Apr 26, 2016 are you kidding me? do you know anything about a&r? im not discounting ur overall point, but it's wholly possible for someone like myself -- with all my talents and wherewithal -- to be able to use deductive reasoning. sorry im not f----- up on codeine!!!!!! you RLY think i have no gauge -- 17 y/o's rule the world right hahahah bro yes. but his influence isn't a magic wand. he's collaborated with soooo many other artists like.. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GOOD_Music#Former_acts ( you f---ing with the latest sa ra? point: CA. sit) you can't say "most" potential -- well you can. it's merely speculative and given your lack of scope, it's a pretty minute pov so its WAY TOO early to compare him to wayne lol.
Apr 26, 2016 Nah he was definitely huge. I remember not being able to get away from his music for at least a couple years. A lot of my boys are still die hard 50 stans. Im a few years older than u tho.
Apr 26, 2016 Man thats crazy but then again regional bias was still sort of prevalent, not so much in a malicious way but each station/outlet was keen on promoting home-state talents and Texas had certainly it's stars like Paul Wall, Slim Thug and so on. Personally I was a huge Dipset stan around the time and along with G-Unit it felt like those two owned all of NY. Some of my earliest memories of rap was those Dipset mixtapes from when they signed to the Roc, I remember hearing Oh Boy on the first one way before it dominated the airwaves.
Apr 26, 2016 Maybe. He's pretty close now. But he will never touch Wayne at his peak. That's okay though.
Apr 26, 2016 Right.. this thread was supposed to be purely speculative from the start and i threw my (clinically insane) 2 cents in based of thugs trajectory now that in the coming years he'll naturally hit the kind of sales mike tyson was suggestion (100k first week) but be able to use that platform and his distinct personality/image to propel himself into the forefront of the mainstream
Apr 26, 2016 my sister was like 7 (and I was 10) singing disco inferno cuz I would always find a station that played it when we were in the car (we had one of those minivans w a seperate radio for the people in the back and we could plug our headphones into it) Almost got me in so much trouble that lil s---
Apr 26, 2016 Actually, we need to understand that things are different nowadays. If you think about it, Thug has been on the map for this entire decade. It's hard to see now but when people look back twenty years from now Thugger is going to be seen a lot.
Apr 26, 2016 yo random question is young thug Haitian? also yea... a lota you all have no idea about the future. not gonna pretend i'm some kind of clairvoyant but u really don't think this backlog of music will be re-examined and placed in context ??? like people already have been doing that to albums from the pre-internet era for decades. not to mention generational shift. theres sooo many kids out here now who's whole high school listens to nothing but thug... you dont think the people who grew up under that will propel his sales as they grow into paying adults? come on. please. and i'm honestly being impartial here. he is a cultural force. i dont know if he will ever have a #1 album or single or sell on the scale of Lil Wayne (lmao people like to really wax poetic about how big "big" artists from the past were. jeez) but he will be remembered as a Great and be a household name. even if he dies early. it's past the point of no return
Apr 26, 2016 Right, and he's just starting. Obviously will never have sales like Wayne, but we kind of came to the conclusion that no one will By saying he'd be as big as Wayne I was trying to say that he will be remembered and will be an important staple of pop culture over time...which I know some people don't see/agree with it
Apr 26, 2016 Oh no @Poohdini he used the word cultural u think ull be able to following along this time?? But yeah thug has potential and mainstream appeal, all we can do is sit and wait to see how for it goes/if him and his camp make the right moves
Apr 26, 2016 *cracks knuckles* I don't think Drake has had that much to do with Future's popularity, but we don't need to have that debate, because there's a more important variable. Future caught (mostly invented) a stylistic trend exactly on the upswing and remained its dominant voice. That seems unlikely to be the case with Thug. The latter will never be Exhibit A in the most popular and interesting stylistic movement in rap. (You could argue that he's so distinct as to benefit by being different, and you wouldn't be wrong, but that's not a sure-fire way to be a commercial force.) No. See: Graham, Aubrey. Yeah, I mean, this speaks to a semantic problem with this thread--what does it mean to be "big"? I'd argue Wayne exerted more influence over hip-hop than Kanye did during the second W. Bush administration; he certainly never permeated broader pop culture the same way. Also, when his music fell off, he lost nearly all of his cache--Kanye could drop three terrible albums in a row and he wouldn't be doing Samsung commercials. Are you asking if radio play is as important to mainstream success (album sales, arena tours) as it was ten years ago? Because it is. Well, no, not at all. 50 has a massive built-in fan base (or more specifically, group of people who are familiar/comfortable with him). If he had even a shred of musical relevance, he'd be everywhere. He failed at trend-hopping and now he's failing as a revivalist. This is a thoroughly stupid post. There's been so much talk about Thug and Wayne in this thread; Thug is in the fourth year of his actual career. Look where Wayne was at the same point. I kind of just quoted this to laugh at Charlie for having the Mike Jones phone number in his profile. Raise your hand if you never heard a song from Houston before 2004. @captain awesome I agree a/b Blackbird
Apr 26, 2016 @WPG Since you're doling out knowledge, my main question is how do you compare success in this decade to the last? For example, is drakes success comparable to 50s or Wayne's in their prime? I know this thread is about thug but this is the more interesting convo to me. Like you said, you can say thugs distinctiveness will be his saving grace as far as commercial success goes, but it's not a sure fire way to achieve that goal. So we can only wait and see how his career, and the landscape of hip hop, pan out
Apr 26, 2016 you are right here but only to mainstream success as defined by those two parameters. I think we definitely need a different barometer in 2016 especially if discussing vague things like how "big" an artist is. i mean thats been a prime topic of interviews and hip hop critical theory for like 6 years at this point
Apr 26, 2016 I believe that. I just like making fun of your knowledge of rap history because it's so easy to make fun of. Well it's up to the person asking the question to define what success means. Kevin Gates is successful. Aesop Rock is successful. Paul Wall is successful. Album sales are no longer as easy a metric as they once were, but they (and radio play) still mean something. This doesn't exist
Apr 26, 2016 as long as there has been weirdos to post on "kanye to the" and "section 80",,, the field has exsited . .. ..
Apr 26, 2016 There's no forum--speaking broadly, not about message boards--where different critical approaches to rap music come together. There are publications that review current and older rap music, there's Twitter, there was Tumblr and Blogspot and whatever. There are, like, a dozen rap critics that are read with any seriousness, and there's not enough overlap in coverage. Kids on KTT don't make for a critical community of any sophistication. (And almost all academic writing on rap music is terrible.)
