Itunes, Billboard, and the marginalization of black music and black audiences in America

Iggy Azalea has the #1 hit now and as Whiney points out on twitter, the last 4 rap songs to go #1 are all by white people.

ohhhh lord 2pac big please talk to this sucker cause they killing hip hop they taking the pain and struggle of life of hip hop the only thing we coulda express our minds and pain. and these suckers took it and made it look like garbage thats why we get judge so much cause these shit dont be making sence

I guess that's not counting "Timber" but ok fair enough

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Bn9Usy-CAAIOXLZ.jpg:large

a bigoted rapper, never thought i'd see the day

diversity hire
btw fuck the direction of all this

i mean fucking pat boone's gonna drop a single with dj mustard next week about his paramours at assisted living right? thats where this is going.

Tbf rap had a good thirty years plus before this moment how long did rock have

Fuck the direction of all this, yes. You can't make me dislike "Fancy," tho.

"Fancy" doesn't exist without the Charli hook though.

when people talk about "Fancy" I get excited for a split second but then I realize they're not talking about Bobbie Gentry

same. bobbie was finer than iggy, too.

when certain people tweet about it i read them as talking about the-dream song

I keep thinking of Drake.

See what I'm willing to bet with THIS post

https://twitter.com/WhitStillman/status/472040503522127872

...is that Whit Stillman only knows white rappers anyway.

there are worst things to be than the Rick von Sloneker of Atlanta hip-hop.

disappointed that out of all the enormously radio-friendly dj mustard and imitation-mustard tracks blanketing urban and rhythmic radio recently, this was basically the only one to instantly cross over to pop and therefore dominate the charts

i will lose hope if "2 on" also fails

It didn't cross over to pop really. Pop radio championed it from day one, whereas Urban is just now picking it up. The same thing happened with Macklemore.

yeah you're right, that was a bad way to phrase it. i'm not exactly sure but based on my own listening it seemed like rhythmic was playing it first, with pop following close behind, and urban starting to play catch-up now. i guess i put it that way to highlight pop radio's aversion to all these other songs even though they have the same sound going for them.

'2 on' the most instagrammed song in brooklyn lol hipstrs

you saying you don't like it d-40?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2014/06/04/iggy_azalea_fancy_is_no_1_how_did_this_australian_become_such_a_popular.html

speaking of billboard trends (she said in an attempt to make her question relevant), what was the last cover song to hit #1? And I mean a legit cover, not like the demo leaked on youtube or w/e.

ok I checked and I think it was "lady marmalade" in 2001

Before that it was "candle in the wind" in 1997

Then "can't help falling in love" in 1993

Is the cover officially dead? Did sampling kill it? Discuss.

There was also 'I Swear' by All 4 One in 1994.

Wait, I didn't know "I Swear" is a cover.

And Monica's Angel of Mine in 1998

You probably never turned on Country Radio in the mid 90s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=16yarf4ZCwA

Granted when I first heard it I thought that the John Michael Montgomery version came after.

covers still happen they just don't seem to get released as singles or hit #1, would guess the absence this century due to adult contemporary losing it's influence on the #1 spot, except for 'lady marmalade' almost all the covers to hit #1 for several years before that - 'candle in the wind', 'i swear', 'can't help falling in love', 'i will always love you', 'i'll be there', 'don't let the sun go down on me', 'when a man loves a woman' (shudder) - got major play on ac (and the british 'angel of mine' was effectively a demo as far as the us in 1998 was concerned). then again it's not like covers are burning it up on the ac chart, i probably missed something but i think the most recent cover to hit #1 ac that's not a xmas song (which do freakishly well) is sheryl crow's 'the first cut is the deepest'. thought 'ok maybe covers don't really make it to #1 that often', of those i listed above all except 'candle in the wind' (an outlier for obv reasons) come bunched together at the beginning of the decade so it's a pretty long window w/ virtually no covers hitting #1. however a cover hits #1 on the ac chart every single year of the 80s, though generally only one cover hits #1. hot 100 isn't quite as consistent - there are three years at the beginning of the decade w/ no covers hitting #1 - but i think there are actually more covers hitting #1 on the hot 100 overall for the decade, 1987 alone has five covers hit #1, 1988 has four. w/ this data i'm guessing that covers hitting #1 on the hot 100 isn't so much a reflection of ac's influence as some larger factor in the culture, maybe boomers making up such a distorted portion of the market that they're being pandered to (esp by the late 80s where the covers generally aren't remotely as obscure as big early 80s hits like 'bette davis eyes' or 'i love rock n roll'), the #1 covers of the early 90s all crossing over from ac is probably a reflection of that format lagging behind pop, generally being slow to change.

Oh wow, this inspired me to look up the ORIGINAL original "Lady Marmalade" and jesus christ this is terrible. Wow. Thank god Allen Toussaint and Labelle rescued it.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SeWMdoetN6Y

oh, wow, hadn't realized it wasn't a labelle original, good lord that is limp.

I think it works. Can't think of anything more fitting for Lady Marmalade than cheap sleazy 70's porn music.

ok I checked and I think it was "lady marmalade" in 2001

clay aiken's cover of "bridge over troubled water" went #1 in 2003 as part of a double A-side single

aiken's 'bridge over troubled water' didn't go #1 on hot 100 though 'this is the night' did, his 'botw' didn't chart at all on hot 100, peaked at 29 on ac where 'this is the night' peaked at 13

ah

for some reason i was convinced that those early american idol number ones were covers but i guess they were doing original schlocky songs

i can't believe "a moment like this" is an original song

my mind is totally being blown

literally no idea lady marmalade or angel of mine were covers!

although the latter goes along with my brilliant business plan of putting together an American girl group and having them release exclusively covers of sugababes/misteeq/honeyz songs and making me a billion dollars

aiken's 'bridge over troubled water' didn't go #1 on hot 100 though 'this is the night' did, his 'botw' didn't chart at all on hot 100, peaked at 29 on ac where 'this is the night' peaked at 13

This was some royalty/ chart manipulation baloney along the lines of "Candle in the Wind '97" being the b-side to some hugely bestselling song nobody knows.

All songs are covers until proven original.

does it count as a cover if the artist had been given the song before the first version was released? iirc (it's in one of the billboard fred bronson books that i don't have anymore) that was the case with "angel of mine," with clive davis deciding she would record it very early on, tho eternal ended up releasing their version in the uk several months before monica's album was released

That's also possibly the case with "Lady Marmalade" tbh

(and definitely the case with "I Heard It Through the Grapevine")

I am looking at my Fred Bronson book and it's not particularly consistent if that was his methodology - for example, Marvin Gaye and Gladys Knight & the Pips recorded their versions of Grapevine before the Miracles' version was released, in fact the Pips version was released before the Miracles' version was. But the two singles are noted on the list of remakes as covers of the Miracles song.

They do a good job of capturing the "black person sings it - white person charts with it" type of cover but some of these inter-label things are harder to quantify. If you asked some rando on the street in 1969 they would have said Marvin covered Gladys. If you asked Marvin he would have said fuck no I sang it first.

oops I wrote that whole comment before I saw the last one, anyway yall get the picture

btw did anyone else not know that these were covers?

They long to be close to you - dionne warwick
Rhinestone cowboy - larry weiss
Midnight train to georgia - jim weatherly
alone - (i-ten...?)
greatest love of all - george benson (wut)

i've never actually heard benson's version (it was for a muhammad ali biopic iirc) but that it was the original came up a ton in 86 when whitney's version was unavoidable. may have just been a case of a song hanging around for so long that dj's were running out of things to say about it. can't imagine it sounds radically different. much much younger when they were hits so maybe casey kasem mentioned it w/ them also but 'bette davis eyes' and 'tainted love' are two i always think of when it comes to hits i was shocked to find out were covers.

one of the weirdest ambiguous cases i've seen is this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pxXhQQYuLhY

you will probably recognize that, if you do, as christina aguilera's "what a girl wants." apparently it was one of the first songs that her label got for her debut album, though the writers had also given it to ophélie winter, whose album came out first (in ~august 1998). amusingly, the xtina and ophélie versions were both released as singles at basically the same time in early 2000, and were on the french charts concurrently (though xtina's version way outpeaked the other and stayed on the charts for more than twice as long).

the snap!/chill rob g thing with "the power" was totally bizarre too

speaking of dying and dead trends...skinny young black models lipsyncing the vocals of their uglier counterparts was definitely a thing for a while wasn't it, let's all take a moment to thank martha wash for suing the shit out of every 90s house group

or skinny white young models in the case of this,
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXSyQjppqG0
But then maybe not cause the 'uglier counterpart' happened to look like this,
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DXSyQjppqG0

*er herm*
http://cs301115.vk.me/v301115040/ade/okUjWkl-45c.jpg