http://pitchfork.com/features/articles/7774-grind-to-get-it/
Grind to Get It
Rap's Recession
by Tom Breihan, posted April 5, 2010
"Them CDs didn't pay for me to go all across the U.S. It was the paycheck. We grind to get it, baby."
That's ST 2 Lettaz, half of the buzzed-about Huntsville, Alabama rap duo G-Side. ST, along with his brother, runs a gas station. Yung Clova, the other member of the group, owns a barbershop. Huntsville International, the mixtape/street album that the two released last year as a free download, was thematically centered around the idea of music taking them places they'd never imagined they could see: "Wanna shed a teardrop/ Every time my ears pop/ Way out in London repping Huntsville hip-hop." But ST and Clova have never been to London or anywhere else in Europe. They'll tour the continent for the first time this spring.
Ten years ago, G-Side might've had a major label contract in hand, like Montgomery duo Dirty did in the early 2000s. Or they might have slowly built a regional fanbase-- the type that once brought folks like Master P from mythically selling CDs out of the trunks of their cars to writing their own tickets once the labels came calling. With their gorgeous synthetic beats, sticky choruses, and joyously striving verses, Huntsville International and the duo's last album, Starshipz & Rocketz, feel much bigger than they are. It's the kind of thing that could catch on, back when things like that caught on. It's closer to the thoughtful bounce of Atlanta's Dungeon Family than Master P's beautifully ignorant thud, but it has the makings of something that could have once at least become a local phenomenon. And even being a local rap phenomenon used to be enough to pay people's bills. For Dirty, it never translated to national success but in plenty of other locations-- New Orleans, Houston, Atlanta-- this sort of regional fame did.
The Internet has changed rap in a lot of ways. MySpace has done the same thing for rappers that it's done for artists in other music genres, and so many people have used the social networking site to attempt to build audiences that the term "MySpace rapper" has now become a distinct pejorative à la "blog band." And then there's YouTube and Onsmash, sites where rappers can post their low-budget music videos without worrying whether guns and lyrics will make it past censors at MTV or BET, or whether their budgets and productions are up to those networks' standards.
Most of all, there's the matter of the mixtape. Rap mixtapes have existed for about two decades. They were once sold on cassette or in slimline CD cases, usually by bootleggers in mom-and-pop stores or street-corner vendor stands. Thanks to the format's questionable legality, rappers didn't have to worry about clearing samples, and many mixtapes became ways for artists to showcase themselves by performing over established tracks. It's something artists did to keep their name out in the world, but there was at least the vague possibility that someone could make money from them; after all, people did pay five bucks a pop for the things, and that money had to be going somewhere. But now mixtapes exist almost exclusively on the internet, and nobody has to make pilgrimages to hotbeds like New York's Canal Street to pick up the latest product. Rappers are offering the things themselves, for free, at a click. And some of them are pushing the project to absurd extremes. Witness, for example, Atlanta rapper Gorilla Zoe, who released 28 mixtapes in 28 days this past February-- way more music than anyone could reasonably be expected to process. And since these things are being offered for free download, no strings attached, nobody's making money-- just like with MySpace or YouTube.
For the past decade or so, major labels and the mixtape universe have shared an uneasy symbiotic relationship. Mixtapes being both illegal and something that wasn't going to make money directly for the labels, you'd have occasional clashes, like the infamous incident where the RIAA raided DJ Drama's warehouse. More often, though, the majors would use mixtapes like a farm system. 50 Cent became one of the decade's defining stars when he jumped directly from NY mixtape cult fave to massive pop stardom. There were plenty of reasons for 50's takeover: the great story, the pop choruses, the Eminem/Dre cosign, the bullet-dimple smile. But 50's mixtape stardom gave him a grassroots word-of-mouth appeal that no label marketing department could conjure. Other mixtape prospects like Papoose or Saigon never panned out, but then, one Nirvana can buy you plenty of Wools and Jawboxes.
More recently, established major-label stars have used mixtapes to build and maintain buzz. In the two and a half years between the release of Lil Wayne's Tha Carter II and III, the man dumped insane amounts of material onto the mixtape circuit, threatening to saturate the market to the point where nobody would want to pay full-price for his music after buying or downloading it for so long. Instead, the opposite happened. Wayne, flush with goodwill and credibility, sold a million copies of Tha Carter III in a week during an era when those numbers were thought to be long-passed memories.
Wayne's historic triumph happened in summer 2008; yet between the tanked economy and the implosion of the music business, that seems like a long time ago. More recently, another rapper seemed primed to make the leap from mixtape phenom to megalithic pop star. Gucci Mane might not have had Wayne's pop history or crossover appeal, but he did spend the parts of 2008 and 2009 when he wasn't in prison releasing a long avalanche of music onto the mixtape circuit in a run that compares favorably with Wayne's. Everything seemed to be working in Gucci's favor. He had a rabid cult, a way with hooks, a cell phone full of star connections, and a few singles that'd gained grassroots steam. The major label album he released in December 2009, The State vs. Radric Davis, seemed primed to cash in on all this, with its loaded roster of guests and its difficult balance of street-rap grit and general catchiness. But in its first week of release, it sold about 89,000 copies-- respectable, but not even in the same universe as Wayne. To date, it's moved about 300,000-- just a fraction of Tha Carter III's sales. A new superstar he's not.
Gucci's in prison right now, but when he gets out this year, he stands to make plenty of money-- not from record sales but live shows. Especially in the South, there's a thriving network of clubs willing to pay top dollar for performances, and an Ozone article from last year alleged that Gucci's managers had actually made a ton of money booking him for out-of-state live shows despite knowing full well that he wouldn't make it to any of them. Most of these interactions are cash-based, so they're hard to trace. But I once watched the Baton Rouge rapper Lil Boosie-- who, at the time, hadn't had an album out in two years-- get paid a substantial free, all in stacks of $20 bills, to do a 25-minute show in an Orlando club parking lot.
Boosie wasn't the headliner that night, but he still commanded that kind of money. He'd released one solo major-label album and another as part of a duo with Webbie. He'd had a few minor hits. But like Gucci and Wayne, he'd also released a ton of material onto the mixtape circuit. He'd done well for himself, but he wasn't a major star, and the mixtapes-to-majors model didn't seem to be working for him. (He'd spent that afternoon in a hotel room complaining to me about how his label didn't take him seriously.) So, at least in Boosie's case, the mixtape farm system had, to some extent, broken down, replaced instead with a mixtapes-to-live-shows model. Boosie was still making good money; he just wasn't doing it through record sales.
The Gary, Indiana rapper Freddie Gibbs spent a couple of years earlier this decade signed to Interscope, but the label kept him on the shelf, releasing none of his music. Gibbs only started building a name for himself nationally after parting ways with the label, when he released a couple of highly regarded mixtapes last summer. In the past, he might've leveraged his buzz from those mixtapes to land another major-label deal. And that does still happen sometimes; Gibbs' frequent collaborator Pill reportedly inked a recent deal with the Warner-distributed Asylum after releasing two acclaimed mixtapes. But Gibbs says that he's "not really" negotiating with labels, that he has other career ideas in mind. "When my music starts moving forward, it's helping me get more and more out the streets. I'm starting to get more show opportunities to supplement my income and take care of my family. There's ways to make money in music; you just have to go about it in different areas, other than selling a solid, physical record."
But major labels still exist, of course, and they're still banking on the idea that stars can still be made and can still sell tons of records. Gucci Mane might've been unable to translate mixtape buzz into platinum success, but one man will probably give that model its ultimate test in the next year or so. The Canadian teen idol Drake isn't a typical mixtape rapper, by any stretch. By the time he released his landmark So Far Gone mixtape last year, Drake had already forged working relationships with guys like Lil Wayne, and he'd already found a high level of media visibility thanks to his years acting on the kiddie soap opera "Degrassi: The Next Generation". Last summer, he scored a major radio hit with the So Far Gone track "Best I Ever Had", reaching levels of airplay saturation unprecedented for a mixtape track with no label backing. After his mixtape success, Universal spent a reputed seven figures to sign Drake. If he doesn't sell a !$%!%!+* of physical or at least digital records, Universal will take a hit.
If the Drake experiment pays off, he'll become the internet's equivalent to 50 Cent's street-level mixtape success. By all conventional measure, Drake has everything a major prospective crossover star should have: famous connections, good looks, an interesting backstory, a distinct musical identity, and the propensity to sing his own hooks. 50 Cent had all the same things going for him, and he made good on his potential commercially, at least for a few years. It's extremely unlikely that Drake will sell what 50 once sold; downloading has decimated music sales too much for that. But if the eventual Drake album sells half or a third of what Get Rich or Die Tryin' did, Universal will still have a major success on its hands.
The radio takeover of "Best I Ever Had" came after months of internet buzz, which at least says something about the viability of said buzz in the real world. In an even more extreme example, Kid Cudi's "Day N Nite" became a legit Billboard top 10 hit two years after the song first made the internet rounds. The club omnipresence of the song's Crookers remix and Cudi's Kanye cosign both played major parts, but the real secret to the success of "Day N Nite" was that enough people just eventually had a chance to hear the song and get to like it to push it into what passes for the mainstream. Without a long-simmering internet buzz, that doesn't happen. "Best I Ever Had" and "Day N Nite" are rare internet-to-radio success stories. Right now, Jay Electronica is enjoying a similar moment, on a much smaller level, with the rap-blog favorite "Exhibit C". But is this sustainable? Can more rappers find success with internet singles?
It's also worth noting that both "Best I Ever Had" and "Day N Nite" are rap songs in only the most nebulous sense of the term. Cudi delivers all of "Day N Nite" in a nodded-out singsong, and Drake's own R&B chorus is the part of "Best I Ever Had" that really sells the track. Similarly, last year's best-selling rap album, the Black Eyed Peas' The E.N.D., was essentially Euro-leaning club-pop with rapping mixed in. "Exhibit C" sounds something like a nostalgic rap-centric reaction against clubby pop-rap tracks like "Best I Ever Had" and "Day N Nite", and that could be part of the reason the song hasn't yet caught on like those other two did. Whatever the case, radio success of straight-up rap music, internet success or no, is nothing that anyone can count on.
But the internet's also produced a few high-profile casualties, artists who have spectacularly failed to build online chatter into anything substantial. Take, for example, onetime rap-blog staple Charles Hamilton, who seemed to be going places at the outset of 2009. An avalanche of mixtapes had landed Hamilton on the cover of both XXL (the infamous internet-fave Freshman 10 issue) and The Fader, he was signed to Interscope, and his "Brooklyn Girls" video was getting decent late-night MTV rotation. But then a series of boneheaded moves-- getting punched in the face by a girl during a videotaped rap battle, claiming that deceased production legend J Dilla was the "executive producer" of his album-- annihilated whatever momentum he'd built. Not long after, Interscope dropped him. Or, for another example, look at Slaughterhouse, the supergroup of major-label refugees who turned rabid online cult status into deeply sad album sales. Weirdly enough, the Slaughterhouse guys had their biggest 2009 mainstream moment as extras in a Drake video, standing around in the background as Eminem rapped his "Forever" verse.
That XXL Freshman 10 issue, which came out late in 2008, has become notorious for the myriad ways in which its internet-fave cover stars have failed to cross over. Despite a massive marketing push, whitebread college-rapper Asher Roth failed to make much of a popular dent with the widely lambasted debut album Asleep in the Bread Aisle last year. Wale, similarly, bricked hard once his major-label debut made its way to stores. Other guys from that cover still have yet to release an album. Earlier this year, XXL unveiled another Freshman 10 cover story, featuring internet-beloved rappers like Fashawn, Pill, Jay Rock, and the aforementioned Freddie Gibbs; we still have yet to see if the new class will fare any better in the marketplace. More established artists Drake and Nicki Minaj all reportedly refused to participate in the newer batch of Freshmen. And what aspiring rapper would look at guys like Charles Hamilton and Slaughterhouse and think that building an internet fanbase would be the way to go?
In the past few months, we've seen a couple of high-profile rock critics-- Sasha Frere-Jones in The New Yorker, Simon Reynolds in The Guardian-- advance the idea that rap has, on a broad level, forsaken the idea of innovation, that it's now a music for aficionados only-- that it's dead, basically. Frere-Jones points out that rap's popular end is basically subsuming itself into European club culture, and it's true, to an extent; witness the way Euro dance-pop is having its way with guys like Jay-Z. Those rappers unable to make the dance-pop leap, Frere-Jones argues, are veering toward stogy traditionalism. Reynolds' assessment was even more damning: "By any sensible metric, rap has slipped hugely from where it was when this decade began. It's not dominating the pop charts anymore, and neither is it irrigating the mainstream with new beats, styles, and slanguage. It's not producing major album-length statements, give or take an 808s & Heartbreak (revealingly, not rapped but sung). It's not even coming up with compelling new personalities."
Even if commercial success is a hard thing to come by in an internet-mixtape world, artistic success is another matter entirely. G-Side, Freddie Gibbs, and Atlanta mixtape verteran Playboy Tre all had artistic triumphs in 2009, releasing powerful full-length cohesive statements as free internet mixtapes. Gibbs' Midwestgangstaboxframecadillacmuzik, G-Side's Huntsville International, Tre's Liquor Store Mascot: Each was a strong, low-on-frills example of plainspoken niche-rap heaviness. Each of these artists has skill and vision and personality, and there's nothing stopping any of them from making their strongest possible full-lengths. None of them has to capitulate to record-label expectations, and all of them are free to make music as furious and passionate and revealing as they want. In return, each has been rewarded with a small but devoted and growing fanbase. If these guys weren't able to give away their music for free on a grand scale, who's to say if they'd have an audience at all? (Also worth mentioning here: Gucci, whose mixtape material is often stronger than the stuff that makes it onto his album, partly because it never bothers to compromise.)
Frere-Jones and Reynolds may be right there's no transcendent Timbaland-type figure forcing head-spinning new sounds into the mainstream, but that doesn't mean innovation has disappeared from the form. Consider, for instance, underground producers like Berkeley space case Young L or warped Alabama trance-masters Block Beataz, both of whom make music that sounds like absolutely nobody else. Or think about Gucci Mane, who may not have taken the mainstream by storm but who's become a cult hero by filtering familiar street-rap tropes through a manic, libertine, word-drunk sensibility all his own. As a rebuttal to the Frere-Jones and Reynolds pieces, Pitchfork contributor David Drake recently posted a CD-length mix of overlooked rap on the So Many Shrimp blog: "there are all kinds of scenes and musical developments happening underneath our noses, and while they don't have the same media profile, while there's no big central Rap Mainstream to orient ourselves around, that doesn't mean they don't exist."
Just as positive, we're seeing a reemergence of small, isolated regional scenes and subgenres. Regionalism has always been one of rap's most fascinating assets, and it's always been fun to parse out, say, the way Memphis records from 1995-+*@ sounded distinct from Texas records or Atlanta records from the same era. In the last decade, though, there's been a weird flattening effect to major-label rap. Because of label expectations or simple profit calculations, we started hearing albums that connected various dots (club song, for-the-ladies song, snarly street-threat song, sad introspective song) while rarely wrapping these various tracks up in a cohesive or satisfying way. So when, say, Houston rappers began signing major-label contracts en masse in the wake of "Still Tippin'", they ended up losing much of the singular local sound that made them interesting in the first place.
These days, labels aren't exactly running around snapping up all the leading lights of any particular scene, and so these various local hot spots are back to working on their own schedule, according to their own logic. On the West Coast, kids are dressing up in extra-tight retro-hipster clothes and recording minimal dance tracks about giving head, and only one track from the unfortunately named jerk scene, the New Boyz' "You're a Jerk", has become anything like a national hit. In the Bay Area, various survivors from the once-bubbling hyphy scene (another localism that had to endure major-label attention) have built up a moody new sound, one that draws from hyphy but adds a more expansive, thoughtful street-rap focus. The stuff guys like Jacka and J. Stalin are doing doesn't even have its own subgenre name yet. Alabama has been cranking out promising country-rappers at a frightening clip: G-Side, yeah, but also Yelawolf, Jackie Chain, G Mane, and many others. Built around the technologically adroit but substantively classicist sound of producers like Block Beataz and DJ Burn-One, this stuff is very much its own thing. Meanwhile, upstarts in Atlanta are making everything from hyper-lyrical block talk to straight-up ignorant fight music; the city seems to be splintering in a million directions at once.
Back in the days when a major label would swoop in and sign most of a local scene's leading lights, the sound of that scene would slowly bleed its way into the mainstream; think of the vogue for screwed-and-chopped vocal samples, for instance, in the wake of the Houston scene's popularity. These days, though, the local scenes become their own little echo chambers. The people making music in all these localities seem to be making music for their friends, for kids on their block, for their Twitter followers. None of them is actively disparaging the idea of commercial succes-- this isn't crust-punk or something-- but it's also not like circa-05 Houston, with everyone expecting a big contract and burnishing off rough edges accordingly. Now that major labels are barely bothering to release rap albums anymore, you have to dig to find this stuff. But if you do bother to dig, there's plenty of gold out there-- maybe more than ever before.
Then there's also the matter of people who were once part of rap's mainstream (or who, in some cases, still are) trying their hands at the mixtape and indie-label world. My friends and I spent the better part of a recent Friday dorking out over a new mixtape from the popular Brooklyn rapper Fabolous-- a man who regularly releases albums that forsake his punchline-based brilliance for R&B-addled attempts to score crossover hits. On mixtapes, Fab's free to let the punchlines fly, and that can be a glorious thing. More dramatically, there's the case of Freeway, once a key part of Jay-Z's Roc-A-Fella empire. After leaving the Roc-A-Fella fold, Free spent 2009 cranking out music in any way he could: mixtapes, street albums, stand-alone blog-bait songs, verses on other people's underground songs. Then, earlier this year, Free released The Stimulus Package, a collaborative album with producer Jake One, on the Midwestern indie Rhymesayers, the label that launched backpack-rap faves Atmosphere and Brother Ali.
Free and Rhymesayers are a somewhat unlikely fit, and Free's new to this whole indie thing. Onstage at Rhymesayers' SXSW showcase last year, Free repeatedly referred to the label as Rhymeslayers. A year later, he laughingly admitted to me that he had the label's name totally wrong: "I didn't quite know the name ... You would think I'd be on Rhymeslayers because I slay rhymes." And Free's not necessarily done with the major-label world yet; he told me that he was exploring a possible label deal with Cash Money. But he's also enjoying his time at Rhymesayers: "For the past month or two, I've been really turned up with this whole independent thing. Working with the label and working with people that think everybody is connected, it's just been like a good feeling to me. Everything is hands on, and I know everything that is going on. I feel as though they are doing a great job."
I thought the resulting album itself was disappointing. But we're at least closer to a time when Freeway could realize the wide-open freedom that a label like Rhymesayers might offer-- when he could, potentially, release his own take on a knotty and revealing album like Atmosphere's Lucy Ford. That's an exciting possibility.
In the end, hip-hop is recalibrating, from a pop sensation back into an underground movement. People are making music for specialized, dedicated audiences, knowing that these audiences probably won't make them rich. Sometimes they're holding down day jobs or figuring out alternate ways of making money. Touring is important. And listeners have to go deeper than the most obvious stuff, digging through various localized underground scenes to find the worthwhile stuff. Sound familiar? From certain angles, rap's current moment doesn't look too different from, say, indie rock circa 1985. That's a good place to be.
For cliff notes just read the last paragraph
