|
a TV personality every week, Rick Ross if it hasn't already happened will with one more facsimile album of diminishing returns (inevitable since he's only got one lane) is poised to fall off musically like 50 or DMX once the public grows weary of buying the same thing for 4-5 years.
And none of those MC's really have much material aimed at radio, while the albums are being pushed as a connected body of work rather than the 'song for the street'/'song for the bitches'/'song for the club'/*insert-three-hottest-producers-here/etc way of building rap albums by the late 90's.
And none of the young dudes are really trying to go on press junkets, visit stations regionally, be on talk shows, take ads out or do much of the previous standard of promotion.
They've already identified their audience, built a relationship with them via touring/free-mixtapes/social-media and having established a track record of quality output even if it doesn't sound much like the earlier record they liked.
Contrast that with Luda who this week and the upcoming one we'll be seeing on TV more than Kevin Hart as he tries to push this comeback to rap.
The tide has turned, it'd already been underway dating back to the beginning of the decade as the actual money in the industry has dried up.
You'll still get your hot club singles that get a rack of downloads but that will basically be what ringtone rap was in the middle of last decade.
But most of the cats in the game now, like in the late 80's, are gonna be people that will on average genuinely love what they're doing (to a point they'd be doing it as a hobby for free which lots already do) and understand that the only way to sustain success is to bring something unique to stand out amidst the clog of content available, while building a fanbase from the roota to the toota on the road with touring, online, etc.
The first three months of 2015 has given us prolly 4 or 5 rap albums stronger than anything that came out in all of 2005 (with I guess the notable exception of Graduation but that will get cancelled out by another Kanye album this year).
Killer Mike didn't have anywhere near the commercial impact or peak that Jeezy did but he got here before him and he will outlast him on the back end.
There will of course be a demo who rocked with it as teens or in college but Jeezy, like Ross even more, will be eventually seen as time-period acts (like Nelly or Ja-Rule) or guys whose regional buzz for a stretch went big national (Trick Daddy, every Houston rapper who popped in 04/05) by the year 2020, rather than the timeless ones (Nas, Hov, the two dead guys, Wu, Kast, Tribe, Snoop, etc) which will be able to headline festivals, clean up overseas, have back-catalog/licensing tie-ins that continue, get features on big new records twenty years into their careers (like Andre, E-40, Eiht, Snoop, Hov, Nas, Meth, etc).
What was the exact point it started is debatable but we are now officially under way with a RAP RENAISSANCE that has the potential to end up being the best era for the genre since '96.
This Renaissance doesn't really include The Snowman, sorry to break that to the stragglers left in his declining audience until it's nobody but weed carriers, nostalgists and Jay Bilas.
I know that was a lot of words at times twisting and turning far away from this post's principal subject but fuck it, in order to make an interesting post about a lot of these cats I had to think about more recent exciting developments in the form.
Meanwhile the lucky members of the early 2000s final crew to suckle a full serving of milk from the corporate record industry cow teet, joined by the scant like Ross who got in for a late lick or two?
"I had to rearrange their faces and give 'em all another name"-Bobby D
peace.
-Bambino https://soundcloud.com/matt-koelling-666011203
www.somethinginthewudder.com
https://twitter.com/nostrabombus
https://www.facebook.com/matt.koelling.96
https://www.instagram.com/something_in_the_wudder/
https://www.linkedin.com/in/matt-koelling-438a80
|
Printer-friendly copy 
Email this topic to a friend
The Lesson
