Rolling Out's Jacinta Howard has an extensive profile of Soulja Boy this week; it treats DeAndre Way's aggressive Internet self-promotion and subsequent rise to fame as a sort of hip-hop corollary to classic young adult novel The Kid Who Ran for President. (Some teenager who doesn't know anything about "the rules" comes along and shakes things up for everybody!)

Actually, Howard's article is well-researched and makes a lot of good points about the artist, although there might be one or two too many quotes from industry people about how Soulja Boy "changed the game." Here are some things we learned.

1. Soulja Boy didn't bother with fast food or retail when he wanted an after-school job as a 16-year-old high school student:

Sometimes, he would go as far as pretending his songs were new Eminem and 50 Cent tracks to draw viewers. And it worked. 

“I was getting $10,000 a show before I [was] signed,” says the now 18-year-old rapper. “I got caught with $60,000 in my backpack at school … it wasn’t a good look.”

2. There are lots of numbers you can cite to explain how successful Soulja Boy is:

To date, “Crank That (Soulja Boy),” a song that he produced, has spawned a pair of videos that were streamed over 40 million times on YouTube, generated over 27 million views of his MySpace page and racked up digital track sales topping three million. As of 2008, the song had sold over two million ringtones, according to Nielsen RingScan.

3. Soulja Boy is not the new "Chocolate Rain" guy:

Indeed, his detractors didn’t expect him to be anything more than a one-hit wonder, a short-lived Internet phenomenon much like Tay Zonday of “Chocolate Rain” fame. But, with his sophomore effort, iSouljaBoyTellem, he effectively silenced the naysayers.

4. Children are the future:

“The kids loved him,” Street says. “Seven, eight million kids knew who he was [because of MySpace and YouTube] before anybody over 21 knew who he was.”

In fact, "insiders" may actually be too old to fully understand Soulja Boy's impact: "Insiders maintain that if he can keep his image untarnished by making age-appropriate songs, he should be just fine," Howard writes. Um, they know what "Superman that ho" actually means, right?

[Rolling Out]