The Worst Album Ever Made on the Short-Bus Ride to School

Soulja Boy, the emerging 17-year-old rapper currently riding a wave of popularity brought on by his hit single, "Crank That," shows how you can make up a dance and get a hit record out of it. With terrible rhymes and ridiculous choruses, the album is no more than the first single.I can't deny that when "Crank That" comes on, I do it. I like the dance and I know certain people who practiced the dance in their office. However, if you want to call yourself an artist, you have to be more than a catchphrase and a two step. In what could be considered either a stroke of marketing genius or a sign of the impending apocalypse, the title of Soulja Boy's debut is an embedded advertisement for his official website.Soulja Boy does have talent for a 17 year-old kid, you can see the potential that is in him. Some of the things he says in the album you can qualify as "not bad for a kid out of high school." The more you listen to the rest of the song, the more you sit back and wonder how the hell this kid got a record deal.You find this in songs like "Booty Meat," where Soulja Boy raps: "girl, shake that booty meat, that booty meat, that booty meat," again and again over the type of uninspired beats, hand-claps, and echoes that dominate the album's sound. "Soulja Girl" is the album's strictly for the ladies song. Meanwhile, the premise of "Sidekick" is so ridiculous that Soulja himself seems to struggle with it: "man, I can't believe that I'm rapping 'bout a phone / but what you won't believe is I wrote this song." This is arguably the worst song of the year which, if there is god, will never get released or played in the car by someone who wants to be "gangster." There also is the song "yahh" which is trying to get people to back up off you by saying "yahh trick yahh."In all fairness, "SouljaBoyTellem.com" does have its moments. "Snap and Roll" features an electric guitar and "Don't Get Mad" has the type of chorus that could get stuck in your head for days. But even during the few instances when the music hits home, Soulja Boy's vocal performance can't stack up. His rhymes are slurred lazily and his singing voice is mediocre at best.All of this begs the question: just how seriously is Soulja Boy taking himself? Who can call someone a "doo-doo head" in one song and describe his musical success as a "movement" in the next? Does Soulja Boy really think that he's "super-fresh" or is this all part of his act, his marketing gimmick?