August 13, 2008 @ 2:55 pm

Five Minutes With Soulja Boy

N'neka Hite

The young man of rap talks about his new kicks, cartoons, and of course, Ice-T

While most 18-year-olds are celebrating moving out of their parent's house, Soulja Boy Tell'em is keeping busy touring the world, preparing for the launch of his graffiti-tagged Block Star sneakers by Yum's Shoes and talking about the debut of his animated cartoon series.

With a forthcoming sophomore LP titled, iSoulja Boy, and the dust settling around the virtual old-school-versus-new-school hip hop beef with Ice-T, the Steve Jobs of hip hop is sitting lovely.

VIBE.com pulls up a chair for fifteen-minutes with the poster-boy for rap’s young money movement.

VIBE.com: What's going on with your new shoe line?

Soulja Boy: We went into the process for my shoe, you know I sat down and I just thought in my head, what would everybody buy?  So, I designed two different shoes.  One's gonna drop in November and the other shoe gonna drop first quarter 2009.

Sweet.  What do they look like?

Each shoe has a special design at the bottom.  You see through the bottom of the shoe and the inside there's a drawing.  On my shoe, it’s the Soulja Boy cartoon character, my logo.

You've made a lot of noise in a short time, tell me how your life has changed?

I’ve been to Europe, Canada, Tokyo, Germany, Paris and London. My whole life changed so fast. I went from being in High School and doing homework to traveling the world making millions of dollars.  My favorite place I've been so far was, Tokyo. They have all the stuff I like—like computers and new technology.  

So about the cartoon, is it going to be like Ice-T cartoon on YouTube?

(laughs) Naah, those cartoons were actually done by a group I signed.  They're working with Cartoon Network. They go by the name Broken Equipment Productions.  They’re under my entertainment company.  The actual cartoon that we're coming out with is releasing the end of this year. It's about me trying to be a celebrity, be Soulja Boy Tell’em and I still have to live a regular life and go to school. So it’s crazy. It’s showing me, like if I don't do my homework I can't make this concert or whatever. It's me and the people that be around me all the time like Arab, Mr. Collipark, and actually what it is, is cartoons living in the real world.  We couldn't just do a regular cartoon like The Boondocks or The Simpson's, we wanted to change it up and keep it real different.

So is it going to be like the “Ya” video with the little dude jumping around real people?

If you want to see actually how the format of the cartoon is you can go to youtube.com and type in Soulja Boy and Lebron James interview and it will come up, they tested the style out on that clip.

Let’s talk about Ice-T.  The last report said you were letting it go.  Have you gotten any response from him?

Naw, everything cool with that. Everything is over with.

How did you feel with a lot of the big hip hop names coming to your defense?

After it happened, that next day I had to fly out to California for the BET Awards. When I got to the red carpet everybody was like, ‘man I respect what you did.’  I ain't really get no backlash.  Everybody knew why I said what I said.  And when Kanye West came to my defense, I was like that's what's up, I got people that understand where I'm coming from.  

Okay, musically what's next?

Right now in the streets I got "Donk".  “She Got a Donk.”  “Donk” is in heavy rotation in the clubs and on the radio.  That's what's keeping me over right now to boil over into the second album. My newest project—it's gone be crazy man. The first single it's a smash.  I worked with Polow [Da Don] on the album and we came out with a banger.

How is life now, since you blew up?

I mean, it's cool, it's just a lot of people asking for money.

Article tags: Ice-t, Soulja Boy 

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