The Atlanta rapper Ice-T claimed “single-handedly killed hip-hop” in 2008
Ice-T is an outspoken individual, and he did not shy away in 2008 from criticising someone he believed had become a blight upon hip-hop culture.
The year before T’s comments had belonged to a specific young man, who transformed from an unknown entity into a genuine cultural phenomenon at magnificent speed. Soulja Boy released his first-ever single in 2007, and it made him a superstar.
The song, ‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’, was a catchy, if basic, number, but, even more importantly, it came with its own dance… Thanks to an instructional video on YouTube teaching people how to do it, people the world over were acting out the Soulja Boy dance.
The phenomenon allowed the song itself to spend seven weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100, while it also picked up a Grammy nomination for Best Rap Song – it later played a key part in an infamous scene starring Tom Cruise in the movie Tropic Thunder.
‘Crank That (Soulja Boy)’ was wildly, wildly popular, and it could be argued that its very success laid the groundwork for hip-hop’s continued growth and flourishing into the mainstream. But that doesn’t mean everyone from the culture was a fan of it. Far from it, in fact.
The song is profoundly repetitive and sparse, built primarily around a call of “Yoooouuuulll!” It is hardly hip-hop at its most sophisticated, and, for Ice-T in particular, it seemed to represent the culture’s death knell.
“Fuck Soulja Boy,” Ice-T announced during a song on a mixtape released in 2008. “Soulja Boy, I know you’re young enough to be my kid, but you single-handedly killed hip-hop, man.”
Referring to Soulja Boy’s output as “such garbage,” he mentioned hip-hop legends such as Rakim, Big Daddy Kane and Ice Cube by way of illustrating how far the culture had fallen. Hip-hop had been honed by the likes of these figures, but now Soulja Boy had “come with that Superman shit.”
Soulja Boy later responded to Ice-T’s disses, sparking a back-and-forth exchange of dissing content online. This, arguably, made Ice-T seem as undignified as the young man he was criticising, and the episode eventually fizzled out and was confined to history. As for ‘Crank That’, one doesn’t hear it much anymore.