I still consider Busta to unquestionably be one of the GOATS. He rips this shit.
I think the only reason this isn't universally accepted is that he's been so prolific; basically, he's put out so much material that people take him for granted.
You're super on point with that. And yeah, like Jonny says below he sometimes phones it in, but he's been putting out hot and RELEVANT records for 20 years now. I have a hard time thinking of anyone else who has had such a run and continually stayed at the front of the pack in a sense.
And as a DJ who's been in the clubs for a minute now, you all know that run during the late 90s and early 00s where the whole year of music was basically "Okay, we're waiting for a new Busta song" and then it comes out and shuts EVERYTHING down for 6+ months.
Like really, if this record were to come out today, it would kill things dead:
Man I wish this fucking record came out. Anyway, back to Drake. Or Em, whatever...
This album is terrible. Just Blaze fell off so hard it's unbelievable.
Might be a little over the top. Just bc it's not his usual sound doesn't mean he "fell off". If you want to work with the other biggest MC in the world / one of the biggest artists of all time, you might need to work to find a common ground to fit his current sound.
Such as by sampling that Night at the Roxy song?
Exactly. It's all well and good finding a common ground and changing your style but the sign of a great producer is taking a new style and still killing it. Just's beats on this aren't good.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
faux_rillz said:
Almond said:
Eminem's huge rise in popularity about 10 years ago pretty much paralleled the jump in suburban hip-hop consumption. A lot of hip hop's biggest consumers and fans come from white (or non-black) suburbia. I think Em probably bridged the traditional black-white divide in hip hop consumption (not necessarily the hip hop world, though) and made it a lot more acceptable for young kids to start picking up hip hop music without being labelled wannabes. When I was in junior high, a lot of boys started to bleach their hair blonde and started wearing wife beaters after seeing the "Real Slim Shady" music video by Eminem. I guess it's easier to relate to rap music if the front-man is the same race as you.
Eminem did not bring rap to suburban white kids, and his debut did not coincide with any jump in the popularity of rap music; those trends were already both a decade old in 1999.
If anything, he was the artist that brought rap to old white people. I remember lots of fifty-somethings tawmbout "I never really saw the poetry in rap music before" circa 8 Mile.
I'd say his success represented a jump in popularity for rap inasmuch as he became probably the first rap act who could fill stadiums worldwide, as opposed to just the US.
This album is terrible. Just Blaze fell off so hard it's unbelievable.
Might be a little over the top. Just bc it's not his usual sound doesn't mean he "fell off". If you want to work with the other biggest MC in the world / one of the biggest artists of all time, you might need to work to find a common ground to fit his current sound.
Such as by sampling that Night at the Roxy song?
Exactly. It's all well and good finding a common ground and changing your style but the sign of a great producer is taking a new style and still killing it. Just's beats on this aren't good.
And I'd agree with that, but you said he "fell off so hard it's unbelievable". Its a couple songs that aren't great. Same guy who made Exhibit C. Don't think he's worth ruling out altogether bc he sampled Haddaway on a song and you weren't feeling it.
Rock stations were playing rap back when the Fat Boys and Run DMC were around. Beastie Boys too - and not just with "Sabotage" (which was off their third album). Seriously, as someone listening to Top 40 radio in the mid/late 80s, hip-hop may not have been all over the charts but it was clearly already crossing over into the mainstream by then.
The idea that Eminem constituted some radical shift in the popularity of hip-hop just doesn't wash with the historical record. He may have expanded the popularity of something that was already very popular and likely was able to reach some demographics that previously hadn't jumped on-board the hip-hop bandwagon but he wasn't more influential in that realm than NWA/Dre/Snoop had been in the '80s/'90s.
This all said, his sustained popularity is to be marveled at.
5th album in a row with the exact same subject matter (hell could be argued its the 7th in a row...). really can't believe he just keeps making the same fucking songs about the same shit.
I can't talk about the US but here in Aus there where a bunch of commercial FM stations that used to be proud that they didn't play rap music. One of them even had the tag line "No Rap Crap".
Yet when Em first came out guess which stations added him to the playlists. So he brought hip hop to a commercial middle class white audience here in Aus. Funnily enough the same thing happened when The Hill Top Hoods blew up.
When the media here talk about Em they always have to say something like "hip hop's great white hope" like he was the first and last white rapper ever. I think its just a line to help sell albums and eventually everyone believes that shit.
[quote author="Cosmo" date="1277946803"
Like really, if this record were to come out today, it would kill things dead:
Man I wish this fucking record came out. Anyway, back to Drake. Or Em, whatever...
YES. I was amped as heck when I first saw that clip back in the day.
Its no surprise - Em was setting sales records back with that Weird Al shit he did a year or two ago.
I guarantee the majority of the people who buy his records the week they drop don't even like (or are at least apathetic towards) rap in general. His success & his fanbase in 2010 are not really related to rap music at all.
I still consider Busta to unquestionably be one of the GOATS. He rips this shit.
I totally agree. Busta has and always will be a taste maker for other emcee's. He causes anyone he's on a song with to rethink their verse. That's why he always ends songs, you just can follow him. That's why LONS fell apart, IMO. They would stick him at the beginning of songs and he would flat out kill it.
I still consider Busta to unquestionably be one of the GOATS. He rips this shit.
I totally agree. Busta has and always will be a taste maker for other emcee's. He causes anyone he's on a song with to rethink their verse. That's why he always ends songs, you just can follow him. That's why LONS fell apart, IMO. They would stick him at the beginning of songs and he would flat out kill it.
Or, it's maybe just that, over the long haul, no one in LONS could match his energy. I mean, Busta was born to be a solo-artist. It's no knock against Charlie Brown or anything that he couldn't match Busta either before or after his verse.
I still consider Busta to unquestionably be one of the GOATS. He rips this shit.
I totally agree. Busta has and always will be a taste maker for other emcee's. He causes anyone he's on a song with to rethink their verse. That's why he always ends songs, you just can follow him. That's why LONS fell apart, IMO. They would stick him at the beginning of songs and he would flat out kill it.
Or, it's maybe just that, over the long haul, no one in LONS could match his energy. I mean, Busta was born to be a solo-artist. It's no knock against Charlie Brown or anything that he couldn't match Busta either before or after his verse.
No doubt. I think we can all agree though, Charlie had a few memorable lines here & there but his ass was garbage. And Dinco was a good rhymer but he was just boring. I never really understood Milo's part in the group. I guess he was their Jarobi in a way. Busta's just the total package.
that reported 3/4 million number for eminem is supposed to be for the first week of sales not the first day. still seriously impressive.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
He did something like 140,000 in the UK in his first week, so that's almost a million sold in just two territories. Those are remarkable numbers in the present climate.
Incidentally, no record company in the world is going to claim to have sold more records than it actually did - if anything, they'll under-report, otherwise they'll be in serious shit when the time comes for the artist to audit them; "Hold on, you said you sold 750k in the first week - now you're telling me it didn't sell a single copy at all afterwards..?"
Incidentally, no record company in the world is going to claim to have sold more records than it actually did - if anything, they'll under-report, otherwise they'll be in serious shit when the time comes for the artist to audit them; "Hold on, you said you sold 750k in the first week - now you're telling me it didn't sell a single copy at all afterwards..?"
Are you talking about now or ever?
Because I know for a fact they were fucking with soundscan crazily a few years back...
Do you apply that to all sales numbers for everyone or just Em?
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
bull_ox said:
DocMcCoy said:
Incidentally, no record company in the world is going to claim to have sold more records than it actually did - if anything, they'll under-report, otherwise they'll be in serious shit when the time comes for the artist to audit them; "Hold on, you said you sold 750k in the first week - now you're telling me it didn't sell a single copy at all afterwards..?"
Are you talking about now or ever?
Because I know for a fact they were fucking with soundscan crazily a few years back...
Well, I'm sure it's not impossible, but I'd still be extremely surprised to hear that a label was consistently over-reporting sales figures, especially for a major artist. It's different from the whole "shipping platinum" thing, because essentially those numbers relate to the quantities manufactured (and they can be really sketchy), but if a label publicly states that x amount of copies have been sold and an artist's royalty statements suggest otherwise, then the label will end up with a team of auditors crawling up their arses before the next statement's due.
But let's say for the sake of the argument, flimsy as it is, that Interscope over-reported by a third. That's still half-a-million albums in a week. Perhaps you could argue that, well, maybe they're trying to make it appear a bigger hit for the sake of Em's ego, except for the fact he's done similar first-weeks with his last couple of albums anyway, so these numbers are pretty consistent. I think that this is simply a case of an album exceeding expectations in a massively-depressed marketplace, along with Em's fanbase proving they're willing to spend money on his shit. Even if it drops right off next week, the album's still heading for 2m before the summer's out.
I remember a few years back, Madonna came 'out of nowhere' with a number 1, and I think the sales were based on the first weekend it had been released (this is in the UK).
Enough people in the media were perplexed as to how this happened, with no radio or tv hype beforehand, and I'm pretty sure that I saw this televised feature that suggested that a tactic of the really big players is to buy their own singles. The label first sells the single to distributors (HMV), then buys them all back. They take the loss for the news and profile that a "straight in at number one" generates, and rely on customer interest to make their numbers up.
I mean, you guys are all talking about Eminem now. You wouldn't be if his latest hadn't broken the top 50, and not generated headlines.
Lots of music fans may go out and buy this purely because they're wondering what the hype is about.
The record company then makes money back, perhaps re-selling the physical copies they bought back from the distributors in the first place.
Game played.
DocMcCoy"Go and laugh in your own country!" 5,917 Posts
Please be serious.
Look at the examples you're using here - Eminem, one of the most successful artists of the last decade, and Madonna, one of the most successful artists of all time. Record companies do not need to hype acts like that - the recipients of that kind of treatment are, almost without fail, new acts. Whenever there are attempts to rig or hype the charts - which is what you're talking about here - the majors won't be directly involved anyway. They'd outsource that kind of thing to street teams and then claim ignorance if they got busted, saying that the street team activity was under the control of the artist management or something. Certainly, the tales of labels sending squads of people round the country on buying missions was true once, but those days are long gone. In fact, since the charts went primarily digital, about four years ago, it's become impossible to rig them. In order to maintain their eligibility, retailers have to closely monitor clustered sales. If there's any doubt about their legitimacy, they have to discount them from the chart returns. The independent company that runs the charts does the same thing, but even more closely. During last year's battle for the Xmas number one, shitloads of X-Factor/Rage sales were written off after it was established they'd been bought 10+ times by the same people. A few years ago, a new band called The Modern killed their own career at birth because they asked all their relatives to go out and buy as many copies of their debut single as they could afford. The alarm bells went off, the sales were invalidated, the single disappeared from the chart the following week, and the band were quietly dropped before they even got to their second single.
They take the loss for the news and profile that a ???straight in at number one??? generates, and rely on customer interest to make their numbers up.
This doesn't make sense. First off, "straight in at number one" is no longer enough of a novelty to be newsworthy in and of itself, unless it's something like the Gnarls Barkley "number one on downloads alone" thing. Secondly, you're relying on "customer interest" to sustain sales for a product you've had to hype up, presumably because there was no initial customer interest in the first place? If you were so sure people would want to buy it once they were aware of it, why would you need to engage in the industrial-level falsification of sales? A regular, garden-variety marketing push would be enough. Unless, that is, you hold with the misconception that there are millions of people who will go out and buy something for no other reason than because millions of other people are buying it ("Oh, this new Madonna record's number one. It must be good. I'd better buy it"). It simply doesn't work like that. It's just cheap-weed conspiracy theory. You cannot build and sustain careers on the back of hype alone. You can launch them, absolutely - or you can attempt to. But once people realise there's nothing there, they'll move on.
At the heart of this, I suspect, is a simple unwillingness to accept that certain types of music or certain performers are genuinely popular. What are we debating here, after all? "Million-selling act sells millions"? How is this in any way suspect? I mean, I don't like Coldplay, for example, but I don't think there's anything unusual in any of their albums selling eight, ten, twelve million copies. They're self-evidently one of the most popular acts in the world - why should it come as a surprise that they sell lots of records? See also: Eminem, Madonna, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, U2, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, etc., etc.
Comments
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Exactly. It's all well and good finding a common ground and changing your style but the sign of a great producer is taking a new style and still killing it. Just's beats on this aren't good.
I'd say his success represented a jump in popularity for rap inasmuch as he became probably the first rap act who could fill stadiums worldwide, as opposed to just the US.
As for your second point...
Beastie Boys. But even then, it was "Sabotage."
And I'd agree with that, but you said he "fell off so hard it's unbelievable". Its a couple songs that aren't great. Same guy who made Exhibit C. Don't think he's worth ruling out altogether bc he sampled Haddaway on a song and you weren't feeling it.
Rock stations were playing rap back when the Fat Boys and Run DMC were around. Beastie Boys too - and not just with "Sabotage" (which was off their third album). Seriously, as someone listening to Top 40 radio in the mid/late 80s, hip-hop may not have been all over the charts but it was clearly already crossing over into the mainstream by then.
The idea that Eminem constituted some radical shift in the popularity of hip-hop just doesn't wash with the historical record. He may have expanded the popularity of something that was already very popular and likely was able to reach some demographics that previously hadn't jumped on-board the hip-hop bandwagon but he wasn't more influential in that realm than NWA/Dre/Snoop had been in the '80s/'90s.
This all said, his sustained popularity is to be marveled at.
Yet when Em first came out guess which stations added him to the playlists. So he brought hip hop to a commercial middle class white audience here in Aus. Funnily enough the same thing happened when The Hill Top Hoods blew up.
When the media here talk about Em they always have to say something like "hip hop's great white hope" like he was the first and last white rapper ever. I think its just a line to help sell albums and eventually everyone believes that shit.
Em
ICP
Kid
Like really, if this record were to come out today, it would kill things dead:
Man I wish this fucking record came out. Anyway, back to Drake. Or Em, whatever...
YES. I was amped as heck when I first saw that clip back in the day.
I guarantee the majority of the people who buy his records the week they drop don't even like (or are at least apathetic towards) rap in general. His success & his fanbase in 2010 are not really related to rap music at all.
I like Busta's contribution to this.
I totally agree. Busta has and always will be a taste maker for other emcee's. He causes anyone he's on a song with to rethink their verse. That's why he always ends songs, you just can follow him. That's why LONS fell apart, IMO. They would stick him at the beginning of songs and he would flat out kill it.
Or, it's maybe just that, over the long haul, no one in LONS could match his energy. I mean, Busta was born to be a solo-artist. It's no knock against Charlie Brown or anything that he couldn't match Busta either before or after his verse.
No doubt. I think we can all agree though, Charlie had a few memorable lines here & there but his ass was garbage. And Dinco was a good rhymer but he was just boring. I never really understood Milo's part in the group. I guess he was their Jarobi in a way. Busta's just the total package.
that reported 3/4 million number for eminem is supposed to be for the first week of sales not the first day. still seriously impressive.
Incidentally, no record company in the world is going to claim to have sold more records than it actually did - if anything, they'll under-report, otherwise they'll be in serious shit when the time comes for the artist to audit them; "Hold on, you said you sold 750k in the first week - now you're telling me it didn't sell a single copy at all afterwards..?"
why is busta biting the blowed
Are you talking about now or ever?
Because I know for a fact they were fucking with soundscan crazily a few years back...
Do you apply that to all sales numbers for everyone or just Em?
Well, I'm sure it's not impossible, but I'd still be extremely surprised to hear that a label was consistently over-reporting sales figures, especially for a major artist. It's different from the whole "shipping platinum" thing, because essentially those numbers relate to the quantities manufactured (and they can be really sketchy), but if a label publicly states that x amount of copies have been sold and an artist's royalty statements suggest otherwise, then the label will end up with a team of auditors crawling up their arses before the next statement's due.
But let's say for the sake of the argument, flimsy as it is, that Interscope over-reported by a third. That's still half-a-million albums in a week. Perhaps you could argue that, well, maybe they're trying to make it appear a bigger hit for the sake of Em's ego, except for the fact he's done similar first-weeks with his last couple of albums anyway, so these numbers are pretty consistent. I think that this is simply a case of an album exceeding expectations in a massively-depressed marketplace, along with Em's fanbase proving they're willing to spend money on his shit. Even if it drops right off next week, the album's still heading for 2m before the summer's out.
Enough people in the media were perplexed as to how this happened, with no radio or tv hype beforehand, and I'm pretty sure that I saw this televised feature that suggested that a tactic of the really big players is to buy their own singles. The label first sells the single to distributors (HMV), then buys them all back. They take the loss for the news and profile that a "straight in at number one" generates, and rely on customer interest to make their numbers up.
I mean, you guys are all talking about Eminem now. You wouldn't be if his latest hadn't broken the top 50, and not generated headlines.
Lots of music fans may go out and buy this purely because they're wondering what the hype is about.
The record company then makes money back, perhaps re-selling the physical copies they bought back from the distributors in the first place.
Game played.
Look at the examples you're using here - Eminem, one of the most successful artists of the last decade, and Madonna, one of the most successful artists of all time. Record companies do not need to hype acts like that - the recipients of that kind of treatment are, almost without fail, new acts. Whenever there are attempts to rig or hype the charts - which is what you're talking about here - the majors won't be directly involved anyway. They'd outsource that kind of thing to street teams and then claim ignorance if they got busted, saying that the street team activity was under the control of the artist management or something. Certainly, the tales of labels sending squads of people round the country on buying missions was true once, but those days are long gone. In fact, since the charts went primarily digital, about four years ago, it's become impossible to rig them. In order to maintain their eligibility, retailers have to closely monitor clustered sales. If there's any doubt about their legitimacy, they have to discount them from the chart returns. The independent company that runs the charts does the same thing, but even more closely. During last year's battle for the Xmas number one, shitloads of X-Factor/Rage sales were written off after it was established they'd been bought 10+ times by the same people. A few years ago, a new band called The Modern killed their own career at birth because they asked all their relatives to go out and buy as many copies of their debut single as they could afford. The alarm bells went off, the sales were invalidated, the single disappeared from the chart the following week, and the band were quietly dropped before they even got to their second single.
This doesn't make sense. First off, "straight in at number one" is no longer enough of a novelty to be newsworthy in and of itself, unless it's something like the Gnarls Barkley "number one on downloads alone" thing. Secondly, you're relying on "customer interest" to sustain sales for a product you've had to hype up, presumably because there was no initial customer interest in the first place? If you were so sure people would want to buy it once they were aware of it, why would you need to engage in the industrial-level falsification of sales? A regular, garden-variety marketing push would be enough. Unless, that is, you hold with the misconception that there are millions of people who will go out and buy something for no other reason than because millions of other people are buying it ("Oh, this new Madonna record's number one. It must be good. I'd better buy it"). It simply doesn't work like that. It's just cheap-weed conspiracy theory. You cannot build and sustain careers on the back of hype alone. You can launch them, absolutely - or you can attempt to. But once people realise there's nothing there, they'll move on.
At the heart of this, I suspect, is a simple unwillingness to accept that certain types of music or certain performers are genuinely popular. What are we debating here, after all? "Million-selling act sells millions"? How is this in any way suspect? I mean, I don't like Coldplay, for example, but I don't think there's anything unusual in any of their albums selling eight, ten, twelve million copies. They're self-evidently one of the most popular acts in the world - why should it come as a surprise that they sell lots of records? See also: Eminem, Madonna, Britney Spears, Mariah Carey, U2, Red Hot Chilli Peppers, etc., etc.