Friday media are better known as time to quietly bury the bad news, not one of the greatest albums of the year – but Kendrick Lamar in fact, he does not act according to the usual norms of social media.
The rapper’s recent career path has felt inexorably counterintuitive: right, he seemed to be in a position of critical adoration but in the midst of a commercial career, releasing head-shaving ruminative 18-track double albums like Mr Morale and the Big Steppers, he’s roaring back. with the greatest blow of his life. The fact that it was a hit was a diss track – the kind of slightly grubby, inside baseball stuff usually tucked away on mix tapes or back halves of albums – he made it even stranger, not to mention what he did some quite fierce allegations about one of the greatest musicians on the planet.
Wherefore, fittingly, I have a victory lap against Lamar; in the form of the sixth studio album GNXIt came not on the back of a months-long media attack, but with a sudden drop last Friday that left music publishers scrambling to cover it before clocking off (although Kendrick’s late Friday release allowed weekend critics to turn their heads. before filing their reviews on Monday). GNX was an amazing album in true form, too – you don’t often get breadcrumbs in these situations: a one-minute YouTube teaser and 30 minutes later, bam!
Perhaps the biggest surprise was that Lamar didn’t opt for the mission at all. Because it seemed that the strange album release time was very much over, 12 years after it started. That 12-year-old number is up for debate: lots of people argue that it was Radiohead’s first surprise album on Rainbow in 2007 (although technically that resolution was announced a week before it came out). But the real liftoff moment that was a surprise album in 2013, and the release was inaugurated in the wee hours before mid-December, was Beyoncé’s self-titled album. It was a move that felt perplexingly new: the greatest artist in the world, a position that had been carefully managed with public campaigns, and all that was right. put the matter there; he seemed almost a transgressor. (Though, in retrospect, he was perhaps quite astute in his understanding of the direction of travel: the weakening of traditional means of campaigning and the rise of the spontaneous power of imagination.
Naturally, things exploded afterwards: U2’s provocation, if retrospect strong enough; iTunes growth around the Innocent Songs album the following September, and we were off to the races. By 2016, as Eamonn Forde notes in this Custodian pieceit was almost expected that the album would be released to the world with minimal promotion, which is especially surprising because you could pull it off with your new album with a few appearances, a couple of interview schedules and an appearance on Jimmy. Fallon’s show. Frank Ocean, Taylor Swift, Eminem, Björk: everywhere you looked, any musician with any clout (and no amount) suddenly started hitting album drops. At the same time, this name “wonder album” it seemed to be completely devoid of meaningby the fact that the statue of the floating artist can be referred to something short down the Thames.
Overwhelmed by the strange album, both the voice and the thing itself, at last it is prostrated. The 2020s saw a steady decline in the number of big-name surprise releases. Perhaps the last true triumph of form, before GNX, was the release of Taylor Swift’s Folklore, followed by Evermore, as Covid raged in 2020. This time it made sense – it’s hard to mount a whopping big promotion campaign in the middle. pandemic – but Swift soon returned to a more traditional promo campaign for her next album, Mid-Middle, in 2022. Fast Tortured Poets on this, Billie Eilish Hit Me Hard and Soft and, Beyonce Cowboy Carter yep – stuck to old-school release schedules, often complete with giveaways ( just like the music site Loud & Quiet Media Talks podcast recently placed).
Enter Lamar and GNX. Does the success of his jumpstart another, release a wave of surprise? I hope not in God. The surprise album works for Lamar – someone with an aura of mystery, artistic integrity and sheer bloody soul around them – and maybe a few others at the top of the list. And also in the works of bands and artists to be considered broken or at least long dormant: My Bloody Valentine’s 2013 album mbv It was a fantastic album that, despite being effectively in the works for the best part of two decades, no one ever expected it to come out, let alone suddenly on a random night in February.
For everyone else, the best advice is to leave the album alone with the surprise. Wood takes up the old diesel for the good of the campaign. Have fun with it – an area price for the Marian part or a million or something to burn something. Give us a heads up first.
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