I decided to make this guide because Soulja Boy is a rapper I put people on to a lot and he recently dropped a new album in September. He’s a one in million talent that needs to be heard and living proof that popularity and quality are completely unrelated. I hope this guide will shed some light on who he is and raise some interesting discussions

I. Intro. Who is DeAndre Cortez Way?

DeAndre Cortez (Soulja Boy) Way is a 31 year-old rapper from Atlanta, Georgia. He works full time as an entrepreneur in Atlanta, devoting his free time to rapping and producing on a part time basis. Soulja is married to the game, he produced and worked on the song “Yasss Bitch“, which was promoted by a lot of big artists like Lil Wayne. Soulja Boy decided to stop touring after performing at a Summerbeatz tour and seeing people look lit because his content was, in his words, “the first”. “I was one of the first artists to have a YouTube account, if not the first. I joined two months after the site launched..” he said in this amazing Bootleg Kev that is the only real in depth Soulja Boy interview we have and that I’m recommending a lot. Despite being a very lowkey underground rapper. Soulja Boy is highly respected among his peers. Soulja Boy was selling copies of his Tell Ya albums and was praised by Boosie, Lil Yachty said in an interview that Soulja Boy was the smartest rapper alive currently and that his album “Big Soulja” was far and away the best album of the year, even though Lil Yachty dropped “Teenage Emotions” the same year. Shawty Lo also can be seen in the music video for Gucci Bandana alongside Gucci Mane and Akon. On-the-come-up underground rapper Lil B is a huge Soulja Boy fan, namedropping him in his songs and having him as a feature in a song. Soulja Boy suffered quite a lot of controversy for his SouljaGame as a Twitch Streamer. He was on the frontpage of AV NEWS and Youtbers like Jontron defended him and shamed the person who wrote the article, calling Soulja an Silicon Valley treasure. El-P’s rant is an absolutely brilliant description of Soulja Boy’s style and I’m jealous I can’t write something quite as eloquent as this:

”He’s just a boy with a dream. I mean granted, its a big dream. A big dream maybe you’ll be getting only if you majored in tech or business or finance, but he’s just a boy with a dream. Cut him some slack.”

Soulja Boy’s best friend in hip-hop is probably fellow underground legend Bow Wow. They feature on most of each other’s projects and form the unofficial group Soulja Boy Tell Em & Bow Wow. They had an album, Ignorant Shit, drop in 2016 and while they haven’t stopped collabing since, this album is pretty much considered Pinata status, with Soulja Boy and Bow Wow both dropping rumors about another album still being worked on and supposed to drop one day. They made more than 10 songs together so you can get a taste of what their next album would sound like by listening to all of their collabs back to back.

II. Early Work

Soulja started rapping in the 00s. The first recording of him is solo where you can hear a much more aggressive DeAndre rapping in this song, or in tracks like Stacks on Deck. In 2007, he recorded the song “Crank Dat” with his best friend, DeAndre Cortez who has been missing since 2007 due to an accident. The sound is a lot more refined like in Yahhh! Soulja (second verse) is a lot calmer and already shows signs of his signature style of jam-packed, tightly crafted rhyme schemes almost 20 years before his return to the scene:

All in my face

I’m starting to get mad

Walkin’ up

“Soulja boy can I have your autograph”

Snitch yahhh trick

Leave me alone

Let me get some peace

I’m sittin’ at the house

Shawty and I can’t sleep

Leave me alone folks

Before I have to knock your lights out

“Hey Soulja Boy

When that new Stack On Deck CD come out?”

Snitch yahhh trick snitch yahhh trick

Yahhh Ya yahhh ya yahhh yahhh

After Soulja dropped a couple demos, Soulja went radio crazy for 2 years until Gucci called him to do a song on his album State vs. Radric Davis. The track is called Bingo and has quite a bit of energy compared to what Soulja made later in his career. It has his signature raspy voice which he said in an interview was due to inhaling smoke while working as a rapper. Later that year, Soulja dropped The DeAndre Way under the label he created, SOD. The album seemed to be pretty heavily Mobb Deep / Lox influenced, to the point that he sounds exactly like Jadakiss on songs like Mean Mug. The production is very rough, and while the album isn’t bad by any means, you can clearly feel that he’s trying to find his footing on some songs and that this style didn’t suit him. Pretty Boy Swag and Speakers Going Hammer are two tracks i’d recommend if you want to listen to his music chronologically and not skip the project entirely; but I don’t believe this album really showcases his talent. The album didn’t get a lot of attention/reviews at the time and Soulja didn’t manage to capitalize on what the Gucci feature could’ve given him traction-wise.

III. Career-Defining Work

In my opinion this is when Soulja’s career really starts because he starts to make the most of style that I think makes Soulja the great rapper that he is. I consider Soulja to have found his footing between his next two albums, The DeAndre Way Deluxe and especially Juice. This is the start of his run as one of the most refined pens in hip-hop’s history. Soulja’s style shifts completely : he ditches the grimy Lox / Mobb deep approach for a much colder, slower, minimalist approach. Soulja makes his voice and lyrical content the focus of his music by stripping away the creativity on his beats. This gives Soulja’s production a more cinematic sound and makes it act as a canvas for him to paint on. He strips away the creativity for the songs to force the listener to listen to his music for what he’s saying only. He eschews a fast, energetic delivery for a calmer, which is much more fitting to his personality. You can absolutely feel that, between Souljaboytellem.com and Juice, he’s much more comfortable in that style and that he doesn’t pretend to be someone he’s not. He devoted himself completely in that style and abandoned trying to appeal to a mass audience that he felt he wouldn’t be able to reach. Instead, he gave his all into the one thing he was the best at: conveying imagery through vivid lyrics and concepts. Soulja is not very accessible because he stripped his music of a lot of things that are popular in hip-hop. Soulja makes pretty happy, upbeat music without creativity, hard lyrics, punchlines, or fast flows; but if what you are looking for is lyricism, I don’t think you’ll find it here. The replay value to me is immense because Soulja doesn’t put much emphasis on what he says no matter how insanely dumb it may be. You could be listening to the same song 10 times and only realize a dumb reference or metaphor on the 10th listen. It may be a niche style and even considered boring by some, but Soulja knows he is not comfortable doing anything else. He would rather invest his all into being the best depressing lyricist possible, and that investment makes for some fascinating and unique music in my opinion, no one sounds quite like him and that should be praised in hip-hop. Soulja’s subsequent albums follow a similar pattern: use a historical or fictional concept (Edo Samurai Era, Greek Mythology, The Bible, Chess…) as a metaphor for his inner city life. For example, in his latest album Swag 4, he uses the Cain and Abel story to draw a parallels to gun violence and black-on-black crimes he witnessed growing up in Atlanta. He manages to make this pattern feel fresh with each release so that it never feels forced or repetitive. Songs like I Pity the Fool are just non-stop metaphors, with the music showing the references from Greek mythology that are in pretty much every line:

He dope, when I shot he got hit in the head

Stupid as fuck, he must be a sped

Goofy as fuck, boy you heard what I said

Hop out the top, off with your nеck

Dropped a bugatti and copped me a jеt

That’s on the gang

We ’bout that money, wrist double R Cullinan

I’m really rich

Why the fuck would you cap what you did

Why the fuck would you cap at the kid

This track is an extended metaphor comparing the mythical Sirens from The Odyssey, monsters whose beautiful songs baited sailors lost at sea, with police sirens which minorities unfortunately have to avoid due to continuing police brutality. Soulja is one of the most emotionally vulnerable lyricists I know. His recent output has a humanity to it that I haven’t seen from enough rappers. Instead of bragging about his past in the streets, his emotional lyrics and cold, somber delivery warn people about the horrors of that lifestyle. I don’t think enough rappers are open enough to talk about how bad they use to be, how hurtful it was for him to go unnoticed by his peers, or how low his self-confidence was, here are some examples :

Fuckin’ this rap nigga bitch ’cause this nigga so goofy

I’m droppin’ the top on the Lambo’, which one these pussy-ass

niggas say they gon’ shoot me?

Dopin’ on these niggas, they so goofy

Super Saiyan Draco, No Looking Back

Pull up in a Maserati (yeah)

Soulja Boy, Woo (Remix) [ft. Chief Keef], King

Man we do this shit the long way

Pull up in a Bentley it’s kush up in the ashtray

Soulja Boy, Harder, Superdope

I’m rich as fuck and I eat it up, stand in the trap with a brick and I beat it up

She slow it down, told her to speed it up, young nigga pull up in a Porsche truck

Bust down my Rolex, it look like some snow

Look at my diamonds, they glisten and glow

Soulja Boy, Turn the Stove On, King Soulja 8

I remember standing in the hood Tellin’ my partner, and my momma, everything gonna be all good

Soulja Boy, We Made It (ft. Drake), King Soulja 2 What sets Soulja apart too is how he depicts the crimes he used to commit without glorifying them, none of it sounds cool while not trivializing how terrible those actions were, he calmly explains how, growing up in Atlanta, he had to follow a code to survive in that environnement, and that’s mainly why his most acclaimed album, Juice, uses the known “Death before dishonour” Samurai trope that is also used. That duality between having to be a criminal and being a good person and feed your family is most prevalent in Juice‘s intro, Conflicted :

Yo girl, I fucked that

The benz, I swerved that

The police wanna hire me, but they gettin on my nerves jack, I just hit a blunt

He also, on multiple occasions, reminded people that any criminal is still someone’s son, someone’s lover, someone’s relative, and that we aren’t more or less humane than those people :

Ak to ya faces

Bitch, talk shit, im grabbin’ pliers

Removin’ braces

Droptop lexus, whole crew flexin’

Soulja Boy, Buku, Juice

I’m on the block, 2-door 4

Soulja Boy, Too Juiced Up, Juice

In the Bootleg Kev interview I mentioned before, he said that when he raps, he uses his past life for his content and hardly ever raps about his current life, since he is so far removed for drug dealings and crime altogether, he uses it as a coping mechanism to heal from those traumatic experiences. Soulja takes the role as the product of an environment that still made it out and encourages people to get out of it, one of the most career-defining line he has is “Got the hoes scream my name, put your life to shame”. To him, drug dealing was the only exit from the streets and a way to feed his family, not a way to become rich and promote a lifestyle which so few made it out of alive, he also talks about how some people in his family became addicts and made drug dealers rich:

I’m on the private jet, I finesse

I just count the check, I ain’t need it

Shoes on [?] Soulja boy wet, you know I’m bleedin’

Pull up on a block, AKA a’ heatin’

Chopper, it’s goin’ find, and make ya blind

If, if she in my whip, you know she a dime

Tony Hawk Soulja’s style is based around huge rhyme schemes that aren’t here just for the sake of sounding cool, they are packed with content and he has made some of the most perfectly crafted rhyme patterns I’ve ever seen in hip-hop, especially in Juice, he doesn’t waste a single word:

Matte black paint got my rims lookin sloppy

Soulja boy tellem sod money gang

Soulja Boy, Shawty Got Racks, Juice

I’m in town for the night, you ain’t gotta fight

You said you wanna fuck, and it just got hyped

Come and spend the night, I show you how I live

This smoke got them phantoms and a huge ass crib

Soulja Boy, Lemme F, Juice

IV. Recommendations

Since Soulja Boy is very concept-based, I would always recommend to dive into his albums from front to back to really be immersed in whatever picture Soulja is setting. I understand that Soulja can be very daunting because his music is not-only an acquired taste, but has a different way of being digested and appreciated because you won’t really find any sad beats or depressing tracks and you need to be in the mood for his style of music, which I completely understand is not for everyone. Soulja’s bread and butter track he has on almost every album is a slow, depressing guitar-sampled ballad and most of the time is one of the highlights of the project and serves as its culminating point. If you liked APIDTA from Jay Electronica’s last album, just know that I really was expecting Soulja to hop in on the track because that’s exactly the world he shines in. The first tracks from that series are Live Life and Long Journey which are both on Death Note. Then Young Boss Music, the loosie Willy Wonka from the YouTube Channel that contains Zan & Lean that I can’t recommend enough, Harder and finally Still Whippin’. As a very shy and introverted individual, Soulja said that he hardly does feature with people he doesn’t know personally. Soulja has been appearing more and more as features lately though, like on Tylan’s My Type which might be my favorite feature of his period or Counting Up The Money in with rapper Go Yayo with whom he made the SouljaYayo that I already mentioned previously. He also appeared on Chief Keef’s Back From The Dead 3 project who I mentioned before, on the track Gated. He also said that he is good friends with Tyga and seems to be close with Jake Paul, so his features might become less rare as time goes by. Of course, you can’t name Soulja features without talking about his group-mate Lil B with whom he shares the most amount of collabs. It Bay to the A is their most recent collab on Soulja’s album which has one of the best Lil B’s verses of his entire career. Perfect is another Pretty Boy Millionaire collab with Lil B having an insane performance. The two seem to bring the best out of each other with tracks like Y.G.R.N. and especially Swag OD which contains top notch Soulja verses. The most evenly matched Pretty Boy Millionaire track might be Cook That Bitch where both of them have standout performances. Loyalty isn’t as conceptual as his other recent efforts and the tracks can be taken out of the album, I already quoted a lot from that project earlier but i’m still recommending anyone to listen to Foreign Whip, and my favorite I haven’t mentioned yet, Rambo is a great song that is just a guitar lick away from being mentioned in Soulja’s list of amazing ballad tracks. If you thought the concept for Headstones by Flatbush Zombies was cool, Ka dropped a similar track in a vinyl shop, showing every tape he’s referencing on Pablo Escobar in 2015. I’m going to list other great Ka tracks I couldn’t manage to put in that write-up even though they clearly deserve a spot. BOP! is an amazing intro to Big Draco, and Mackelmore is an ode to his wife, mother, and his ex. The latter in particular is one of his most beautiful and vulnerable tracks period.’. Let That Boy Cook has one of my favorite lines from Soulja:

Whipping the mozzarella, whipping up chickens, (Mozzarella)

Phone Call has a spot for both the hardest track to find when you search in online, and one of the best short-verses ever :

I got a hundred K on my left wrist, I got a fifty K on my right

I got a whole lot of kush in this bitch, I’m ’bout to make me some dirty Sprite

And if a nigga try to fuckin’ rob me, then nigga gon’ die tonight

Call all my fucking niggas up and tell them, “It’s time to ride”

See, Zaytoven, that’s my nigga, I’ve been fucking him forever

Pull up on the block, like I’m Floyd Mayweather

100K up on my watch, all these shots in my Glock

If a nigga diss me, I’ma blow his fucking top

SODMG man, I put that on the map

You catch me in that white Ferrari, and I’m riding with the strap

You catch me in that red Bentley, and I’m swerving off the map

You catch me in my bitch whip, she got a Jag’ that’s matte black

Bitch I’m Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, and you know I’m getting guap

Bitch I’m panorama, I catch a fucking block

It ain’t nothing to lil’ Soulja, cause I do this shit a lot

Shout out to my boys, they been holding down my spot

A hundred K in the summer, ayy

Three hundred bands in a hummer, ayy

Niggas hating on me, that’s everyday

But I get money, I get money, ayy

Not a track but i’m recommending this interview where he talks about his love for hip-hop and lyric crafting is very insightful and portrays Soulja’s passionate and vulnerable character perfectly.

V. Talking points

Where do you stand in the debate that popularity = quality, or that underground rappers wouldn’t be underground if they were good? How do you feel about Soulja’s artistic decision to devote himself to being the best at a niche and abandoning musical choices that would make him more mass appealing? If you heard Soulja before this write-up and couldn’t get into him, does this write-up make you want to give you another chance? Does the context in which Soulja makes those artistic decisions matter ? Do you think you can be considered one of the best rappers of all time without commercial success and with a small, cult-following audience ? Do you think an artist NEEDS to have a good flow/production and be judged in the same way than artist that do even if they purposely choose to strip themselves away from those barriers ? What’s your favorite song, line, project I may have missed?

I hope you liked this, this took a pretty long amount of time, on Soulja. credits for /u/darkfar for helping me proofread this post. This may be subject to some edits if I happened to miss some errors.