There’s something timeless about soulless music. The radio offers new music monthly that is too awful to even be real, until eventually you break down and accept it, before eventually getting sick and hating it more than you did in the first place. This process takes about 6 months, and then 5 years later you will be nostalgic for it, in a lived through it way. (Spice Girls are a good example; Fergie, a more recent one.)
Soulja Boy is the latest soulless wonder, and he’s almost broken me down with his “hit” “song,” Crank That. However, I just learned something interesting about Crank That, making me wonder about the future of soulless music. He has reached 3 million in ringtone sales (triple-platinum), but only gold album sales. Beyond offering the absurd news that a hundred thousand people own Soulja Boy’s souljaboytellem.com (an album title as lame and somehow brilliant as the track), this could prove the Arctic Monkeys’ line about music existing for the sake of ringtones likely prophetic. Commercial music could soon be nothing more than 15 second bits surrounded by nonsense. And that might as well have been the formula for Crank That. And that might make Soulja Boy a genius, or at least a pioneer. The line between art and commerce certainly becomes more obvious when it’s the difference between a full-length album and an incoming call warning.
Also,if you're interested, the most soulless thing ever, surely coming to a phone near you.
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