop. Each of these fandoms brings its own affordances and constraints to bear on the new hybrid artifact. For example, in "Crank Dat (Spiderman)" dancers hold their hands out like Spiderman, middle two fingers touching their palms and the remixed song incorporates a sample from the recent Spiderman blockbuster film. This type of multi-faceted reimagining of "Crank Dat" produces entirely new branches of the phenomenon as downstream innovators begin their projects with the "Spiderman" version rather than the earlier videos posted by Soulja Boy or Cash Camp.
Other fandoms afford very different types of intervention. "Crank Dat (Whinnie the Pooh)" and "Crank Dat (Spongebob)" are remix videos that leave the audio of "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" untouched. Instead, they draw on the vast amounts of raw material provided by the two animated television programs to assemble new music videos. By carefully selecting and manipulating short clips, the video remixers are able to create scenarios in which the characters from Spongebob and Whinnie the Pooh appear to be singing the lyrics to "Crank Day (Soulja Boy)." That these videos juxtapose familiar figures of children's television with a slightly more adolscent soundtrack subverts the conventional manifestation of each, stimulating the transgressive pleasure of taboo.
Unlike the lowtech stereotype that plagues hip-hop, other fandoms are more widely recognized for their innovative uses of media technologies. When the overlap of these social groupings is revealed in "Crank Dat," it highlights the tech savvy that already exists among young hip-hop practitioners. Furthermore, by drawing on multiple fan networks "Crank Dat" is able to act as a commons for teaching and learning new technical skills. It is not uncommon for small discussions of tools and technique to take place in the comments sections of "Crank Dat" videos on YouTube.
Challening hip-hop conventions
While the cultural overlapping visible in the fandom remixes, "Crank Dat" was also used to express self-criticism by young people identifying as hip-hop participants. In "soldier boy wit technique," two young black men in pajamas perform a variation in which they incorporate movements from ballet and modern dance. At the start of the video, one of the dancers addresses the viewer in a challenging tone of voice, "This is how you do the Soulja Boy dance ... with technique. See, there's art in hip-hop!" and after they finish, he again speaks directly to the viewer, "Just like that. Technique can be made. It's real." By bookending their innovation in the language and style of hip-hop competition, the men in the video argue for an expanded understanding of movement in hip-hop through the use of the familiar "Crank Dat" dance. Were they to have simply crafted a new dance and performed it, their argument would not have been as effective but by exploiting the living trend, they were able to bring a sense of relevance and timeliness to their critique.
Where is Soulja Boy in all of this?
As the various remixes and variations of "Crank Dat" piled up on YouTube during the summer of 2007. Soulja Boy was physically absent from the conventional media industry. Sure, his name might be called to mind each time a celebrity or sports figure was caught doing the dance in public but Soulja Boy was not being interviewed on late-night talk shows or doing spots on MTV. We have seen how "Crank Dat" could be an effective tool for exercising new technical skills and expressing a broad range of personal and social meanings but from an industry perspective, the "Crank Dat" phenomenon was a challenge. With thousands of people participanting in an essentially popular activity, Collipark, Soulja Boy, and their fellow stakeholders needed to find a way to incorporate these new practices for profit without damaging the creative culture.
Soulja Boy Stage II: Releasing an album
The strategy developed by Soulja Boy and Collipark during the summer of 2007 successfully balanced their commercial goals with the popular interests of the "Crank Dat" phenomenon. Through a deft manipulation of music video conventions and consistent emphasis on everyday creativity, they exploited a grassroots movement to sell millions of ringtones, CDs, and digital downloads. Their unusual engagement with the pop industry reflects the commercial ambiguity and spirit of innovation that historically characterizes hip-hop culture.
[fn One question that vexes this analysis of Crank Dat concerns the distrust we must maintain in the wake of LonelyGirl15. Plenty of evidence affirms that in 2006, Soulja Boy was really a high school student who stimulated the wild spread of a remix practice from SoundClick.]
Soulja Boy was signed to Collipark Records, a subsidiary of Universal, in May of 2007. Shortly after, they created a higher fidelity recording of "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" and made it available as a digital single and ringtone. They did not, however, immediately shoot a music video for the song. Instead, they waited as the number of "Crank Dat" videos on YouTube continued to rise. At the end of July, they released a short step-by-step instructional video.
Waiting in spite of the song's rising presence on radio effectively meant that fan videos played the role of the conventional music video. By keeping Soulja Boy in the wings, "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)" the pop commodity could raise money for Collipark Records without de-centering its roots in participatory culture. When a music video was finally released at the end of August, it depicted Collipark as a clueless record executive sitting in his office and riding in a limousine as people outside danced, sang, and shared their own "Crank Dat" videos. Rather than introduce Soulja Boy and "Crank Dat", the music video recognized and commemorated cultural work that had already taken place outside the purview of the pop industry.
During the height of the "Crank Dat" craze, Soulja Boy rarely played the role of a rapper or producer on his blog. He acted as curator, cheerleader, and symbol for the collective. By reposting "Crank Dat" home videos, he rewarded the creators with social capital in the form of visibility and recognition. He frequently encouraged fans to post more and inspires friendly competition among them, challenging the fans to innovate upon the original Cash Camp video with new dance moves, new dress, new sounds, and new video editing techniques. Finally, he posted candidly about the machinations of his career, frequently crediting the readers will his successes, "I still need yall support all da fas yall da ones who helped [me] get signed! I LUV YALL!" (TODO blog post)
Meanwhile, Soulja Boy's experience with media and communications technologies afforded him an unusual maturity and sense of self-confidence. Collipark gave the young artist an unusual amount of influence over the development of their fan-centric strategy. Admitting some degree of ignorance, the executive recalls, "I hadn't heard his stuff in the clubs, on the radio, nothing. It was all Internet." (Erwin)
Soulja Boy was able to survive potentially destructive incorporation by the pop music industry because of his persistant effort to highlight the diversity of stakeholders in his audience. Fans became invested not only in his music and image but in the actual progress of his career through the on-going narratives of his blog and YouTube channel. By maintaining a role in the community, interacting directly with fans on MySpace, and promoting the creative work of others, Soulja Boy's eventual commercial success could be read as a shared victory for all stakeholders in the Crank Dat phenomenon rather than the selling out of just one.
Soulja Boy Stage III: Resisting the one hit wonder
"Part of Soulja's magic that blew him up, even before I got to him, was that the kids looked at his music as something that was just theirs. It was something they could have that nobody else could have." - Mr. Collipark, as quoted in Soulja Boy Tell Em's official bio, 2007.
In spite of the surprising sales of his first album, Soulja Boy's continued success was by no means guaranteed. Early coverage in the hip-hop press suggested that Soulja Boy and his MySpace peers were ultimately destined to be one-hit wonders. (De leon) Mr. Collipark senses the importance of "the kids" in his assessment of Soulja Boy's appeal but he does not address the tension that must exist when something "nobody else could have" becomes the most popular digital download of all time. (Burgess) Should not his success undermine his outsider credibility and destroy the possessive investment felt among his fans?
Beyond his role in championing the "Crank Dat" phenomenon, Soulja Boy continues to be commercially and popularly relevant through his creative use of media and communications technologies. Although he is now a wealthy celebrity and no longer the underdog high school kid with FruityLoops, he struggles to find his place amid the traditional hip-hop industry. Inspired by low expectations to improve his skills as a rapper and producer, Soulja Boy makes public the motivational power of creative competition in hip-hop. Furthermore, as his early ambitions suggested, he has diversified his public presentation to include animated shorts, appearances at consumer electronics fairs, and the leader of an online gaming group.
Relevance of the ringtone
While Soulja Boy's first CD sold over a million copies, many appear to have been purchased out of loyalty rather than an interest in the recordings. Around the time of its release, Soulja Boy featured photos on his blog of young people who had purchased more than a dozen copies of the album. For these fans, the compact disc was not a medium by which they could access the music but rather a token of their commitment to Soulja Boy's success. Having followed him for nearly a year and watched as he struggled through various stages of his early career, the purchased CD was as much a thank-you note for the vicarious ride as something to rip into iTunes and cast aside.
There have been unexpected hits before but what makes Soulja Boy's success different is his deployment of multiple types of pop commodities. His album may have sold over a million copies but he sold five times as many ringtones during that same period. (Galianopoulos 68) Fiske's understanding of popular culture indicates that consumers always select commodities based on their expressive functionality. The ringtone represents a new kind of pop commodity uniquely suited to the day-to-day technological experience of many young people. As mobile phones are often carried in our pockets and purses, the ringtone emanates outward from our bodies as we move through the world. Without the conceit of being a storage medium like a CD or cassette, the ringtone explicitly bears its expressive potential. Sales of Soulja Boy's second album are quite low by comparison. Yet, despite flagging sales, his latest singles are frequently played on commercial radio stations, in clubs, and as ringtones. Perhaps Soulja Boy's lasting contribution may not be his elegant massaging of the "Crank Dat" phenomenon but that he has shifted the conditions for success in the pop music industry. Historically, the worth of an artists' activities was measured in album sales but Soulja Boy's career suggests a need for new metrics. Keeping with hip-hop's commercial ambiguity, the new pop commidities sold by Soulja Boy are both financially rewarding for him and expressively rich for the fans with whom he interacts.
Competition
The volume of criticism aimed at Soulja Boy was so high after the success of his album that hip-hop magazine XXL invited him to publish an open letter in April 2008. The young rapper adopts a defensive tone in his letter and asks readers to consider his commercial successes rather than focus exclusively on his technical ability to write and deliver lyrcs,
"If I was smart enough to think of a different way [of approaching hip-hop], I should be respected for that. I broke the record for highest-selling [digital] song of all time. The album just certified gold. Got the Grammy nomination, doing all these shows. If you can't respect that, what will you respect?" (Miller)
For Soulja Boy, the artistry of producing hip-hop music is inextricably tied to its circulation across multiple commercial and non-commercial contexts. He does not differentiate innovation in pop commodification from innovation in the producing of musical recordings. This expansive understanding of hip-hop broadens the terms by which hip-hop practitioners may compete with one another. In Soulja Boy's view, a view presumably shared by many of his peers online, creating home videos can be as much an expression of hip-hop culture as learning to be a DJ or a rapper.
In light of this enlarged understanding of the creative possibilities in the hip-hop approach to culture, Soulja Boy has recently begun to reclaim his history in geekier pursuits. In a recent interview, he vaguely outlines his future ambition to develop "movies, video games, [and] clothing lines." (Galianopoulos 71) By joining his music activities with pop fandom and commercial interest, Soulja Boy begins to reveal existing areas of over-lap among these popular pursuits. If he is successful, this expanded understanding of popular culture's diversity may effect a liberation of hip-hop culture from some of the self-destructive stereotypes from which a small number of stakeholders once profited.
Soulja Boy and the hip-hop approach
Hip-hop is a culture of creative competition in which participants express themselves through innovative deployment of media and communications technologies. Soulja Boy's exploitation of networked computing resources for purposes of learning, self-expression, and entrepreneurship revealed a thriving creative community of young people using the hip-hop approach to explore online spaces. Their work reflects the on-going ambiguities and contraditions that have characterized hip-hop culture from its earliest manifestation. Practices and digital artifacts move fluidly across commercial, non-commercial, and semi-commercial contexts. Soulja Boy did not "kill hip-hop," as Ice-T asserts. He is living it.
Was SB a genius? no.
Making mistakes in public, role of parents, teachers, mentors
KRS-One: "This is Soulja Boy's first record. What, he's supposed to sound like Aristotle? No, he's supposed to come out ignorant. If you look at everybody's first record, it was ignorant. Chuck D, Run-DMC, everybody."
tempting to see tech savvy kids as "geniuses", re: things parents said to me at school
Soulja Boy responded to Ice-T in a YouTube video shot with the built-in webcam on his laptop. Alongside jabs at Ice-T's age, Soulja Boy soberly asks for help, "Give me some pointers! Instead of dissing us, help us!"
SB response
- using wikipedia, "i wikipedia'd", birth name + date
"old enough to my great grandfather"
- seated in front of a webcam, sitting w/ friends
- instead of responding directly for claim, he literally asks for guidance -- > how many other children feel this way?
The video opens with the faces of Soulja Boy and two friends illuminated by the laptop's screen as they listen to Ice-T's comments. After a few moments, they stop the audio and Soulja Boy addresses the audience. "Ice-T, I wikipedia'd you," he begins and proceeds to read the older rapper's birth date while joking, "You're old enough to be my great grandfather!" The video shortly takes a sober turn as Soulja Boy chides Ice-T, "Give me some pointers! Instead of dissing us, help us!"
Cringe-worthy moments:
- Blowing his nose on money in his vlog, Suggesting that $100,000 / year "ain't shit" re: his educaiton
- October BET awards, "Shout-outs to the slave masters. Without them we'd still be in Africa. We wouldn't be here to get this ice and tattoos." Collipark, "There is no excuse for saying something like that. That is the side of him that we have to teach." (Galianopoulos 71)
((( TODO save for later.
"Popular cultural is contradictory [...] Those who accuse it of being simplistic [... are] blinding themselves to where the complexities of popular culture are actually to be found." (Fiske 1989 120)
Effect of SB on other areas of hip-hop
"I'm not a pioneer of shit. I just brought to light what artists should be doing. The computer, the Internet, period, is the key to selling records right now." -- Soulja Boy (Golianopoulos 68)
- teaching industry about the digital underground
- consultant, CES? short lived "Soulja Boy school" video series
Single Ladies
Unexpected
Arab Money
Planned and failed, not timely
Stanky Legg
Different kind of dance, kids, lively GS Boyz G-spot boyz Why can Stanky Legg work but not Arab Money or Bird Walk?
With little exposure to the online activity that accompanied Crank Dat, it is easy to misread the phenomenon as merely the effect of a catchy song with an easy dance step. A quick comparison of two post-Crank Dat dance songs, clearly illuminates the contrast between a timely, spreadable pop artifact and one that is offers no welcoming point of intervention to its audience. In 2008, Busta Rhymes, a veteran of the New York hip-hop scene favored by traditionalists, released an uncharacteristically snap-like single titled "Arab Money" along with a dance that borrows liberally from Cash Camp's "Get Silly." Not only is the dance a weaker imitation but the use of vaguely-Arabic gibberish as a refrain alienated, offended, and confused listeners rather than welcoming them into a playful engagement with identity, locality, language, and ethnicity.
Around the same time, Beyoncé's released "Single Ladies", an homage to 1960s Broadway dancer Gwen Verdon Fosse. (Griffin) The video depicts Beyoncé flanked by two female dancers. All three women are wearing high heels and sheer body suits that emphasize their legs, hips, waists, and breasts. Like the original Cash Camp "Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)", "Single Ladies" is explicity coded. In this case, it reads: female, black, sexy, powerful, and mature. Whereas "Arab Money" is formally closer to "Crank Dat" in sound and style, it the implicit invitation to reimagine "Single Ladies" that inspires a similar remixing phenomenon. Today, there are hundreds of remixes, edits, and home videos on YouTube in which the emphasis on feminity and the body in the original "Single Ladies" is explored, toyed with, and occasionally upended by people with a variety of body types and gender presentations.
50 Cent liberation?
tellem.tv, v thisis50.com
)))
-- scraps
"[Young people assume that remixing is part of music] and they'll defend it, at least until a new form of creativity comes along that they try to stop. We all become our parents." (Lessig 2008 97)