After a hectic week in the Hip-Hop world, I am pleased to read that the album Graduation by Kanye West, this week outsold 50 Cent to debut at number one in the album charts. It seems in the run up to the release of each album everybody has had something to say about the head to head, with 50 Cent even stating that if out sold, he would no longer perform as a solo artist. On reason the outcome pleased me so much. 
Estimates based on sales as early as Wednesday stated that Kanye was outselling his competitor by over 150k copies. There has been a long running feud between the two artists for some time, and this joint album release date has simply thrown any past differences of opinion into the media spotlight
It is a long standing tradition in Hip-Hop that rappers have antagonistic beefs with other artists. The east coast west coast divide has been labelled as a reason for some famous Hip-Hop rivalries in the past, for instance Biggie and TuPac, but that fact is these rivalries are more fabricated to generate record sales than they are based on real life differences.
Used as a promotional tool, the same day release of ‘beefing’ artists is a great way to send loyal fans more promptly to the shelves, and undoubtedly the main winner is not the artist with his self proclaimed bragging rights, but the record labels behind each artist. One thing is for sure, the increased media coverage generated by feuding artists certainly hasn’t slowed record sales for either artist in the past.
The silver lining in the hype generated by the launch of these albums this week, is that Hip-Hop as a genre has been thrust into the limelight, and that can only have a positive impact for fans of the genre.
As a fan of Kanye I was glad to see him have a top selling album, however I’m afraid I didn’t buy into the beef and go running to the shop to buy his album. For those of you interested in what’s up next? A joint release date in November for albums from both Mary J Blige and Mariah Carey. No thanks ta!
September 19th, 2007 at 9:53 am
Interesting thoughts… I thought Kanye was likely to win this battle due to 50’s public comments leading up to the release date. I personally like both artists, but prefer 50. I do think a lot of Hip-Hop beef is just designed to sell more records. How many times have we seen artists come out with beef remixes of other artists. One that stood out was Nas - Hate Me Now, Cam’ron did a well publicised diss track over the instrumental a few years back. http://www.freewebs.com/whatsbeef/beefarchive1.htm. I don’t doubt we can expect more of the same from the 50 Cent/Kanye crews.