In Which I Lose My Sh*t About Trailers, Snippets, Artwork & Behind-the-Scenes Pics

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I'd apologize for the random rant, but I'm not sorry. And here we go....

I just flipped through the interwebs and stopped cold when I saw the headline "G.O.O.D. Music (Big Sean, Pusha T, 2 Chainz & Kanye West) – "Mercy". Oh shit! I didn't think the new G.O.O.D. Music joint was supposed to drop until Friday! Fucks yeah! And then I clicked and...

...it was the fucking artwork. Really? Those fucking red letters on a black background are worth a post? Who the fuck cares? Is there a single living person who has now seen it and thought, "Man, I'm really glad I got to see the "Mercy" art work a couple days early. That was awesome."

Now this isn't really about "Mercy". "Mercy" is really just a symptom of a larger disease. In the digital age artists feel like they have to blast out new content every other minute, and in their drive to flood the blogs with new shit, separately releasing snippets, trailers, art work, track lists and behind the scenes video/pics have become common place.

Yo, rappers (and publicists), stop. Just stop. No...one....fucking cares. Whether you're a rapper or a blogger, ultimately your only mission is to put out material that people will care about, and you're failing that mission with this behind-the-scenes-pics-esque fuckery.

If you were at an Italian restaurant waiting on your spaghetti and the chef came out, put two noodles on your plate, then walked back into the kitchen you'd be like, "What the fuck was that? I don't want to see you until you got the whole fucking bowl of spaghetti". But that's what we're getting every day in this rap interwebs game - two cold noodles on a plate.

Or to flip it around, if a blogger was to write the first two sentences of an album review, then close with "the rest of the review is coming on Friday" you'd be pissed. So why do artists insist on doing that to bloggers? (Probably because some of my blogging brethren are lazy/stressed enough to post it - they're caught in the same "we have to get a new piece up every minute!" cycle that the artists are. But while the bloggers and rappers feed off each other, it's the fans/readers who lose.)

Unless the art work is somehow news worthy on its own, or the tracklist reveals some huge upcoming track that people will be excited about, just keep it to yourself and let us know when you've got the finished product. Deal? I promise when you finally drop the album/track/video/whatever literally no one who will say, "I really like this, but I wish I had seen the behind-the-scenes pics first."

It's a simple concept, really. Getting a handful of ultimately meaningless posts is not a good reason for releasing something. Giving fans and consumers a quality product they'll actually enjoy? That's really the only reason to release anything.

(On a closing note, I know this may hurt some feelings, and I'm really not trying to be a complete dick, but this shit is all hype and, well, just check out the name of my site.)