Kanye did 957,000 copies in 6 days. 50 did 691,000. The top 4 albums--including Kenny Chesney and High School Musical 2--did 2.2 mil copies. Industry execs are officially off suicide watch. It's, like, their best week ever!
The biggest winners: cocaine dealers in Midtown Manhattan.
The total for West's "Graduation" is the largest by any album since 50 Cent's "The Massacre" opened with 1.1 million copies in March 2005. West's own August 2005 album, "Late Registration," was the last album to surpass 800,000 copies when it began with 860,000...
The double punch provided by "Graduation" and "Curtis" also marks just the second time in that era that two albums have bowed in the same week with totals surpassing 600,000 copies.
The last such occasion was in September 1991, when Guns N' Roses' "Use Your Illusion II" led The Billboard 200 with 770,000 copies in the same week that the band's companion album "Use Your Illusion I" bowed at No. 2 with 685,000, a pair of numbers now beaten by West and 50's totals.
Wednesday, August 29, 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.
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.
It tries to account for the global sophistication of b-boy/b-girl competitions in talking about the rise of South Korean b-boys and their journey into evening-length works. It also touches on Benson Lee's fantastic new movie Planet B-Boy, which captures a year in the life of Thomas Hergenrother's essential Battle of The Year, an event that is beginning to look like the b-boy/b-girl World Cup. Trac 2 also gets a strong mention in the piece.
At the same time, it's waaaaaaay off the mark in terms of looking at how b-boy has moved to the theatre stage. "Battle of the Year is largely responsible for the trend toward longer, more artful works featuring characters and plot," the author, Julie Bloom, writes.
Bloom even contradicts the Times' own dance critics, who have been covering hip-hop dance theatre since the Rhythm Technicians took to the stage at PS 122 in 1991 with the acclaimed play "So What Happens Now?", years before BOTY's competition expanded beyond Europe. (That play could also be said to be the birth of hip-hop theatre itself.)
This is not at all a slight to BOTY's influence on global b-boying/b-girling, which has been HUGE. It's simply to say that Bloom overstates the case drastically, and there are effects.
This is not an incidental point. As many pioneer dancers remind me, part of the reason hip-hop dance remains the least understood of the original four elements is because few people really care to get their facts right. Many see this as a campaign to erase and deracinate hip-hop's origins. Sometimes I agree, sometimes I don't. But the effect can be the same.
So mad props, love, and respect to the German and South Korean massive for continuing to expand and change the game. But I'm sure even they would tell you that the history isn't always what it's made out to be by the mainstream media.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007 Music And The Post-Industrial City :: Rebecca Solnit on Detroit Photo by Misty Keasler
From this month's Harper's comes a fine meditation on the prehistory, present, and near-future of Detroit by one of my favorite writers, Rebecca Solnit. As you might always find in Rebecca's writing, the piece is breathtakingly written, wrenchingly honest about race and history, and, in the end, cautiously, even defiantly optimistic. You can see why I love her work.
Here's an excerpt where Rebbeca interviews one of my heroes, the inspirational Grace Lee Boggs. In this short passage, my fellow Detroit music fans not from Detroit or nearby, you might find some of the real context for J-Dilla, Invincible, Sa-Ra, Juan Atkins, Derrick May, PPP, Black Milk, Soundmurder, Dana Burton, and the list goes on...:
...inside that stockade of racial divide and urban decay are visionaries, and their visions are tender, hopeful, and green. Grace Lee Boggs, at ninety-one, has been political active in the city for more than half a century. Born in Providence to Chinese immigrant parents, she got a Ph.D. in philosophy from Bryn Mawr in 1940 and was a classical Marxist when she married the labor organizer Jimmy Boggs, in 1953. That an Asian woman married to a black man could become a powerful force was just another wrinkle in the racial politics of Detroit. Indeed, her thinking evolved along with the radical politics of the city itself. During the 1960s, the Boggses were dismissive of Martin Luther King Jr. and ardent about Black Power, but as Grace acknowledged when we sat down together in her big shady house in the central city, "The Black Power movement, which was very powerful here, concentrated only on power and had no concept of the challenges that would face a black-powered administration." When Coleman Young took over city hall, she said, he could stgart fixing racism in the police department and the fire department, "but when it came time to do something about Henry Ford and General Motors, he was helpless. We thought that all we had to do was transform the system, that all the problems were on the other side."
...
When she and Jimmy crusaded against Young's plans to rebuild the city around casinos, they realized they had to come up with real alternatives, and they began to think about what a local, sustainable economy would look like.
They had already begun to realize that Detroit's lack of participation in the mainstream offered an opportunity to do everything differently--that instead of retreating back to a better relationship to captialism, to industry, to the mainstream, the city could move forward, turn its liabilities into assets, and create an economy entirely apart from the transnational webs of corporations and petroleum.
Jimmy Boggs described his alternative vision in a 1988 speech at the First Unitarian-Universalist Church of Detroit. "We have to get rid of the myth that there is something sacred about large-scale production for the national and international market," he said. "We have to begin thinking of creating small enterprises which produce food, goods, and services for the local market, that is, for our communities and for our city...In order to create these new enterprises, we need a view of our city which takes into consideration both the natural resources of our area and the existing and potential skills and talents of Detroiters."
That was the vision, and it is only just starting to become a reality. "Now a lot of what you see is vacant lots," Grace told me. "Most people see only disaster and the end of the world. On the other hand, artists in particular see the potential, the possibility of bringing the country back into the city, which is what we really need."
Friday, July 06, 2007 Mark Anthony Neal :: What's in Your Hip-Hop Canon?
When you get to our age, making hip-hop canons is definitely a Steely Dan kind of thing--"Hey Nineteen, that's Aretha Franklin/She don't know the Queen of Soul"--done out of being aghast, AGHAST at how little, LITTLE the kids know.
What a false emotion. That's why I try not to do it.
Wednesday, May 30, 2007 KRS-One on Can't Stop Won't Stop
Back from being underwater swimming with the honu and hanging with fam far away from all the madness.
Just closing up the loop begun last week on KRS-One and Can't Stop Won't Stop.
Here's an interview published last week where KRS-One outlines his problems with my book generally and particularly with the section I did on "Stop The Violence". I'll leave it to yall to read my argument in the book and KRS's argument and determine what you think.
Most debates are good debates. They reflect people taking this shit seriously, which is the most important thing at the end of the day.
Listen. Lots of folks act like Can't Stop Won't Stop is it. Like, you read it and it's done. Don't need to know nothing else. But that was never my intention.
That's why I've always been insistent on being humble about my own contribution to hip-hop scholarship. People think it's cute or just Asian of me to deflect praise sometimes. It's not an act. I recognize the fact that people sometimes place a burden on this book that I just don't want.
Can't Stop Won't Stop was and is never meant to be the last word on anything. It's meant to be a small contribution to the larger wave of thinking about the hip-hop generation (not just rap music).
If it's the first word for some of yall, that's great--now go on and get you some more. Lots more. One perspective--even if, like mine, it's filtered through hundreds of other people's perspectives--is never enough.
KRS's criticism is on point in one sense: I wasn't able to speak to everyone I wanted to--Grandmaster Caz and the Cold Crush were at the top of the list, as well as many other b-boys, b-girls, graf writers and other pioneers, especially women pioneers.
Should I have waited to do so before releasing the book? In the best of all possible worlds, yes. Could I have waited to do so? For many personal reasons that you will never know...No.
(BTW that piece he says about H. Rap is on point too--it's all there in CSWS, just not as explicit as he lays it out in the interview. In fact, you can check p. 186 to see how Whipper Whip flipped the script.)
But the bottom line--not to sound redundant, because this is all in the CSWS Prelude, and it undergirds the entire Total Chaos project as well--is that if we all take this as seriously as we should, there ought to be many many other perspectives other than mine under consideration. Period.
If there's gonna be disagreement and arguing about this one is better than that, hey that's human.
I respect KRS's perspective a lot--and he shaped this book and my thinking more than he may ever know, just check the essay I did on BDP for Classic Material: The Hip-Hop Album Guide. Nothing more need be said.
I did say I got a strong enough ego to try to step on. And in the end, it ain't about me, it's all about building this...
Holla if you like, KRS.
UPDATE 6/24 :: Another interview with KRS from Robbie Ettelson can be found here. When KRS refers to me working at Def Jam, he's probably meaning 360hiphop.com. I noticed I've been getting another wave of emails about this and a bunch of new commenters coming through. I guess it's because there's been another wave of links to this page. It's a little strange to be hosting a debate on your own book in your personal blog, but hey! That's hip-hop. Step in the cipher. Take your knocks. Move on.
I've been getting a steady stream of emails from fam this past week over this new song by KRS and Marley Marl called "I Was There" in which he knocks "so-called objective rap historians". They're concerned KRS-One is dissing me.
Nah, don't worry! Even if he was, I got a strong ego to try to step on anyway.
I really do think that the event at Stanford that gathered hip-hop scholars, journalists, and at least one agitated rapper last year has something to do with him doing this track. (I wasn't there. Had a niece's first birthday to go to back home.)
The beef that opened up there has been squashed so there is no need to go over that again. But apparently Kris is still mad about the ways rap history is being written. Note that he didn't say "hip-hop history" or "hip-hop generation history".
Anyway, given that history, it's amazing that he's teamed up with his former nemesis Marley Marl, and although I don't think "I Was There" is that great, I think "Hip-Hop Lives" could be the best work both have done in years.
Honestly, I'm a little jealous of this video. It's just really well done, and might save you the work of having to read 800+ pages (even though it shouldn't!)
