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...
Labels: common, hip-hop not dead, talib kweli, UGK
