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I. Introduction
The massive popularity of 2007's "Crank Dat" dance craze across conventional media channels and social groupings tempts a reading of the phenomenon as a successful "viral" campaign. Closer inspection of its origins, growth, and circulation, however, reveal a surprisingly diverse range of overlapping activites in place of a single-minded strategy. Numerous stakeholders used the "Crank Dat" framework to express personal and political messages, affirm social commitments, and promote their own interests. Among them, Soulja Boy, a teenager from Atlanta, achieved highly visible celebrity status, demonstrated the value of new media commidities, and became very, very rich.
Crank Dat, for all its confusion, contradiction, and welcoming incompleteness, is a shining example of spreadability in practice.
II. Preconditions
Crank Dat and, its face, Soulja Boy circulate first and foremost within hip-hop culture. Hip-hop, as S. Craig Watkins and Tricia Rose have written, is an approach to cultural production, consumption, and circulation characterized by "dialogue with the past, remixing, appropriation, communal ownership, [and] creative chaos." (Watkins 2007 TODO) More than a style of dress or set of musical conventions, hip-hop collapses the producer/consumer distinction with a persistent call for participation. In the oft-repeated words of KRS-One, "hip-hop is something you live."
As the dominant form of global pop, hip-hop embodies the necessary contradictions of a popular culture. (Fiske 4) An emphasis on strict tradition coexists with constant change and stylistic innovation. Obsessive scrutiny of "reality", "realness", and "the real" willfully permits suspicious claims of criminal heroics when there is money to be made. Rather than weaken hip-hop culture, these deep, unresolved tensions enable its mobility. The contradictions in a popular culture resonate with the constant negotiations of power, principle, and position that pervade day-to-day social life across geographic and sociological categories. (Fiske TODO)
For the better part of the 1980s and 1990s, nearly all of hip-hop's most visible artists came from New York or Los Angeles. (Chang) By 2005, with CD sales flagging, the pop music industry stakeholders began to promote hip-hop music from other areas of the United States, notably the largely ignored yet wildly innovative Southern states. (Grem) Among the various regional styles afforded high visibility in this period, snap music deviated most from the conventional New York hip-hop template. With minimal drum programming and repetitive spoken or chanted lyrics, snap destabilized unquestioned hip-hop norms like the value of complex wordplay and the use of samples from funk and soul records.
Another reason for snap music's otherness is its close relationship to dance. In contrast to "Lean Back", Fat Joe's anti-dance New York club anthem of the previous summer with its assertion that "gangstas don't dance", the music video for "Lean wit it, rock wit it", explains the value of snap's slower tempo and sparse aesthetic. True to the genre's name, dancers freeze and snap their fingers on the third beat of every bar. Rather than engage in the boastful competitve wordplay or ghetto narratives of New York's hip-hop luminaries, snap's lyrics are integrated more fully in the embodied experience of the dancer, directing him or her more like a square dance caller or wedding party MC.
((( Strip club relationship is important D4L Laffy Taffy is this the right place to introduce it? (((
In 2002, Soulja Boy, born DeAndre Way, moved out of Atlanta to live in the suburban town of Batesville, MI. With ready access to a personal computer in his home, Way learned to make animations, edit photos, record audio, and compose music. Reflecting on this period, Way credits his experience of multiple social, economic, and geographic settings for his later success:
"When I went to Mississippi, I had to adjust to what was going on. But it was really a blessing in disguise, because if I would've never moved to Mississippi, I wouldn't be where I'm at today. I wouldn't have had access to no computer, no internet, no camera to film my dancing. I took the hood to where the money was at. If I didn't have no money behind it, nobody would've ever known about it." (TODO)