In fact, Atlanta’s trap music has dominated pop music in recent years and so did efforts to create hits using viral memes, with Breihan citing No. Their trap song “Black Beatles,” he argued in the book, “represented a big change in the way people consumed, encountered and understood pop music and it also heralded the arrival of a newly dominant genre of pop.” The next chapter focused on Rae Sremmurd, who grew up in Mississippi but made their mark in Atlanta. “It’s where hit songs are made now, not just a mutation of MySpace.” “At the time I was writing the book, I didn’t fully realize how important TikTok would become,” Breihan said. TikTok, which was new in 2019, also helped fuel the song’s success. For more than four months, he was able to keep his streaming numbers ahead of everyone else, including Billie Eilish, who tried the same strategy by adding Bieber to “Bad Guy” to try to knock Lil Nas X off the top. Lil Nas X created a clever strategy to maintain interest in his song by releasing multiple remixes of it to fuel interest, including a version with Billy Ray Cyrus. In fact, Breihan did consider placing Lil Nas X in the book with his country/rap song “Old Town Road,” which broke the record for longest No. He sold millions of ringtones, which were briefly popular, and iTunes downloads.īreihan said Soulja Boy’s impact resonates to this day, his strategies refined by the likes of Drake, Nicki Minaj, Justin Bieber and fellow Atlantan Lil Nas X.

He created a dance instruction video on a new site called YouTube for “Crank That,” which went viral. He’d mislabel his songs on Limewire, an illegal music-download site, so more folks would hear his music. He then linked and cross-promoted on multiple mediums.Īs Breihan wrote, “He might have been only a serviceable musician, but he was a genius-level early adopter.” He wrote his own Wikipedia entry. He created his songs using a demo version of a digital audio workstation FruityLoops ( now FL Studio) from his house and posted them on SoundClick, an early social-media platform. “Soulja Boy is the original self promoter,” Breihan said. He was the first artist to use the Internet to work outside the record label system and generate a No.

1 in 1990.Īnd Breihan explains why Soulja Boy (real name: DeAndre Way) made the cut for “Crank That” in 2007. And Vanilla Ice’s oft-reviled “Ice Ice Baby” was, for better or worse, the first rap song to hit No. George McRae’s “Rock Your Baby” tapped into early disco in 1974. There are chapters on the Beatles via “I Want to Hold Your Hand” in 1964, the mesmerizing power of Michael Jackson via “Billie Jean” in 1984 and teen pop idol Britney Spears with her breakout 1998 hit “.Baby One More Time.”īut Chubby Checker created a massive dance craze with “The Twist,” which hit the top of the charts in 1960, then again in 1962. Some of these “rupture” points are super obvious but necessary to cover.

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