Does Your Pop Music Suck? If You Could Please Turn Your Swag Off.

/This post has been commandeered by guest blogger Don Bito. Send your nuggets of pop shame to wegotthebits@gmail.com/

In the interest of full disclosure, let me make one thing clear right up front: I really liked Crank That.  Call me crazy, but the simple beat against the bold rhythm of the words never failed to make me want to dance.  Plus, let’s be honest, any song featuring the refrain “supersoak that ho” gets automatic points for audacity.

And I, like many others, was intrigued by Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em‘s overnight success publishing his own music online.  Unfortunately, in his desperation to avoid the moniker of “One Hit Wonder” Soulja Boy unleashed Turn My Swag On upon the world.

And I would rather be known as a one-hit wonder than the artist behind Turn My Swag On any day.

There are some words in Swag On. I hesitate to call them “lyrics.” When you listen to the song it seems like three and a half interminable minutes of “What’s ups, ” “Yeahhhs,” and “Turn my swag ons.”  That’s because these empty phrases offer at least as much substance as the little else Soulja Boy says in this song (that is to say, none.)

Perhaps that’s unfair. Swag On does make a weak attempt to tell the tale of Soulja Boy:

I’m back again,
I know a lot of y’all thought I wasn’t coming back
Yeahhh, yeahhh
I had to prove them wrong,
Got back in the studio and came up with another hit
Yeahhh, yeahhh
I told the world my story, the world where I’m from
SouljaboyXL.com, boy what’s up?
Yeahhh, yeahhh

The problem is that the tale of Soulja Boy is the opposite of interesting. And being told straight out that Swag On exists solely for the purpose of being Soulja Boy’s second hit somehow doesn’t make me want to listen to it more.

I wish I could sit here and drag this song through the mud a little but more but, frankly, it’s so vapid that I’m boring myself  even writing about it. I mean, “bad” can mean so many things…the list of colorful synonyms is so long that I can even write a column about shitty pop music every week without getting bored.  But this song isn’t even a sort of bad worth using a thesaurus.

It’s just plain old, watered-down, standard bad, right down to the tired beat. BOOM BOOM tsch, BOOM…BOOM tsch – over and over again like f*cking water torture. Dressing it up with those little percussive bells and whistles doesn’t stop me from wanting to give up and tell my captors everything, if only they would end my misery.

[Editor's Note: If you are harboring a secret love for this song (as some of you must be, since it's still at #32 on the Billboard Hot 100), or if you don't want to see your dreams of becoming a self-produced smash hit take a blow, I could - maybe - excuse you for listening to the remix with Lil' Wayne.  I mean, at least they're actually rapping.  And it has to win points for the hilarious Lil' Wayne line "Holla back, bitch, I'm in the bathroom, takin' me a rich nigga shit."]