“Ay y’all, hop off the WiFi!” Soulja Boy tells no one in particular. He’s in the studio, sitting at his MacBook, listening to beats, idly freestyling under his breath. He scrolls, he clicks, he types. He sends emails, he flicks through iTunes, he smokes a blunt that someone else has rolled for him. None of this is particularly interesting on its own, but knowing that Soulja Boy has gotten rich and famous simply by sitting at his computer, performing these basic actions, feels revelatory. Watching Soulja Boy use the Internet is like watching Ron Jeremy’s penis get an erection. “I was always on computers,” he says, adding somewhat cryptically, “ever since I could get on computers.”

“When I was like five or six, I used to play piano,” he says. “I didn’t even know how to read music. I sounded like Beethoven but I didn’t know shit—I just knew what sounded good. If I hit a fucked-up key, I wouldn’t press it no more.” That Soulja Boy, as a child, taught himself to play piano through trial and error should be of surprise to no one: His entire career has been an exercise in throwing anything and everything at the wall and seeing what sticks.

Soulja Boy first rose to prominence in the mid-2000s, a time before the Internet as we know it existed. Perhaps the first web-native rap star, Soulja quickly became a master of using all of the nascent tools at his disposal to turn his art into a brand, then monetize that brand with more flair and less shame than any musician ever, save for perhaps Gene Simmons. “I’ve been using the Internet ever since I made my first song,” he tells me. “Y’all know the rest.”

In case you do not: According to a 2014 Forbes profile, a then-teenaged Soulja would upload his own songs to file sharing services such as LimeWire and Kazaa, ensuring that scores of illegal music pirates would listen to his music by messing with the tracks’ metadata to make it look like they weren’t Soulja Boy songs at all, but instead tracks by famous musicians. He learned to work the systems of such sites as SoundClick and MySpace, where he began to rack up friends at a frenzied pace. “I had 270,000 friends and I was still in the hood,” he says.