A genre whirled out of the grist of urban pain and worn as a low-slung hat and baggy jeans has somehow slipped on clown shoes and taken up night classes in pantomime. Its dances are silly, its beats infantile, its rhymes lazy. I am sorry to report this, but hip-hop is no longer cooler than me. I’ve known it to be true for some time but dared not acknowledged it — until I saw Bo Ryan do the “Soulja Boy.” Bo Ryan is the men’s basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin. He is old, he’s white, and he should have nothing to do with pop-cultural relevance. And yet there he is, online, dancing the Soulja Boy, an ongoing craze among young aficionados based on the song “(Crank Dat) Soulja Boy” by an artist of the same name. Soulja Boy’s Internet sales of his 2007 self-titled album have exceeded 3.3 million copies, the most ever on the Web.
Salon.com