Friends, it is my honour and my duty to report that the proposed fight between Soulja Boy and Chris Brown – the Ricky Gervais and Grant Bovey of the Facebook generation – is growing ever more absurd by the day. By the way this one is moving – telegrammed in blurry low-res Instagram videos where Brown calls Soulja Boy a “bitch” – this could be all change twice over by press day. But the latest revelations are as follows: “Iron” Mike “Everything I’ve Touched With My Huge Rough Hands Has Turned to Fire and Hell in the Last Decade, Maybe More” Tyson has signed up to coach Brown and released a diss track to prove it, and the whole thing might have to happen in Dubai or somewhere where neither fighter has to take a drug test before the bout. If you don’t already gleefully have the vague fight date of “March” blocked off in your calendar for this one, then you are not my people.
And so the vague recap: Soulja Boy, a man who looks incredibly easy to pick up against his will, is an Atlanta rapper who you will of course remember from 2007’s seminal Crank Dat (Soulja Boy). A few days into the year, Mr Boy favourited one of model Karrueche Tran’s photos on Instagram, which somehow served to enrage Brown – he and the actress had a tumultuous on-off relationship between 2011 and 2015, which isn’t an explanation but it will have to do. At this point in the timeline, it was announced that the two had beef.
Beef is a curious celebrity pastime, one far removed from the good old days of Biggie and Tupac going at each other until they died; it is an agitation acted out in loaded subtweets that end in ellipses, and with Snapchat callouts, and Instagram comments that are leapt on and decoded by fans. Beef, it has to be said, is a very modern way at getting so mad at Soulja Boy that someone offers you $1m to fight him in a ring.
So how this all snowballed into Tyson – stiff-legged and just slightly off the beat – standing alone in a recording studio spitting out “If you show up / it’s going down / I’m gonna teach him how to knock your ass out” into the mic is anyone’s guess. A lot has gone on in the interim. Soulja Boy took to the streets to prove his don’t-mess-with-me credentials in a short-lived live broadcast, and somehow managed to get in a set-to with a stranger during that. Former champion Floyd Mayweather signed up as both fight promoter and Soulja Boy’s trainer, a frankly headache-inducing conflict of interests that makes me think the International Boxing Federation isn’t going to endorse this one. Tran, the unwitting progenitor of the beef, released a statement essentially saying, “Well, this is dumb”. Brown, who, when he hasn’t been training, has as best I can tell been smoking a load of cigarettes in someone else’s bedroom and occasionally using a 10-year-old camera phone to release diss videos, hit back that “NOONE ASKED FOR THIS OPINION!!!” It’s all getting very messy.
Is this fight going to happen? My heart tells me no, my head tells me yes. At this point, too much trash has been talked, too much money has been hypothesised about, and too many gigantic male egos have been put on the line: there is no way Soulja Boy, Brown, Tyson and Mayweather will let this slip away into the night, and that was before 50 Cent got involved. But then I’ve seen the clip Soulja Boy put up of him practising his swings and I do worry that if he tries to do that against another human being, then he will die. It sort of looked like a wet and fragile puppy trying to struggle out of a small string bag, and failing.
Picture it. March. Dubai. The scorching heat of the desert sun. The sky darkens over slowly cooling sands. A billion-dollar skyscraper has been built especially for the fight.
What we are basically going for here is “Apollo Creed’s entrance from Rocky IV, but twice over”. Iron Mike performs his 30-second diss track, glitter cannons exploding behind him. Assembled rap royalty watches from behind Gucci shades.
Brown, the Ivan Drago of this analogy, spends 30 minutes entering the ring from below, pausing for a full dance performance of Loyal somewhere around the 15-minute mark. Soulja Boy, our brave Apollo, descends from the roof among go-go dancers and fireworks, wearing something inexplicable made out of the US flag and a load of silver leather. He is somehow allowed to grab the announcer’s microphone one last time to call Brown a “bitch”. And then, ding-ding, Round 1. And Soulja Boy is killed instantly by the first punch.
I’m sorry: that’s the only way I see this one going. But let’s at least enjoy the next two months of hype.
