Monday, September 17th, 2007

Kanye With The Lead

Who’s surprised? MTV News’ Shaheem Reid reports that Ye had done almost 800K by Friday, almost a quarter more than 50’s 600K. Reports from the UK have Ye over 50.

In the meantime, 50 seems to be rehearsing his reaction to the final sales tallies here, due Wednesday. He cancelled his European shows, is complaining that Jay-Z’s appearance with Ye on 106+Park upstaged him, and is claiming Def Jam rigged sales. (The back story by LAT’s Chris Lee is here.)

This could be a fun week.

posted by @ 3:52 pm | 2 Comments

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Maryland Legislator :: Whites Should Boycott Sexist Hip-Hop

But wait! It’s not what you think.

Here’s a provocative essay by The Honorable Justin D. Ross, Maryland Delegate (D-Prince Georges Cty.) and–surprise!–hip-hop parent:

In the current debate over whether hip-hop has become degrading to women and harmful to race relations, I’ve heard quite a bit from black activists, some of whom have fought for years against the sort of lyrics I’m writing about, and I’ve gotten several earfuls from black rap artists.

But I haven’t heard a peep from the white fans who essentially underwrite the industry by purchasing more than 70 percent of the rap music in this country, according to Mediamark Research Inc.

I don’t presume to tell any artist, studio executive or record label what to record or not record. But I will presume to ask young white customers: Why are we buying this stuff?

Now it’s still very debatable whether hip-hop is actually purchased in such proportions by whites. (Read Bakari Kitwana’s Why White Kids Love Hip-Hop: Wankstas, Wiggers, Wannabes, And the New Reality of Race in America first, then check this discussion and this discussion. I’ve done a bit of research on this and can say definitively there is no definitive study, there’s still only gut feel.

But no one else has yet said what the Delegate from Maryland has said…

posted by @ 11:55 am | 3 Comments

Tuesday, September 11th, 2007

Showdown Tuesday’s Here

Will ‘Ye shut ’em down? Will 50 be underwater? In the immortal words of Cee-Lo: But who cares?

(For more thorough, often hilarious coverage, check Miss Info’s blog…)

posted by @ 9:39 am | 1 Comment

Monday, September 10th, 2007

The Funniest Piece Yet On YeCent/50West

From our man Jay to the Smooth…

What will you do tomorrow?

posted by @ 7:45 am | 3 Comments

Wednesday, August 29th, 2007

Kweli Hits #2 :: WTF?


Ya Heard?

Numbers coming in from last week’s sales have Talib Kweli’s Ear Drum hitting #2 on the album chart. Yall know I’m a big Kweli fan, so I’m very happy for the man.

In the past month Common, UGK and Kweli have all had their highest debuts ever. What does this all mean?

First off, some perspective. Kweli did 60,500 copies, one-sixth of what the #1 album, “High School Musical 2 did (in its second week), a shade over half of what Common did in his first week and over a third of what UGK did in their first week. Those remain sobering numbers for rap music execs.

But let’s also be real: Kweli also had much less than one-sixth of the promotion that HSM2 did, and probably less than Common and UGK did as well. I don’t have access to what Kweli’s done in his first week for his previous releases, but I suspect that the numbers are about the same. In other words, give Kweli his props for building his audience and keeping it, regardless of distribution.

(This was a theme of an interview I did with him years back. He said then, and I’m sure he still feels now, that for artists it’s no longer about the kind of backing you get from a label. It’s about developing your base, one-to-one. He was saying this before Myspace, before Youtube.)

Industry insiders already are speculating that the chart success of Kweli, Common, and UGK this past month is all proof that hip-hop’s audience is aging. I think part of this has to do with their unwillingness to trust hip-hop audiences’ tastes, that people may be more down for “the underground” than some execs are willing to imagine.

It could also be argued that all of these artists are different, because they have enjoyed associations with bigger artists. For Common and Kweli, there’s the Kanye effect, for UGK and Kweli, there’s the Jay-Z effect.

But the age gap argument is probably truer than most of us have yet admitted. All of these artists are in their 30s and began building their audiences in the 90s. If you follow this reasoning, UGK did the best because they were able to bridge young and old audiences the best of the three.

Plies fans aside, then, aging hip-hop audiences might be the upside in this down market. Just like in the rock market in the 80s, thirtysomethings are speaking…loudly. While their younger brothers and sisters are downloading the industry to its grave, they are actually still buying albums. Not singles, albums.

The surprising bottom line might be this: older hip-hop audiences are not actually the tail, maybe they have become the foundation of the hip-hop market. If so, radio better recognize: the first 24-hour hip-hop classics format may not be far away.

Then again, we still have a couple weeks til Sept. 11th, a date hip-hop fans everywhere have begun talking about as if it’s the final cataclysmic showdown between “conscious” and “corporate”. Fact is I think those terms are as stupid as Polow Da Don’s views on women of color. But I’ll be like everyone else on that Super Tuesday.

Check back here then…

posted by @ 3:14 pm | 9 Comments

Sunday, August 26th, 2007

How To Write A Newspaper Article

I do a lot of talks about hip-hop journalism.

One of the things I always say is that part of the fun of it in the old days was the fact that no one had any clue how to write an actual journalistically sound piece, so we got these ridiculously strange pieces all the time–interrupted by some ill lyric or nugget of wisdom from Malcolm X, making a left turn into some long-winded analysis of the artist’s previous 15 b-sides, that kind of thing.

Since then, of course, the writing has gotten a lot more j-school approved professional, which is not a bad thing. But I still have love for the folks who write like they don’t know what a lede is.

So for those of you who have as little clue as I did what the hell a “nut graph” is” here’s a Hilarious piece from the Sunday Times that actually serves as a pretty functional, handy guide on how to write a newspaper article.

All you young bloggers, save this puppy for when you get that call.

And btw, in the meantime? Go read a book–many books–sometime. But that’s another lesson for another day…

posted by @ 6:52 am | 0 Comments

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

The Other Shoe Drops For DJ Drama

SOHH.com reports that Universal’s release of a legal mixtape by DJ Bear (who?) have only sold 5,800 units at cut-out prices since being released a month ago.

Drama responded, “How ironic. I guess they’ve realized just how important mixtapes are.””

The legal mixtape thing, of course, is hardly new. But there’s good reporting in this piece…

+ A UME exec admits they don’t have any, uh, clue…and

+ Retailers are like, whatever, next.

posted by @ 11:41 am | 1 Comment

Thursday, August 23rd, 2007

UNICEF Germany :: Save Africa, Go Blackface

Wow.

Save Africa hipsterism reached a new low this summer with this UNICEF campaign by ad company Jung von Matt/Alster presenting German children in blackface.

You can see them beginning here. More analysis here.

Even the taglines, meant to call attention to Africa’s educaitonal crisis, sound nuts. Here’s one: “”In Africa, kids don’t come to school late, but not at all.”

Lost in translation maybe? Nein!

After protests, there was this reply from a UNICEF official:

The idea behind is that children from Germany demonstrate their solidarity with children in Africa by showing up with a coloured make up. Their message is: “Children may look different but are equal – we all want to go to school.” Absolutely no connotation of black children as “dirty children” was intended.

Before publishing the ad, we had carefully discussed possible misinterpretations and the agency had also tested public reaction in a survey in Germany, without receiving negative comments. Neither did we receive any negative reaction from the German public after publication.

The ad was published in a few high-quality print media like Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Spiegel, Die Zeit, Stern, free-of-charge. These media had never volunteered to publish the ad if they would have expected a negative connotation. Obviously, the perception of the ad varies by country…

We apologize if you feel irritated by the make up of the children.

Onward…to cultural understanding, oh UNICEF soldiers!

posted by @ 9:45 am | 4 Comments

Wednesday, August 22nd, 2007

Still Not Cornier Than Wash Post Bloggers!

Fact checkers at the Washington Post let this one by Jose Antonio Vargas through:

Already, Obama has gotten shout-outs from some of hip hop’s biggest names. In his summer hit “The People,” Chicago’s own Common name-drops Obama: “Barack stick, knight the people like Obama.”

Yeah, “Barack stick, knight.” I heard that…OK…

“Strike A Pose”? Now it’s true that I came up in the 90s. But even these fools make me look like I’m (insert your current avatar of cool here, junior).

BTW just in case you were wondering? I’m not a hip-hop fundamentalist and I certainly never said it was dead! (See post labels…)

Now let me take my old man medicine before I pop a vein.

posted by @ 12:29 pm | 0 Comments

Thursday, August 16th, 2007

R.I.P. Max Roach


Max Roach, 1924-2007

Our prayers go out to the Roach family.

In the early 1980s, Max Roach did a series of shows downtown with Fab Five Freddy taking the mic, angering lots of jazz purists. In defense, he launched one of the most famous defenses of rap music and hip-hop in a famous interview with Fab. (If memory serves, this ran in SPIN Magazine.):

The thing that frightened people about hip-hop was that they heard rhythm–rhythm for rhythm’s sake. Hip-hop lives in a world of sound–not the world of music–and that’s why it’s so revolutionary. What we as Black people have always done is show that the world of sound is bigger than white people think. There are many areas that fall outside the narrow Western definition of music and hip-hop is one of them.

UPDATE 8/17 ::

+ Ben Ratliff’s discography

+ NYT Page, including music

posted by @ 10:52 am | 5 Comments



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