Steve 'Flash' JuonI don’t think whipping a cybertruck is the flex that Soulja Boy thinks it is.
I admit that’s a fruit that hangs low, but it’s a good starting point to talk about “Swag Season.” The market decline in the value of Tesla vehicles due to the antics of their CEO form an eerily similar curve to the value of Soulja Boy based on DeAndre Way’s antics. Both have lashed out at their enemies both real and perceived on social media. Both have made outlandish statements that are easily and demonstrably proven false. Both proclaim themselves to be “genius” level tech gurus when their tech companies don’t offer anything you can’t buy elsewhere — and often at far more reasonable prices. 15 years ago near the peak of his career a new Soulja Boy music video would do no less than 20 million views. Nothing here has cracked 100K.
In fact comparing Elon Musk to Soulja Boy might be unfair… to Elon. Tesla’s reputation has been hurt by their eccentric leader, but their market capitalization is still in the hundreds of billions of dollars. At times it’s over a TRILLION. It’s a real number but it’s one you can’t conceptualize easily. Two explanations might help — a trillion seconds is over 30,000 years, longer than the span of recorded human history. If you could spend a million dollars a day, it would take you almost three thousand years to spend it all. That’s just fucking insane. No. Soulja Boy’s market capitalization has plummeted way more than Tesla’s. He’s gone from over half a billion views for “Crank That” to now being traded as a penny stock.
If the music was interesting then discussing the metrics of “Swag Season” would be a moot point. In fact in all likelihood he banked so much money early in his career that he can ride out the rest of his life without worrying about an individual album flopping. That’s why it seems phoned in when he records songs like “So Much Money,” “Big Check” and “I Can Buy Anything.” Just because it’s ostensibly true doesn’t make it interesting to hear him brag about it.
“Niggaz they talkin ’bout money but we got a lot
I’m talkin my money, I’m runnin my guap
I set in the trap and I open a shop
Blew up like C4, I’m stirrin the pot”
It doesn’t even make sense for Soulja Boy to be trapping. If he’s got “So Much Money” then he should be out of the game altogether, or at the very least, he should have people working for him instead of doing it himself. I don’t know if he needs to listen to “10 Crack Commandments” or watch The Wire for a while. Maybe both. They may both be fiction but they come from real lived experiences. I’m sure for DeAndre there are real lived experiences in his raps too but he feels like he’s a long way from a street hustler at this point in his life.
The point of songs like “My Phone Ringing” is to create the pretense that he’s still living that life or is at least close enough to it to narrate it believably. Does he need more people to make us believe though? All songs like “Drip Check” do is drop a lot of brand names — Dior, Van Cleef, Fendi, Versace, et cetera. “Look at my fit.” And? What are we supposed to do? Jock you? Hate you? Nah I’m indifferent either way. It’s just a guy reciting a list of all the things he can afford. I’m not happy or mad listening to it, just bored.
The streaming numbers reflect an unfortunate reality for Soulja Boy — it’s not interesting any more. He recycles the same beats and the same themes with a minimal amount of window dressing being changed between albums. Listeners can tell it’s just the same thing with a new paint job. Even a bad or a silly Soulja Boy song could get in the whip if he had a good hunk or a great instrumental but “Swag Season” is an hour of music that doesn’t deserved to be listened to twice.