Earlier this week, Top Dawg Entertainment Captain Anthony “Top Dawg” Tiffith called out fans for not supporting ScHoolboy Q’s Kanye West assisted “THat Part.” In a series of Tweets, he voiced his frustrations with the single allegedly selling only 26,000 units in its first week. The music video itself has almost one million views already a day after being released on Thursday. Though the track has hit 81,000 Soundcloud streams and five million Spotify plays, that wasn’t enough for Tiffith.
Kendrick Lamar has become the label’s largest success story for sure. However, the rest of TDE has yet to find similar success despite significant gains over the years. Taking time to discuss, HipHopDX Managing Editor Trent Clark, Senior Features Writer Ural Garrett and Contributing Writer William Ketchum answers if the entity that gave birth to Black Hippy can truly strike gold again.
Is King Kendrick’s Popularity Overshadowing The Rest Of TDE?
Ural: Before crossing over into mainstream, there was a moment in time where being up on TDE meant being apart of the cool club. The idea of Black Hippy alone was an exciting prospect. Jay Rock, Ab-Soul, ScHoolboy Q and Kendrick Lamar felt like a lyrical powerhouse with a following that hadn’t been seen on the West Coast in quite some time. Watching the chips fall into play became a sight to behold around 2011. Rock, Ab-Soul and K.Dot dropped independent juggurnaunt debuts. By 2012, ScHoolboy Q landed TDE their first legitimate radio hit with “Hands on the Wheel” from Habits & Contradictions before signing a lucrative deal with Interscope and Aftermath. As the year ended, King Kendrick shook-up Hip Hop with the decade’s first undisputed major label classic good kid m.A.A.d city.
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An unavoidable problem with labels revolving around Hip Hop is that competition comes from within as well as outside. As the following year rolled around, Kendrick just started to outwork and outrap everyone, including his labelmates. This could have become a problem for everyone else. More notably when Soul had an issue with the “Kendrick Lamar & Black Hippy” headline from the October/November 2013 issue of XXL. Didn’t help that after numerous complaints from the Black Lipped Bastard about delays on social media, These Days flopped. 2014 became a good year for ScHoolboy Q as Oxymoron sold around 139,000 copies and became large enough to be considered a success.
Fast forward to present day, Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly managed to be an even bigger event than his previous album and he transcends to rap mega stardom. The same year, Jay Rock found himself only selling 18,713 copies in his first week for 90059 Despite phenomenal signings including Isaiah Rashad and SZA, both haven’t necessarily set the world on fire either. If “THat Part” isn’t as successful as many would have hoped, blaming the fans isn’t going to increase sales either. There are plenty of other reasons as well from Ye’s shoddy verse to where the market is at the moment.
That doesn’t mean that TDE is having any trouble. They’re just going through the motions of trying to have another successful act on par with K. Dot. That challenge isn’t any different than any other label, regardless of genre. What we’re witnessing is the maturation of artists going in separate career directions. Does this mean we’ll ever get the Black Hippy album? Who knows? For all we know, the recent signing of Lance Skiiiwalker or that other unannounced signing could possibly lead to next huge success on par with Lamar.
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William E. Ketchum III: During what seemed to be TDE’s winning streak between 2011 and 2014, the members’ bond seemed truly inseparable, artistically and otherwise. Ab-Soul gave a brilliant epilogue to Section.80 with an outro that summed up its stories and gave thought to the album’s themes and messages. Kendrick, Ab-Soul and Schoolboy Q used storylines on their albums that integrated with each other. Schoolboy Q revealed that Kendrick Lamar handles the sequencing for his albums; and in the YouTube video where the TDE family let Kendrick hear Jay Z’s verse on “Bitch Don’t Kill My Vibe” remix, a snippet of the crew hyping out to Q’s “Yay Yay” preceded the main event, making fans go crazy asking for the rest of the song. And perhaps most importantly, the group toured together; my best TDE memory was seeing the crew perform at the BET Music Matters tour in the months preceding the release of good kid, m.A.A.d. City.
Labelmates support each other with tweets and guest appearances all the time, but with TDE, it felt different. That immovable synergy made the group feel special: if you supported one, it truly felt like you were supporting the whole TDE family and its mission.
But as with most groups, individual interests take over sooner or later. Kendrick Lamar obviously catapulted to a different stratosphere that no one, including his TDE cohorts, could keep up with. On To Pimp a Butterfly, Kendrick’s synergy with his band seemed to take the priority, and none of the Black Hippy members were on the album. Ab-Soul publicly complained about the delayed release date of his album, and once we heard These Days, we saw why: the consensus said the project was several notches below the high standard he set with Control System, and that TDE had set with previous releases. To many, that may have been the first sign of a chink in TDE’s armor: they were just as capable of having unhappy artists and weak albums as anyone else, and seeing one artist seem to put himself before the crew was disconcerting.
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Trent: What we’re simply seeing isn’t a TDE issue nor is it a quality issue. I’ll be the first to admit that These Days was hardly Control System but it wasn’t bad. It held me down in the gym, allowing me to get extra reps in focusing in on Soulo’s intricate wordplay. But I’ll digress back to Top’s point.
There simply aren’t enough fans who care enough to build up their catalog to bolster the commercial interest in the type of music TDE excels in. As a teenager, Master P’s modus operandi of releasing music on No Limit Records made me a general fan (and consumer by his grand design) of lesser known artists on the roster. Sensible logic should have told us that being in a digital era where actual MC’s such as Kendrick, J. Cole and Chance the Rapper (in terms of free downloads) are going platinum, that would trickle down into the Powers That Be’s marketing campaign, but the fan’s actions speak louder than all the perfect rating tallies of To Pimp a Butterfly.
Fans who counterpointed Top saying “‘THat Part’ wasn’t that good’ or “ScHoolboy Q should just release his album” all have valid complaints but they also have to step back and see the big picture. We’re talking about a truly independent record label with from California who saw their third option catapult into a global phenomenon. You have to allow that situation to get its proper shine, which as we have seen, comes at the sacrifice of all the artists on the label. Isaiah Rashad’s Cilvia Demo was fantastic. You don’t think everybody on the roster wants to see a follow-up like yesterday? But there is a reason why a song like “Collard Greens” is more readily accessible in your memory than a “Shot You Down.” It’s called radio programming and that shit is expensive and almost always reserved for the major label budgets.
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And again, there simply aren’t enough fans who would gravitate towards a more streamlined Hip Hop sound with monetary support to make these type of rollouts that more common. Any way you sniff it, Kendrick has hype on his side (I’m still perturbed at Taylor Swift’s “don’t touch me” tweet; I could write an entire Stray Shots dedicated to just that) and if you want to see the same results rise up within the mainstream (I don’t know why “fans” care so much about this), then you simply have to band together and support. With dollars. On iTunes. Or Amazon. THat’s the point Top is making.
