By Jemeil
11:00pm on a Thursday night and 10 albums just dropped. By 11:15 half of those albums are already proclaimed album of the year and/or certified classics. Not enough time has passed to fully digest a song, let alone a project from the beat selection, to flow, to lyrical content, to cultural impact yet we feel like with one listen we can determine how great a project will be and gauge its longevity. But alas this is the time we live in where we want to be quick to judge something and feel like we have to be the first to have our opinion out to the public. We don't give anything, music specifically, time to marinate before we call it classic or trash. This could be due to the microwave generation we live in or fast food music consumption as some call it.
I wanted to touch on it more in depth in another post but this is a perfect time to bring it up so here's the quick summary; The name microwave generation stems from us not wanting to let things cook, simmer, marinate etc etc. we want the quick snack. With music this becomes detrimental because we can listen to an album or song and immediately afterwards we're waiting on the next one. Kendrick & Joey BadA$$ both dropped albums earlier in the year and I've seen a lot of fans already asking for new music. We fail to realize music is an art and these artists/musicians put time and effort into it and it's a slight to them to demand music right away after them giving us their art. But enough about that, back to my main point...
Now I don't know if it's the influx of music as a whole or just the social media era in general but the review 24 hours after a project releases has to come to an end. Now I believe on first listen of an album you can determine if you like it or not but reviewing it is a whole other thing as is calling something classic. Classic takes TIME & That's what we fail to realize the most. For example, Meek just released his album 'Wins & Losses' and within an hour it's been referred to as album of the year and he's been called a top 5 rapper which I've personally never heard. Recently seen him compared to Jay and that's blasphemous. And not to intentionally bring these 2 artist names together let's look at More Life, a playlist by everyone's favorite Canadian Aubrey Drake Graham. When More Life was released people were hailing it as Drakes best body of work and it being a certified classic...a few months later and nobody is even talking about. It was a vibe that came and went. All I ask is that we quit the quick microwave review and give everything time to marinate. No more of the "classic or trash" narrative after you hear one song. In closing just remember the words of the great poet known as Hov, "Do you fools listen to music or do you just skim through it?"
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