For a while, it seemed as if Wale was destined to soar for an eternity. With all the planetary bodies aligned in his favor, his buzz would surely catapult him to unfathomable heights. His mixtape was the talk of the town. MTV tapped him to provide the musical backdrop for the 2009 VMAs. Jay-Z signed him to a Roc Nation management deal and made him an opening act on his Blueprint 3 Tour. The most popular pop artist in America graced his first single. He amassed 125,000 followers on Twitter (as of this writing). Simply put, Wale was coasting with no sign of slowing down. Until now. Despite the heavy promotion and media blitz, Wale’s eagerly awaited debut, Attention Deficit (Allido/Interscope), only managed a measly 28,000 units sold in its first week. What went wrong?
Here are 7 reasons why the Wale experiment failed.
Buzz overkill – Buzz is a gift and a curse. On one hand it boasts the benefit of industry exposure; on the other, it tends to exert a certain pressure to please the most powerful interests. Wale’s buzz in the last couple years was so loud that no one bothered to check for the equally talented J Cole until later this year. Like Drake, our friend Wale is caught in the middle of expectations that he’s incapable of matching.
Label politics – Like I said in my Attention Deficit review, Interscope pitched Wale to a fickle crowd. What they forgot is that Wale enthusiasts leaned on him as an alternative to that other stuff. By diluting his sound with radio-ready hooks and new wave robo-pipes the label only succeeded in alienating his core fan base. That’s like offering a coconut to a monkey while holding up a banana in the other hand. Chances are he’ll crack your skull with that coconut and proceed to snatch the banana. If reports that Interscope undershipped the album are valid, then it further underscores the disconnect between the label and the marketplace.
New Media – Word of mouth is still the No.1 killer of wack music and the No.1 promoter of quality music. The difference is that new media has enabled music connoisseurs to spread reports of an album’s quality more effectively. This hurts newcomers like Wale who are still in the process of building a fan base. With most rap albums leaking two weeks in advance, it only takes a few days for people to spread the word these days. Shortly after Attention Deficit made the inevitable premature debut online, message boards, blogs, and Twitter pages were inundated with knee-jerk assessments of the album.
Twitter – If anyone plans on getting Wale a Christmas gift, I recommend a shirt with the following inscription: “I sent 9,000 tweets in 10 months and all I got was this lousy t-shirt.” Twitter has its merits, but it can be misleading. For starters, it gives artists a false sense of security and self-worth. Take it from an award-winning social media user, astronomical follows don’t mean much on Twitter. A wide swath of those followers are bots and bots don’t buy CDs. Then there’s the other chunk that, despite gushing about having ecstatic orgasms of delight as they listen to Attention Deficit, made no effort to buy the album. I posed this question on Twitter earlier.
Pride goes before fall – This point would be moot if Wale wasn’t a newcomer. Being a rookie in hip-hop is just like being a rookie in sports. You play it cool, feign humility, dish fake spiels about how you’re just like the fans and can totally relate to them. Rookie season is never the time to gripe publicly about your disdain for interviews. Suppress those eccentricities until you’ve actually earned the right to be cocky. I’m sorry, were you saying something about Kanye? Well, he’s an exception because he had already made an impact via his role on The Blueprint and The Fix — two of the best albums of the 2000s. And that was years before he dropped his own masterpiece.
Missed opportunities – Wale has been pointing fingers at others for all that went wrong on his debut, but he needs to save some criticism for the man in the mirror. He had numerous opportunities to showcase his talent and woo new fans, but he failed to close the deal. Remember his VMA performance? Yeah, me neither. That was a golden opportunity to make his case to millions of MTV viewers, many of whom hadn’t heard of him. Same goes for his appearance on the esteemed BET cypher which will be remembered for Eminem’s lyrical onslaught than for Wale’s forgettable freestyle. Here’s the funny part. A friend who basically heard of Wale through me called me after seeing these performances to inform me that “dude is trash” and that his album would go wood. First impressions, people. Look into it.
Witchcraft – This is the only logical explanation for Wale’s flop. Some unknown foe from a previous life must have cast a voodoo hex on his career.
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