Ice-T versus Soulja Boy
Click to viewSo, apparently there's a bit of a feud going between Ice-T and Soulja Boy. I'm assuming most people--at least most people who'd read me--know who Ice-T is. I'm a big fan of his work, which is edgy, exciting and incredibly, incredibly thoughtful.
Soulja Boy, on the other hand--well, if you haven't heard "Crank Dat Soulja Boy", I suggest giving it a listen. As far as hostility to women goes, this is one of the most misogynist records I've ever heard, in my life. The song is extremely obsessed with degrading forms of sexual exhibition, specifically relating to ejaculation (look up "Superman" and "RoboCop" at Urban Dictionary if you don't believe me). What's more is, the song is produced very badly, sounds thin and uneven and not very cohesive at all. The lyrics are performed lazily, as if he really couldn't be bothered to rhyme worth a shit, or as if he was having too much trouble doing his stupid dance to have any actual flow.
What speaks worse about hip-hop in general is that unfortunately, nobody's going to get (or even listen to) what Ice-T has to say about this. Hip-hop continually refuses to learn from it's past. It continually pushes away legendary material in favor of what plays well in a club, now. If we were to, for example, replace the players in this feud with, say, Bruce Springsteen on one hand and, say, the Jonas Brothers on the other hand, the world would stop and really consider what was at issue.
Instead, as Soulja Boy puts it in his response, "He's the forefather of my nuts...this nigga born in 1958!"
Soulja Boy will never record an album as good as Fear of a Black Planet, The Iceberg, Amerikka's Most Wanted, or any of that. What's sad is, Soulja Boy will probably win the feud, but he'll be another chewed up and used up useless cultural remnant, like the many hundreds of other rappers who decided not to make compelling hip-hop for the ages, but instead cash in on an easy club jam.