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Winter Is Coming.
No way. Those numbers can’t be right. It leaked. It sucks. Baby must’ve bought all of them. Sacrebleu!
One million. OK fine, 964,000. Tha Carter IV did what no rap album should dare to do, topple Jay-Z and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne. Toppled is actually too soft of a word to describe its accomplishment. It beheaded the two-headed monster that seemed defiantly secure in its place atop rap’s royalty. The fact that both albums made history in the same month should mean hip hop hooray, right? WTT managed to not leak in today’s highly porous times and it broke iTunes first week sales records with 290,000 downloads. The album came out only a month ago. Total first week ended at 436,000.
Then only two weeks later, rap’s original Goblin (sorry Tyler) ate’em up by breaking their record in only four days, going onto sell 340,000 on iTunes. In total, C4 has the biggest first week sales of this year since Lady Gaga’s Born This Way. Who knows how many of her 1.1 million sales came from Amazon’s $.99 download offer? Demand was so high that it shut down their servers. So really, Wayne can rightfully and unofficially claim the biggest first week sales of the year.
But how could this be? Wayne did not host an elaborate listening session at a historic planetarium featuring society’s elite, feeding mini-lobster rolls to hoteliers and long-legged European models. (Pardon us if we got our facts twisted, we were not in attendance.) Wayne did not bestow his engineers with Rolexes to keep the album from leaking. Wayne did not put together a pop-up store in a trendy neighborhood. Wayne did not receive digital slob jobs from members of the media via their Twitter accounts just for being in the same room. “6 Foot, 7 Foot” was cool but “How to Love” sucked right?
Quality and sales rarely go hand-in-hand. We know this. Yet we make an issue out of it every time a product of lesser quality, as deemed by The Culturati, outsells a superior one. So toss the issue of quality out of the chainsawed Maybach because what’s more interesting than the actual sales of Wayne’s album is the reaction it’s getting from those who are supposed to know what’s going on, what’s hot and what’s next. From the onset of early sales reports, doubts bubbled. C4, unanimously the worst of the Carter series, was going to double the sales of the critically adored and coddled WTT.
The lead up to the release didn’t look very promising. Wayne closed the VMA’s with a confusing performance right before his album became available on iTunes. Most of the talk revolved around his leopard print pants. So much so that the next day, media outlets investigated to identify the actual model of his “jeggings.” Jay-Z, who earlier in the week took an unexpected jab from his once collaborator, stole the spotlight not with his own performance but by his wife rubbing her pregnant belly on stage, and yes, he smiled and saluted on camera. Ganbei!
“No one I know likes ‘How to Love’.” Yet it peaked at #5 on Billboard’s Hot 100. “Otis” on the other hand peaked at #12. One of the most critically acclaimed rap albums of all time, Kanye’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy, has sold less than Nicki Minaj’s Pink Friday. Yet, the editors, writers, bloggers and industry ilk all openly cast doubt on Wayne’s sales via Twitter. This blatant dismissive attitude reveals just how out of touch those who sit behind a computer are with real consumers. Influencers who are supposed to shape and in many ways dictate consumer behavior got left out of this historic occasion. While the intimate urban mostly-New York media bubble was busy adoringly stroking one another for a job well done covering the event that was WTT, the hype became bigger than the moment. People got lost in the smoke that they created and couldn’t see beyond their immediate circle. And so people jokingly but seriously attributed C4 more than doubling WTT’s numbers to Baby buying copies of it. And newsflash from 1998, white people buy majority of major rap albums. That argument is tired and needs to be retired.
Hammer, You Ain’t Hittin’ in New York!
In the early ‘00s, New York didn’t take southern hip hop seriously. Back then, many old heads who bounce to Juicy J today, chuckled at the fashion, candy paint and the way southern rappers talked. Of course the South is on top now. Like Benny Blanco did to Carlito, southern hip hop snuck up on New York and took us out to the point where we now get excited about homegrown talent who make southern sounding rap. And while New Yorkers now ask DJs to play southern songs at clubs, we still have an elitist outlook towards what comes out of our southern neighbors. You know, they’re late; they’re not up on the latest CFDA darlings. When we do embrace them, we know they’re not a real threat to our cultural defining throne. We know Waka Flocka will never be another Big or Jay-Z so we’re comfortable in our endorsement.
In many ways, WTT vs C4, is similar to how New Yorkers view politics. We have a hard time grasping why anyone would watch Fox News, believe Beck, Palin, Perry or Bachmann. But a majority of the country does. By dismissing it, we feel better about ourselves and make ourselves feel superior. Well, they’re just dumb, we know better. Even on those rare occasions when New Yorkers travel to cities not near large bodies of water, we don’t take the time to just shut up and observe what’s happening in those places. Our arrogance gives us a false security in our coolness. As a result, we get so busy thinking that we’re influencing, we don’t allow ourselves even the opportunity to be influenced by those who we deem uncool.
So I’m Outside of the Club and You Think I’m a Punk
I joined in the Twitter banter when the disbelief kicked off. Someone in Florida responded saying that around his way, people don’t sit all day reading rap blogs, that they go to Datpiff to download mixtapes to listen to in their cars. He also pointed out that while he noticed New Yorkers were excitedly Tweeting about WTT’s release party in Miami’s LIV, most people in that city wouldn’t be let in to the club on any night, even if they could afford it.
The exclusive elite class was what hip hop used to rally against. WTT got criticized for being out of touch with their contingency. Jay-Z and Kanye are now the same establishment that they once sat outside of. Fully crossed over, not so much with their music but with their existence. They brag about hanging with Anna Wintour, Warren Buffet and Larry Gagosian and acquiring women and fashions with difficult spellings and pronunciations. They are brands, businesses, that don’t have to solely rely on rap for their lifestyle. Curated. Responsible to shareholders. Jay is married to the most flawless superstar in recent memory. It’s all so perfect.
C4 and Wayne are far from it. While the news of Jay’s unborn child breaks Twitter records, Wayne fathered four children with four women and got divorced when he was 24. He’s been to jail. He’s battled addiction. Wayne reminds you of people you know; he could be your friend or your cousin. To most, Jay and Kanye seem like people you aspire to be. As much as Wayne wants to be a goblin or an alien, he is more human, more real than Jay and ‘Ye. Hublot, who? They’re simply no longer relatable to the masses. Even when they get Frank Ocean of young people’s champions Odd Future it comes off forced. Of course he’d work with them, who wouldn’t? On the other hand, C4 features non-obvious, non-next artists like Tech N9ne, Shyne and Cory Gunz. Most influencers would’ve said no to those names in a focus group. But Wayne has them because he wanted them. It’s not methodical. It’s a little messy, like most of our lives. While it’s an event to bask in when Jay-Z smiles in his own video, Wayne is never not smiling. While Jay and ‘Ye are a business, man, Wayne, after 19 years as a rapper, still proudly claims to be a “blunt blowin’, Polo drawls showin’ / I don’t give a lovely motherfuck ass nigga.” Jay and ‘Ye don’t just flaunt their wealth, they rub your nose in it, it’s not a celebration of excess, it’s a celebration of having more than you. ‘Ye raps about Margiela, Wayne raps about Supra.
There is a larger context at play with these numbers. And instead of just brushing them off, we should take the time to examine how we think about the role media and influencers play in consumer behavior. It’s a conundrum I deal with in my other other life as a marketing consultant. Every brand wants to tap into the influencer network and get hits on blogs. Millions are spent throwing lavish parties for their indulgence, showering them with free product and pampering their desires—all done with the hope that their coverage will lead to sales of a product. WTT did just that. But it lost the race. A sprint, yes, but still a race and a convincing win. It’s too early to tell what effect, if any, this will have on artists and brands’ approaches to marketing. Perhaps we will be more welcoming instead of being exclusionary. Perhaps we will realize that there are more people outside of the club than inside of it. Perhaps we’ll realize that influencers do matter—but maybe only to each other.
-HYUN KIM
All Hail Wayne. - The Madbury Club :: "Welcome To The Club."
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