As part of our week-long retrospective feature, MachineGunFunk.com and The Saturday Swindle Sheet would like to kick off the new year by declaring the worst album of the year that was. While we saw a whole lot of terrible music in 2007, no artist was able to achieve the level of suck as one DeAndre Ramone Way. And somehow, despite possessing no real musical prowess of any type, he managed to put out one of the most inexplicably successful songs of the year. “Crank Dat (Soulja Boy)” ranks up there with “Disco Duck” and “Party All the Time” when it comes to songs that should have never been released, let alone been as excruciatingly popular as they were. The following is a revised write-up of the album, SouljaBoyTellEm.com (originally run on Oct. 3), which wins the MGF award for Worst Album of 2007.
Soulja Boy – SouljaBoyTellEm.com
Collipark Records (10/2/07)
Rap
“He’s a genius, man. It’s like catching Michael Jackson before he actually hit wax. It’s that kind of talent,” says Mr. Collipark (the guy who produces wack beats for wack rappers). Yes, I understand that Soulja Boy is signed to Collipark Music, but not even someone as musically inept as Collipark can honestly make a statement like this and not know that he’s completely full of shit. This is quite possibly the worst album I have ever heard, if not at the very least the worst album I have heard all year.
The calypso-meets-Casio-driven “Crank That (Soulja Boy)” is one of the most successful singles of the year, and I still cannot wrap my head around this. Perhaps it’s because there’s a tacky dance to go with the song, which features the rapper (and I use that term as loosely as possible) grunting and groaning through three minutes and four seconds of my life that I will never get back. Had I not received a promo copy SouljaBoyTellEm.com from Interscope, I would have never put myself through the torture of listening to the entire album; I’ll admit that I couldn’t even sit through the entirety of most of the songs. I might be taken off of Interscope’s mailing list after this, but it’s pretty much impossible to sugar-coat the degree of suck that this album achieves.
Soulja Boy is a cheap sound-alike of Fabo from D4L (as if it wasn’t bad enough to actually be Fabo from D4L, we now have people biting him), with no real rhyming skills and terrible lyrics—not to mention that virtually every single song contains one line or phrase (in most cases the title of the song) repeated ad nauseum (as in “Snap and Roll”, “Yahhh!”, “Bapes” and most others)… really, it’ll make you nauseous. “Soulja Girl” is the obligatory song dedicated to the women who like crap music, as it features some T-Pain rip-off (it might actually be T-Pain, but does that really anything of a difference at this point?) trading barbs with Soulja Boy, who periodically grunts “YOU!” in a way that would indicate that he happens to be affected with Down syndrome. Actually, that’s not very nice to people with Down syndrome—it’s bad enough to have it without then being compared to Soulja Boy.
I guess this is supposed to be that new generation of crap rap that’s beat-driven, but even the beats are absolutely useless. Sounding like they were crafted on a twenty-dollar Casio keyboard, I could make better beats if I were blind, deaf, retarded and suffering from a bout of diarrhea. Hell… you could knock me out cold and throw my unconscious body onto a TB-303 and I’d still make better beats. There are absolutely no redeeming qualities to this album. It sucks so incredibly much that I think I’m getting a relapse of the stomach flu that was plaguing me this past Sunday. Ghostface [Killah] once said that D4L is killing hip-hop, and if that’s the case, then Soulja Boy is standing at the side of hip-hop’s deathbed, urinating on its face as it takes its last futile gasps.
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