The Mixtape

A brief history of Lil Wayne’s rise to power: After two years with the Hot Boys, a Cash Money foursome, Lil Wayne went solo. His first album, Tha Block is Hot (1999), went double platinum. But his initial success, then at the age of seventeen, was short-lived. His following albums, Lights Out (2000) and 500 Degreez (2002) did poorly. Then the pattern gets interesting. Wayne scrapped work on his fourth album and released the recordings as a mixtape, Da Drought (2003). His following album, Tha Carter, sold a million copies. Then in 2005, two more mixtapes, Dedication and Suffix, cemented his reputation. The following album, Tha Carter II, debuted at number two on the billboard charts and sold close to two million copies.

From 2006-2007 Wayne released more and more mixtapes, worked on dozens of collaborative songs, and put out single after single. A large portion of this work was made available for free online. Sean Fennessey, of Vibe Magazine ranked 77 of Lil Wayne’s songs from 2007. He says, “it seems that every morning a new mixtape, freestyle, or feature…popped onto the Web.” By the time Tha Carter III came out in 2008, the audience had been sufficiently primed. It went double platinum, selling three million copies.

How did he do this? Fennessey has some insight: “Lil Wayne possesses an unquantifiable charisma. And he’s the perfect artist to own this time, when album sales are bunk and only sheer bombast and constant reinvention reign supreme. He’s a symbiote attached to this rapidly changing game—as it moves, he moves.”

Let me state this for the record now, Lil Wayne is not a skilled lyricist. In the words of Blockhead, he’s “a semi-ok underground battle rapper who is, in all likelihood, seriously learning disabled.” What he is, as Fennessey points out, is sheer persona, unquantifiable charisma adapted to the pace of the Internet.

This sort of thinking, believe it or not, exists in the literary world. QuickMuse is a project founded in 2006 by Ken Gordon. Their tagline: “Great Poets. Fifteen minutes. Poetry under pressure.” The New York Times did a write-up on them awhile back. They quote Robert Pinsky, participant and fan of the project: “My ambition was to be a jazz musician… Writing poetry fast is like composing music…It’s physical, like sketching, like modeling with clay.” The idea, as Pinsky says it, is that “you may not write your best, but you should be able to write something memorable.” This seems to me a not dissimilar approach to what Wayne has done with the mixtape, tossing off quickly written songs or freestyled recordings as often as he takes a shit or a codeine pill (or regularly, in other words).

The important thing is, “modeling with clay” doesn’t replace serious poetry. It’s simply part of the balance. More than any other writer I can think of, Pinsky keeps art serious and playful at the same time, not in his individual poems, but in his attitude and life as a writer. He’s been on The Simpsons and the Colbert Report (if you haven’t, you really must watch the meta-free-for-all). Another admirable project is the Slate.com poetry “fray,” where Pinsky participates in an online forum to discuss the week’s poem.

But how do we compartmentalize these different modes, as it were? Where does the serious art belong? This brings us to the division between online and print content. I myself am guilty of submitting my best work (my ‘serious’ work) to print journals and my 2nd (or 3rd or 4th) best work (my ‘fun’ work) to the online versions of those same journals. Why? I suppose the feeling comes from the idea that “anyone can say anything on the internet.” There’s less of a filter, or at least, less of a traditional filter (i.e. a paid editor). The web filter consists of page hits, linkbacks, Digg, Stumbleupon, and so on. Lil Wayne has adapted to this filter. So has Soulja Boy Tell ‘Em, who made his way to fame via YouTube and MySpace.

Print content is dwindling. That much we know. But that doesn’t mean that it’s going to disappear, or that we, as writers, should stop sending our work to print publications. After all, Wayne parleyed his mixtape success into Tha Carter III. It means there has to be a symbiotic relationship. Thus, the print journals created affiliated blogs (you’re reading one now). This isn’t exactly a new idea. What is new is removing the irrational prestige from print publications. It’s harder to make it into the top ten YouTube videos than it is to get published in the New Yorker (at least statistically). But why should it be easier to get published in McSweeney’s Internet Concern than in the Quartlerly? (It is.) This means online editors will have to be more selective and not cave to the limitless pagespace of the Web. But that’s not enough.

This is the dilemma: people want something they can read fast, they want something new, they want it yesterday, they want it to be actually good, and you, aspiring writer, can’t possibly fulfill all those desires. To fulfill the insatiable craving for new material, you either need little respect for quality and have the charisma of Lil Wayne, or you need to find a way to produce quality work extremely fast. The solution is a middle ground: write blogs as if they’re articles rather than journal entries. To create enough material quickly enough, multiple authors have to write for a single publication. Often today we have individuals operating individual blogs, or micro-journals publishing two stories a month. For an author/editor to update her site every day with a story of any length or quality means she doesn’t have time for anything else. If she doesn’t update regularly, no one visits the site, thus eliminating the potential for advertising revenue. Collaborative work has always been the nature of the magazine and newspaper business, but the smaller digital journals of today don’t have sufficient networks or resources to produce exemplary content every day. Some of us, in the coming months and years, will need to consolidate and cooperate with other publications. Lil Wayne’s promotional model functioned because he worked with myriad artists, added content constantly, and gave away a lot of his shit for free. Hint, hint.

Next Week: How Wu-Tang conquered the rap world with a five-year expansion strategy. Why some literary journals should drop the bullshit claim of being an open forum for art, and truly rebrand themselves as a collective, embracing bravado and self-promotion.

Part I: Straddling the Line

Part II: Hip-Hop and Vaudeville

Part III:Practical Lessons in Attitude

Part IV: The Hip-Hop Business Model

By Christopher Robinson