In a time where more and more artists enter the industry, notably through social media, many albums tend to simply come and go. The albums that stay, however, tend to be those that manage to create special bonds with their fans - especially through the excitement that comes along with their rollout. Entering 2024, Playboi Carti fans were probably the happiest, as this may be the year we finally get a new project from the Atlanta rapper. Fans’ thirst for new music is justifiable; the wait has been going on since the Christmas 2020 release of Whole Lotta Red, and after the “Narcissist fiasco”, some direct hints at music were only appreciated. (for those unaware, on August 23, 2021 Carti posted a picture of, supposedly, himself in a black mask on Instagram, captioned “NARCISSIST 09/13/21”. If you, like fans back in the day, thought “Narcissist” referred to an album, you’re wrong. It was a clothing line that was eventually released without Carti’s consent, taken down within minutes, yet still managing to have fans spend significant amounts on merch they’d never end up getting).
So where is that hope coming from now? Indeed, after only appearing on features since the 2020 release, on December 7th, 2023 Playboi Carti finally began teasing a new individual project via instagram; his story contained a snippet captioned “I AM MUSIC”, words that still appear as his profile picture on Instagram. From then on, that month felt like it came with a weekly advent calendar building up to the new year, as Carti released a new track on his social media every week (4 in total), one of which (“2024”) was produced by Kanye West and gained extra prominence, amassing tens of millions of views on YouTube. The following month, for unnamed reasons, the Atlanta rapper canceled his long awaited tour, which had fans speculating that it was somehow related to the album supposedly in the works. Producer Pharrell Williams equally hinted at the project on twitter, posting a screenshot of Carti’s current profile picture, captioned:”PREPARE”. There were assumptions that the project in question was a collaboration between the two, especially if we see its name as an allusion to Pharrell’s record label: “i am OTHER”. Such elements keep the album anticipated, creating engagement with it before it is even released - this subtle art is known as album rollout.
While rollouts see no set criteria, most traditionally, artists resort to announcing that a project is in the works, releasing its top single(s), and then talking about it on talk shows or simply dropping hints on their social media. Such was the case most recently for albums like Travis Scott’s Utopia, Brent Faiyaz’s Larger Than Life and Kanye West’s album Vultures (made special by just how infuriating the constant release date changes were to us fans).
But while conventional album rollouts are no longer paid much attention to, it is the spectacular ones that stick, the most fascinating being those that create a whole world around the album. When words “album” and “world” are mentioned together one project comes to mind - Travis Scott’s 2018 Astroworld. As lengthy as this rollout was (the album was announced at least two years prior to its release), it felt like a real adventure, starting with Travis installing inflatable large golden statues of his face (which we later saw on the album cover) in multiple cities of the US; as fans were posting pictures of it on social media, the hype for Astroworld grew. The post-release creation of the Astroworld Festival kept that hype alive (until the crowd crush incident of 2021, that is), showing just how much a rollout can contribute to an album’s success.
Some albums create not only worlds but whole stories - here names such as The Weeknd, with his cinematic Vegas superstar persona in the After Hours experience, or Janelle Monaé, and her “emotion picture” accompanying the album Dirty Computer, come to mind. But one to look at as by far the most fascinating is Donald Glover (AKA Childish Gambino)’s 2013 rollout for Because the Internet. The rollout to this album transformed a collection of tracks into a multi-medium immersive experience. 4 days prior to Because the Internet’s release, Gambino put out a 72-page screenplay as an accompaniment to it (as Complex later put it, “in case [the album] didn’t make sense”). The script opens on a note: “THE PRELUDE TO THIS SCREENPLAY (“CLAPPING FOR THE WRONG REASONS”) IS AVAILABLE ON THE WEBSITE YOUTUBE FOR FREE CONSUMPTION. IT MAY OR MAY NOT GIVE CONTEXT TO THIS WORK YOU’RE READING”. This is a reference to a short film released 4 months prior, the surrealist appeal of which (very similar to what Glover later on did on his show “Atlanta”) really set the scene for how effectively weird the whole album experience will turn out to be. The “Roscoe’s Wetsuit” tweets (the meaninglessness of which was a meaning in itself, commenting on people’s tendency to give importance to everything they see on the internet), Glover’s appearance on interviews always dressed in the same clothes, acting as “The Boy”, and the satirical tone of the screenplay all contributed to this strange, mind-provoking yet still unfinished experience. It is on December 10th, 2013 that it finally came together; the story the audience became more or less familiar with throughout the rollout became complete with the album’s release. Because the Internet fits into the experience harmoniously, combining sounds that may seem so different, and yet they fit so well into the emotions that this tale aims to display. Genuinely one of the most beautiful rollouts of all time, it allowed Glover’s message about the pros and cons of the internet age to be transmitted in multiple truly touching ways.
However sometimes, there is no need for pre-album activity at all, as was most famously the case with the “role model” for surprise drops: Beyoncé’s album Beyoncé. The following surprise releases were, however, made underwhelming, by just how grandiose Beyoncé made this release. Along with the album, came a short art feature explaining that she aimed to create a full immersive experience with her music, to be lived there and then with the release. Each song would then be accompanied by its own short film, illustrating what the music was aiming to transmit. Once again, looking back, the release could not have been anticipated at all, and yet its surprise effect may have just contributed to how well it did sales-wise, selling 600,000 copies in the first three days in the US alone. This illustrated the tremendous success of the singer’s aim with her rollout: to bring back the excitement that she believed should come with an album’s release, which today, she deemed, is no longer as prominent.
Beyoncé can, unfortunately, be agreed with: today, less and less effort goes into what once made an album rollout special, into creating anticipation, and into building a grandiose artistic experience to accompany the music. Most commonly, a rollout will consist of a snippet that is expected to go viral on a platform like TikTok in hopes of generating attention to the album to come. Unless a real effort is put in to hide any signs of the project, surprise drops are no longer surprising, given the culture of leaks. The hype around an album is more and more oftenly built around the fact that the artist hasn’t dropped anything in a few years; if Frank Ocean is to hint on any studio works right now, hundreds of thousands of Blonde enjoyers will day by day wait impatiently behind their screens. Same can be said about Playboi Carti; with the last album dating back to 2020, it’s no brainer that the cult-like fanbase is this excited for some new music.
Image courtesy of Alexander Londono via Unsplash. Image license can be found here.
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