What’s the name of that one song, again? I think to myself while stumbling through the world of legally downloaded music. All I know is that it’s a Lil Wayne song and that it has a sick beat, but these are two things I can’t type into a search engine with any degree of success.
My solution: Download the Lil Wayne discography, putting me on the level of middle school boys worldwide. I ignore this unfortunate connection, click download and walk away content that I’ll get what I want.
I come back to see my package completely downloaded. Thanks, bit torrent. I add the folder to my iTunes and watch in horror as 681 songs start the unfortunate process of relentlessly adding themselves to my library. I sit in horror and realize I’m that guy. I’m the guy who, when others view his library on a shared network, they have to scroll for five minutes to get to the ‘M’ section of his library. I hang my head in shame.
I can’t help but ask myself, then, why and how the hell does Lil Wayne produce so much material? Why is it that I only like about one out of every 50 songs he produces? Why do people like me feel the need to download all of these songs knowing 640 out of the 681 or so will languish, ignored, in my library forever?
The answer: I have no idea.
Lil Wayne has songs that are irresistibly catchy, and all-in-all just good to listen to. I won’t deny this fact, as it enabled me and countless other unfortunate souls to go about flooding their laptops with his countless mix tapes. But this does not justify the amount of shitty songs with which he floods the market.
It seems to me, Mr. Wayne, that you pretty much record anything one or two times through, call it good and then release it to the public. While this process may enable you to release an ungodly number of songs, it makes people have to sift through them for days to find something worth listening to. So, to put it simply, stop releasing so many songs and settle on the ones worth a listen.
By flooding the market, Lil Wayne has eventually ensured that some of his songs will inevitably become good and/or popular because, simply, almost no recording artist can release that many songs and fail to produce a decent single.
His methods seem akin to throwing 40 darts and praying that one of them lands on the target. It honestly makes me question whether he actually knows what a good song sounds like, or if his ears have grown so numb with cough syrup that he has to guess.
So my call to Lil Wayne is this: Start listening to your own songs and stop releasing so many mix tapes. Editing to ensure that published material is worthwhile has always been an important facet of media, music included.
Rampantly releasing material shouldn’t be the goal of any artist, as is the case with Lil Wayne. Being the most prolific artist of the generation amounts to nothing if half of the songs you release amount to wasted space in someone’s iTunes library.
