Ah, the creative American music business. Move up the release date by a day due to Thanksgiving, push out a bunch of buzz-worthy CDs, and call it SUPER TUESDAYMONDAY!
*crickets*
I shouldn’t mock, because I have been waiting for a few of these releases, but it is kind of a joke. Last year’s Super TuesdayMonday was a big ol’ bust. In a week where Kanye West and Guns N Roses were both expected to sell in excess of 500,000 units each, Kanye hit the mid-400K range, while GNR didn’t even break 300,000. Only the top 11 releases hit six figures, where past years would have seen between 15 and 20 titles exceed 100,000 units.
[Side note: how crushing of a blow is the #13 bow of Leona Lewis with Echo?]
Last week saw the top 7 titles exceed 100K, with John Mayer leading the way, and this week should be more, but by how much? Susan Boyle is expected to exceed 500,000, but the next highest title prediction is Adam Lambert’s debut For Your Entertainment with 225,000 units. It is early in the week, and things could still change radically, but it is just not going to be as big a week as the industry is hoping it will be.
If you want to talk about one of the classiest pop songs of the ’90s, you wouldn’t have to look any further than Annie Lennox’s debut disc Diva, which yielded several top 10 hits around the globe, although she just hit the Top 40 in the US with two singles. In fact, Diva only reached #23 in America, which was a bit stunning to me, given how pervasive that disc was in my life when it came out. While songs like “Little Bird”, “Precious”, and “Walking on Broken Glass” are all great songs, it is “Why” that has to be considered a highlight of Annie’s career. 
Mr Hudson posted a video today of a Jay-Z show in London that he showed up at to sing “Young Forever”, 
The most striking thing to me, though, was at the end of the second round, where Hova kicks in to the intro of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”. This happens at every concert…someone segues from their own song into a crowd-pleaser that gets the audience hyped, or maybe they play a bunch of party jams right before the show starts. For Jay, the fact that he can stage a huge sing-along for a song that was considered alternative in the 80s, it becomes a blessing and a curse. On the positive side, there is no question that Jay-Z can rock a crowd, no matter where they are. But does that ability hurt his street cred? Sadly, it does. There’s a double-standard playing here…so much of the rap body of work talks about escaping poverty and making it big. Yet Jay has to deal with the “sell out” tag, amid accusations that he isn’t street anymore. There’s no winning for winning, is there?
We talk about selling out, catering to certain audiences, working with the “right” producer, but at the end of it all, if the listener finds something that resonates, then the music has done its job. As much as I hate the God-and-nation forms of country music, it works for someone, and who am I to deprive them of that. So the same goes for rap music. If you can bridge the gap by speaking the musical language of the audience you are playing to, more power to you.
Stumble It!
