What The Hell Just Happened In Music This Week?

Image via Complex Original

Date: September 16

When I heard the first 30 seconds of "Tuscan Leather," it felt like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders. I'd been waiting months to hear this shit. I'd stayed up past 2 a.m. one night waiting on a new leak. I'd cried on my flight back from Los Angeles listening to "Versace (Remix)" because it was all I heard on my vacation. I'd quoted "You underestimated greatly" off "5 AM" on days when work was going really well. And when I heard the first bit of Nothing Was The Same on Monday morning, that sped-up vocal track swirling around like wind, I was, I don't know, shocked, in a sense—the same way I felt about Yeezus after months of anticipation. All these new sounds to digest.  

If you're looking for a review on where Drake is right now, read David Drake's (No pun intended!) piece on Drizzy's emotional maturity and how and why millenials relate to his music. There's a lot of classical music woven throughout songs like "From Time" and, as we knew, "Started From The Bottom" (which samples pianist Bruno Sanfilippo), and we're reminded that Drake sounds better when he's rapping and singing. And when he works with his old friend and main producer Noah "40" Shebib, it's magic. But I still don't know how I feel about it compared to Take Care. These things take time. Mostly, I'm just relieved that it's finally here. —Lauren Nostro

RELATED: Is Drake Really the Voice of the Millennial Generation?

Date: September 17

A good sense of timing is a big part of making it in the music biz, knowing to strike when the iron is hot. So props to L.A. singer Jhene Aiko for capitalizing on her moment this week. When we downloaded our leaked versions of Drake's Nothing Was The Same, we were immediately struck by Aiko's excellent hook on "From Time." Her voice found the perfect balance of sweetness and sincerity. (Even if that "I love me enough for the both of us" line is a bit to unpack). So she did the smart thing and immediately followed up the leak with a new song, the Childish Gambino assisted "Bed Peace." The cover art pays homage to John Lennon and Yoko Ono's 1969 "Bed-in for Peace," and the song itself is all about those days when you wake up and just roll around in bed before you roll one up. By now, plenty of rap fans know Aiko's name. But her appeal is much broader than that. She just hasn't been introduced to the proper audience yet. With songs like "Bed Peace," hopefully she will be. —Insanul Ahmed

RELATED: Listen: Jhené Aiko f/ Childish Gambino "Bed Peace"

Date: September 18

Billboard broke the news this week that The Weeknd and 2 Chainz were joining Keith Urban as the trio at the top of the pops. The Weeknd experienced slight growth in sales, as his Kiss Land rode a wave of press (including his first-ever interview, with us) into the No. 2—then, corrected by Soundscan, No. 1-position, notching just ahead of Urban's Fuse. The Weeknd's 2012 debut, Trilogy, sold 86,000 copies in its first week. By contrast, Kiss Land moved 98,669, a not-insubstantial step up.

The Weeknd has claimed that he's not really an R&B artist, which is probably a smart move. But, interestingly, traditional R&B has been experiencing something of a commercial rebound thanks to television. Tamar Braxton's Love and War, released earlier this month, sold 115,000 copies its first week. While Braxton had little in the way of press coverage, her fortunes were no doubt bolstered by the success of her reality show, Braxton Family Values. Reality TV has given R&B a boost by pushing some of its more entertaining personalities into the gossip blogs, which act a shadow press for artists typically ignored by the mainstream music press in favor of artists like The Weeknd.

On the other hand, 2 Chainz got some less cheerful first-week news, as his perfectly-solid B.O.A.T.S. II: Me Time only sold 63,000 copies, a significant drop from his 2012 album Based On a True Story, which sold 147,000. Part of the problem, probably, is that the album's lead single, the Pharell-produced "Fedz Watchin'," took considerable time to get any chart traction. While other ready-for-prime-time radio fare like like "I Do It," with Drake and Wayne, and "Livin'" with Iamsu!, have yet to be released as singles. We're thinking that they should help give the album some long-term numbers. But there's no way to sugar-coat the fact that the first-week drop-off must be a disappointment for Chainz.

*"High For This" is a Weeknd song and "I'm Different" is a 2 Chainz song, you see. —David Drake 

RELATED: First Week Sales For The Weeknd and 2 Chainz Are In

Date: September 19

Last week, Maybach Music Group Founder Rick Ross renamed TMZ founder Harvey Levin, "Hervis."

This week, he named one of Levin's employees, a TMZ cameraman, "Clevis."

These names are similar, we noticed, in their ending. Being curious intellectuals, we thought: why?

After doing some very scholarly and professional etymological research, we discovered some possible interpretations for the source of Rick Ross's use of "-vis."

1. vis, from the Latin, can refer to "force," or "power." In the context of Ross commandeering both Hervis ("Tell Hervis you work for me now...") and Clevis for promotional use, he is bestowing upon them a certain "power," and he is doing it by "force." This is to say, though neither Hervis nor Clevis had been inducted into the Maybach Music Group, they have become instrumental to the objectives of the "MMZ"...Self Made, Vol. 3 in stores now.

2. vis, from the Proto-Albanian, can refer to a "place," "land," or "country." As in, Rick Ross might say, "You are in my land now, the land of the MMG. I am the bawse here, and you will follow my rules."

3. vis, from the Dutch, means "fish." We all know how much Rick Ross loves to eat. By renaming his subjects after fishes, he is placing them below him on the food chain.

The takeaway here is to beware of Ross's ability to rename you. UOENO, but he might be flexing on you in three different languages. —Alexander Gleckman

RELATED: Rick Ross Takes Over TMZ Again, Names Cameraman "Clevis"

Date: September 19

Danny Brown's always been a little ahead of the curve as far as rappers talking about molly. Now that the drug has become so ubiquitous in hip-hop that Miley Cyrus is making headlines for mentioning it and Jay Z is making songs about being too highbrow for it, it makes perfect sense that Danny Brown would have to up the ante. And that's exactly what he did, by making a song about using molly to the point it's uncomfortable and almost certainly pretty dangerous, stripping the drug of the happy vibes that it might have in say, a Juicy J song. In Danny Brown's hands, Freak Nasty's "Da Dip" and Kanye West and Jay Z's "Niggas in Paris" are both interpolated into a much darker variety of party jam than they set out to be.

"Now all these rappers talk about that molly/Better make it known these niggas ain't dippin'," he raps, over Skywlkr's bouncy, electronic beat, managing to make a fun party song about how unfun it is to do so much molly that you "can't believe that [you're] even moving." The tension between the fact that this is a party song and that the partying doesn't sound particularly fun is fertile comedic ground, leading to backhanded brags like "I'm grindin' on your bitch while I'm grindin' on my teeth." The video, directed by Rollo Jackson, captures that same I'm-partying-so-hard-I'm-not-even-sure-I'm-enjoying-it vibe, breaking up its dark tones with winsome hand-drawn animations, mostly of drugs. If this is what we should expect from Old—conflicted, funny party songs over weird electronic beats offering the barest shadings of old-guy wisdom—then count me in. —Kyle Kramer 

RELATED: Video: Danny Brown "Dip" (Prod. by Skywlkr)

Date: September 20

Top Dawg Entertainment has come a long way since Jay Rock was their flagship artist and signed to Warner Bros. Records. Through a series of shrewd business moves and by placing a focus on quality music, the L.A.-based record company has procured a partnership with Interscope Records. The label's flagship artist, Kendrick Lamar, has sold one million records, performed on the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards, and has been a conversation starter for the last month thanks to a guest appearance on a Big Sean song that wasn't even cleared for Sean's album.

This week, TDE decided to focus on its future. It started on Monday, at Fader's Uncapped concert series, where Schoolboy Q performed "Collard Greens" with Kendrick. "Collard Greens" is a single off Oxymoron the upcoming album that Schoolboy announced had been officially turned in to the label. Opening up for Schoolboy was SZA, the singer who was TDE's most recent signee until Friday.

What happened Friday? The label finally officially announced the signing of Chattanooga, Tennessee's Isaiah Rashad. The upstart rapper, whose name has been affiliated with the label since Peter Rosenberg hinted at it on Hot 97 back in June, released a video for "Shot U Down." The video introduces the hip-hop world to a town previously unexplored by the music.

With Rashad and SZA having entered the TDE fold and Schoolboy finally ready to release Oxymoron, the label is poised to show the world that it has more to offer beyond King Kendrick. —Dharmic X

RELATED: Video: Isaiah Rashad

Date: September 20

Chris Brown is still struggling to figure out why some people have yet to forgive him beating Rihanna's face to a bloody pulp in 2009. (We'd call it the Rihanna "incident" but that would be tip-toeing around the subject.) In a cover in JET Magazine that came out Friday, Brown compares his situation to that of Jay-Z. "No disrespect, because I'm a fan," Brown says, "but nobody brings up the fact that he stabbed somebody and sold drugs. He gets a pass."

Jay Z did, in fact, plead guilty to stabbing record producer Lance "Un" Rivera in 1999. But the comparison is ridiculous. Besides the vast differences in the cases, Jay accepted his punishment, kept his head down, and continued his career with quiet comportment. Brown has spent the past few years doing the following: wearing an "Oops" chain as artistic statement, chucking a chair at the Good Morning America window, getting a battered woman tattooed on his neck, and of course, slinging disgusting remarks back at comedian Jenny Johnson on Twitter. All his efforts at expressing remorse have rung false. —Lauren Nostro

RELATED: Chris Brown Criticizes Jay Z's Drug Dealing Past in Upcoming Issue of JET

Date: September 20

It may look like the type of house where a deranged serial killer would drag his hapless victims to be dismembered, but the boarded-up house with the spray-painted address on its door that appears on the cover of Eminem's forthcoming The Marshall Mathers LP 2 is actually the ever-so-humble abode that a young Marshall Mathers once called "Home Sweet Home." Longtime Stans fans will remember this ramshackle structure from the cover of the first Marshall Mathers LP, in which Em was seen on the porch, chillaxing. He's no longer visible in the new picture, presumably because he's relocated to a dwelling more befitting of a multimillionaire megastar.

But the not-so-subliminal message behind this image is that Em hasn't forgotten where he comes from. And while the pigment on this faded black-and-white photo is all washed out (as if it had been exposed to the sun's harmful ultraviolet rays for too long), this album artwork is no nostalgia trip. Huge swaths of Detroit look every bit as dilapidated as this ramshackle house right now, and Em would like the people of the D to know he knows that too. But the best thing about the MMLP2 artwork may be the person who got to reveal it to the world via Twitter. The dude who correctly answered an Eminem trivia question and won the privilege of tweeting this jpeg to the world goes by the Twitter handle @bigbuckKilla66. Check his avi. It's real like that in the D. —Rob Kenner 

RELATED: Eminem Reveals Album Art for "The Marshall Mathers LP 2"