I'm listening to a leaked copy of Vince Staples's Def Jam debut album, Summertime '06, which is scheduled to drop next week. Vince Staples' album is pretty good. It ain't got no hits, however.
Ever since Rae Sremmurd dropped SremmLife at the top of 2015, other high-profile rappers have failed to match that rookie group's level of singles-driven buzz. Since January, Kendrick Lamar, Lupe Fiasco, Chance the Rapper, Earl Sweatshirt, Young Thug, and Vince Staples have all released critically acclaimed, "complex" and/or "complicated" projects that have failed to gain radio traction. There are currently 16 rap songs in the Hot 100, the highest being Fetty Wap's "Trap Queen" at No. 3. Of these 16 songs, only six are new tracks from albums that dropped in 2015.
Even A$AP Rocky's singles aren't charting too well, despite A.L.L.A. being a pretty straightforward, singles-driven album. For the release of his Dreams Worth More Than Money next week, Meek Mill has abandoned his four previously released singles altogether.
Drake and Big Sean are the chief exceptions to this observation. In February, Drake released a morose, monotonous album that, paradoxically, features several hit records. (Contrast with Earl Sweatshirt, who released a morose, monotonous album that features no hit records.) Also in February, Big Sean dropped Dark Sky Paradise, a relatively strong project driven by two hit singles: "IDFWU," which came out last year and peaked at No. 11 on Billboard's Hot 100, along with "Blessings," featuring Drake, which has peaked at No. 28.
Between September 2014 and March 2015, Kendrick Lamar released three singles for To Pimp a Butterfly, and all three of them bricked. The highest-charting record from Butterfly is lead single "i," which debuted at No. 39 on the Hot 100 and then plummeted from the chart in the following week. As a radio host at New York's Hot 97, Ebro Darden was an ideally situated advocate for "i." Unfortunately, Nielsen analysis of the song's flagging popularity among radio listeners undermined Ebro's support for the record. When he and I spoke about Kendrick in January, Ebro was energetically perplexed by the Hot 97 audience's rejection of "i." He told me, "We like the message, we like the music, it’s an Isley Brothers sample, it’s familiar, it’s soulful—why don’t we like this song?"
Kendrick Lamar's To Pimp a Butterfly is a grand, challenging soundtrack for challenging times—but so was Kendrick Lamar's last album, good kid, m.A.A.d. city. Both albums grappled with gang violence, police brutality, temptation, crises of faith, addiction, and redemption. The civil rights climate in which Kendrick wrote and recorded his earlier album was less fraught, at least nationally; he released good kid in October 2012, just eight months after George Zimmerman killed Trayvon Martin in Sanford, Fla. Three years later, Kendrick, his fans, and the nation at-large stand in compounded, perpetual confrontation of black death and white supremacy. 2015 is a dire and exhausting time to be alive. Which explains, perhaps, the overwhelming complexity of Kendrick's music and message this time around.
It's not just Kendrick Lamar who's now having a hard time settling into radio rotation. Donnie Trumpet teamed up with Chance the Rapper to create Surf, a youthful pop-funk album that's tender and subtle in its exuberance, much unlike the white boy Mark Ronson's Uptown Funk. Though Surf features several trending rappers—Big Sean, J. Cole, Quavo, D.R.A.M.—there's nothing trendy about the project itself. Surf is anti-cool. Despite its tremendous popularity in the iTunes marketplace, Surf seems to exist at the outskirts of contemporary rap; no one's hailing Surf as a hip-hop classic. Despite its dozen-plus rap features, Surf is a vacation from hip-hop norms.
Lupe Fiasco, previously notorious for his souring otherwise decent albums with ridiculous pop overtures, fucked around and dropped his career-best this year. Tetsuo & Youth is easily the least accessible of Lupe Fiasco's five studio albums, yet it's arguably the richest and most interesting. Tetsuo & Youth is my favorite Lupe Fiasco album. It's got the best Lupe single since "Paris, Tokyo" in '08. It's got Lupe rapping about hot dogs, deer piss, and weddings. Tetsuo may be the worst-charting, worst-selling album of Lupe's career, but it's brilliant nonetheless.
It's not like Smart, Conscious (groans), Important Rap has always been marginal to the mass-market. In 1998, Lauryn Hill dropped a whole album about heartbreak, self-assertion, intimacy, spirituality, bougie Negro conspiracy theories, and whatnot. The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill has four hit records off a 16-track listing.
Where are the so-called enlightened breakout singles of yesteryear? In 2003, even Talib Kweli had "Get By"!
It's unlikely that Vince Staples will gain major career traction via radioplay of his lead single, "Señorita," which is a good song. Overall, Summertime '06 is a strong project that I'd characterize as "warehouse rap," which is no match for the mix of trap, pop, and quasi-R&B that's now running the U.S. song charts. I take small comfort in the prediction that at least my man Fetty Wap, a.k.a. Fetty Vandross, is destined to go gold.
Justin Charity is a staff writer for Complex. Follow him @BrotherNumpsa.
