Another Year In America June 4, 2009

[koganbot]

Interesting event that either does or doesn't portend something about the future of music distribution: two of the three newbies to the Top 40 are there because of downloads of The Girls Love Drake, a bootleg Drake compilation LP that uses selected tracks from Drake's So Far Gone mixtape and other sources. The Billboard story says, "'Best I Ever Had' and 'Every Girl' (credited to Young Money), two tracks on the mixtape that have previously charted, appear on this week's Hot Digital Songs chart thanks to downloads of The Girls Love Drake. Additionally, 'Best I Ever Had' jumps 60-18 on the Billboard 200 [they mean The Hot 100, actually], while 'Every Girl' leaps 75-35, although chart experts predict they will both drop again once the unofficial album is no longer available." (So, Billboard's singles formula includes album downloads. Didn't know that.)

Meanwhile, Pink's "Please Don't Leave Me" slowly builds its sales and airplay, which is a frequent pattern with Pink singles, for some reason.

Drake "Best I Ever Had": Simple sentiments over complicated beats. Kind of a drag. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

Pink "Please Don't Leave Me": Pink creates her mess and struggles against it, the result being quite touching, as if the melody were treating the singer with the tenderness that the lyrics plead for. I'd overlooked Funhouse when it appeared last year, but from the sound of it Pink is maybe at least some of the time finding her musical balance, finally. TICK.

Young Money f. Lil Wayne, Drake, Jae Millz, Gudda Gudda & Mack Maine "Every Girl": Group goes, "We like her," Wayne replies, "And we like cartoons" - well, that's how I first heard it; he's really singing "And we like her too," "her" being potentially any young woman that any one of these men has the hots for. A strange palette here, apparent lushness that's actually threadbare, the AutoTune a hypothetical attempt at tunefulness. BORDERLINE NONTICK.

Comments

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Really liking the "So Far Gone" Drake mixtape (haven't heard "Girls Love Drake"), for the way that he kind of splits the difference between old and nu Kanye. He's playing mostly to indie kids and hip-hop poseurs, but it kind of works. But if he thinks he's bagging "hipsters" by sampling Peter Bjorn and John then he should probably get his demos straight! (His claim that he has to deal with the split between "thugs" and "hipsters" at his shows must be bullshit -- I can't imagine an actual thug getting within ten miles of this guy.)

[koganbot]

Well, Wayne's rapping with Drake, and Wayne's closer to "thug" than to "hipster," even if hipsters tend to think that Wayne is pretty hip (for a thug). I don't know. I think that Kanye has quite a lot of cred with thugs, and maybe Drake's heading in that direction too. My guess is that "hipster" in hip-hop means something different from "hipster" in indie - that it might actually mean people like Kanye and Lupe (rather than the indie rappers or the backpackers, unless Kanye and Lupe et al. are considered part of that, which I doubt, but I'm so far away from paying attention that these things all seem like distant nuances to me; whereas someone who's paying half a mind to all this probably sees the landscape far more clearly). And this would depend on the size of the Toronto rap scene, again a subject I know nothing about: if it's not large, then hip-hop people in it may not be able to break into mutually incompatible groups. Like how the metalheads and punks might come together in a scene where there aren't enough of them total for either either group to create a viable scene on its own.

An unauthorized Drake LP getting up to 16 on the Billboard digital chart is a sign of some reach beyond a single constituency, I'd think - though Wisin & Yandel and Grizzly Bear are both in the top 10 on the Billboard 200, so maybe not.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

All true, and I'd actually forgotten how frequently Wayne features on the album (good spots all around). And there's stuff from Trey Songs and Lloyd and others who don't exactly scream "indie kid." I think I just have an immediate suspicion of the actual crossover of people who feature Lil' Wayne and Lykke Li onto their mixtapes, but then again Flo Rida hit the Top 40 with Eiffel 65 and Dead or Alive, so who knows.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

*crossover to thugs, I guess, emphasis on the Lykke Li. But hell, it's not like Kanye is exactly a hipster-only act, and I'm guessing Drake is probably carving out about the same audience for himself.

[koganbot]

Stones in '64 and '65 were probably getting a whole hunk of the hoods and the cool kids, though of course getting the screaming girl teens too, but the Beatles were getting more of the latter and less of the former. But the demographics were in motion then, shape-shifting. (Not to say that demographics are dead still now, but they certainly don't seem to be hurtling into the tornado.)

[petronia.livejournal.com]

If this guy is out of the Canadian scene, then yeah - the line between thug and hipster is thin. Hipster being, like, Feist. XD; (And indeed, Feist started off in hardcore punk.) Like when I went to that k-os gig I saw a bunch of the same people who would be at the Shins or the New Pornographers or whatever, whereas I was with a bunch of fairly dedicated hip-hop heads.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Canada's weird! But then again I bet a Kanye show looks pretty weird these days, too.

[skyecaptain.livejournal.com]

Or a Lil' Wayne show for that matter.