"Crank That (Soulja Boy)" is released

Why it matters

"Crank That (Soulja Boy)" came out May 2, 2007. The song was made by a sixteen-year-old kid in Batesville, Mississippi, named DeAndre Cortez Way, who recorded as Soulja Boy. He produced the beat himself on FL Studio in his bedroom. He uploaded the song and a homemade music video for the matching dance to YouTube and SoundClick. The song spread on file-sharing networks and on early YouTube, weeks before any major label had heard of him. Interscope signed Soulja Boy that spring. The song was repressed for commercial release and went seven-times platinum. It spent seven weeks at #1 on the Billboard Hot 100. "Crank That" is one of the very first viral-by-internet rap hits, predating the streaming era proper by several years and TikTok by ten. The dance Soulja Boy choreographed (the Superman, the leans, the hop) was, briefly, the most-imitated piece of choreography in the country. He was sixteen. The whole 2010s and 2020s model of viral-rap-as-business descends, in significant part, from one Mississippi teenager making a beat on his laptop and putting the video up. You should remember that. The model was his.