Rapping/singing Canuck Drake slams into the top spot on this week’s Billboard 200 album chart with a vengeance. “Thank Me Later” scores 2010’s biggest week for a debut album, with 447,000 units sold. It’s the third overall biggest week for an album this year, following the first weeks for the latest albums by Lady Antebellum and Sade. A couple more interesting things to note: in just one week, Drake practically equals the entirety of what his introductory EP “So Far […]
Posts tagged "Drake"
After Ingesting the Hype, Thank Drake for Making a Solid Album
Hype is a hard thing to overcome-I’ve said it before. As someone who follows the goings-on of the music industry, I certainly fall victim to heightened expectations and wind up getting disappointed every once in a while. No one’s been the beneficiary of more hype over the course of the past year than Drake. His story seems unlikely in the world of hip-hop. He’s biracial. He’s Canadian. His first name is AUBREY, for Chrissakes. Even more damning, he was a […]
Chart Stalker 6/16/10: Aguilera Fail? Lil Jon FAIL!!!!
Please join me in welcoming the “Glee” cast back to the #1 spot on the Billboard album charts. The “Journey to Regionals” EP, which arrived on the same day that the hit show aired it’s season finale, claims the top rung on this week’s Billboard 200 with an impressive 152,000 units sold. It’s the third “Glee”-related album to top the charts in the past eight weeks, which has got to be some kind of record. Right behind it is the […]
New Release Report 6/15/10: Let’s Get Drizzy
For the five of you who (like me) haven’t illegally downloaded it off of the internet, Drake’s debut album, “Thank Me Later” is finally released after a year of pre-release buzz. I’ve gotta say, the fact that “Thank” is on the lips of hip-hop fans everywhere is a testament to the marketing team behind Drake, who’ve apparently gotten hip-hop fans everywhere to drink the Kool-Aid and put their marbles behind a a personality-deficient Canadian former child actor with caterpillar eyebrows. […]
Alicia Keys Asks: Is Interracial Dating Still "Un-Thinkable"?
Yesterday, I showed you Drake’s new video “Find Your Love”, and I commented about how the overhyped rapper was growing on me, thanks to said video as well as his appearance as a co-writer and background vocalist on Alicia Keys’ “Un-Thinkable (I’m Ready)”. The song, a standout track on Keys’ latest album “The Element of Freedom”, has been getting significant rotation in my apartment for half a year now. While I guess the lyrics of the song can be interpreted […]
Maybe There's Something About This Drake Kid: "Find Your Love"
I have no problem admitting my love for mass-appeal pop music, but I also think I’m smart enough to look past hype and like something based on musical merit (because yes, even mass-appeal commercial music can have merit). For the past year or so, the frenzy around Canuck TV star-turned-rap phenom Drake has felt all too much like unwarranted hype. How does a moderately talented, moderately decent looking kid with no street cred become hip-hop’s next big thing otherwise? The […]
Smoothed-Out Sundays: "Un-thinkable (I'm Ready)"
Alicia Keys’ albums have a tendency to wear off of me fairly quickly. I’ll rave about them when they first came out, but six months later, there will only be three or four tracks that I really like. Each successive album of hers has had more replay value than the one before it, and 2009’s “The Element of Freedom” might be the first Keys album that I can legitimately say I love all the way through. Well, except for the […]
Blerd Premiere: Eminem's "Not Afraid"
I remember writing somewhere (might have been a Facebook status update) that Eminem is like an “A” student who continually turns in “C” papers. As an emcee, Em is flawless. The guy’s got a great vocabulary, a fantastic sense of rhythm (A.K.A. flow) and a unique voice. However, for the past five or six years, he’s been squandering his gifts and pandering to his pop fanbase by a) using that obnoxious Triumph the Insult Comic Dog accent, b) reveling in […]
Konfusion & K-os!
Despite the fact that I pretty much despise everything MTV stands for these days, I’ve gotta give props to the network formerly known as “music television” for introducing me to a handful of artists over time. One such artist is K-os. I was watching the Sucker Free countdown on MTV2 a few years back when I saw the video for “Superstarr Pt. Zero”. Struck by how much the track reminded me of the true-school hip-hop that I love, I purchased […]