Chris Brown, Garth Brooks Trail in Battle for Next Week’s Chart
November 7, 2007
Jay-Z’s Roc-A-Fella/IDJ album American Gangster, his tribute to the Ridley Scott movie of the same name about legendary Harlem dope dealer Frank Lucas with an Oscar-worthy performance by Denzel Washington, looks like a pretty good shot to take the #1 spot on next week’s HITS Top 50.
According to retailers left around this great country of ours, he’s on track to sell between 400-450k. Judging how the Eagles do in their second week—and they will be performing on ABC’s nationally televised Country Music Awards tonight, so you never know—will determine next week’s #1.
Barry Weiss’ Team Jive continues its hot streak with the new Chris Brown album, Exclusive, with the smash single, “Kiss Kiss,” which appears headed for at the very least the Top Three and maybe even higher with between 300-350k.
The independently distribbed Garth Brooks album Ultimate Hits on Scott Borchetta’s Pearl Records imprint looks like it will do between 200-250k, though the CMAs could boost that number significantly.
Rapper Cassidy’s B.A.R.S. The Barry Adrian Reese Story, his new Full Surface/Ruff Ryders/J album, is on target for 70-80k
Suretone/Geffen’s Angels and Airwaves, the blink-182 spin-off, is looking at 65-75k.
Thanks to the Eagles, the market was up 11% vs last week, down 13% vs same week last year and now down 14.5% year-to-date.
Jay-Z — With Beanie, Diddy And J.D. — Rocks Hollywood At Tour KickoffNovember 6, 2007 - House of Blues, West Hollywood, CA
Posted by DawanOwens (from yourhere.mtv.com), Los Angeles, CA, at 3:23 pm EST on Wednesday, November 7th, 2007
Photo by illwill
It’s 7:49 p.m. on Tuesday night and I’m standing in what I would call a MASSIVE line in front of the House of Blues on Sunset Blvd. Tonight Jay-Z will be performing live in concert to a sold-out crowd. I’d guess it’s about three blocks long but I couldn’t see the end!
My position in line places me in front of the will-call entrance. I feel tap on my shoulder: “Excuse me, son” — I turn around and it’s Sticky Fingaz from Onyx. I hear “Excuse me, please,” again — it’s “Girlfriends” star Jill Marie Jones. Celebrity after celebrity scoot by me in an effort just to see if their names are on the list for tickets — and more than a few were turned away. A fan next to me sees one celebrity pass, looks at me, then looks down at his ticket and says, “Dang! They didn’t let the dude from ‘American Gangster’ in?”
Finally, the line starts moving and about 20 minutes later, after a pat-down and an electronic ticket-swipe, I’m IN! A quick scan of the crowd reveals, as Gang Starr would say, the mass appeal that J has been able to create over the years: I see everything from ‘hood to Hollywood, from sharp-dressed kats to dirty backpacks. I’ll sum it up by saying this: You know you have worldwide love as a rapper when guys who look like the dude with the stapler from “Office Space” are at your show.
One disappointment: the warm-up DJ, who would have been great at a teen birthday party but not a Jay-Z concert.
10:00 p.m. No sign of Jay. Worried? Nawww, an inside source of mine said he would be on at 10:15.
10:05 p.m. The first of two curtains go up and the crowd begins to cheer.
10:15 p.m. ON THE DOT The second curtain goes up to reveal a live band, all dressed in white shirts, black ties and black pants: CLASSIC GANGSTER. This crowd, who had pretty much been dead for the last hour, loses their minds. Kats hollering at girls stop in mid-holla to find their spots.
Jay-Z walks out onto the stage with the lights just down enough so that you can’t be sure if it’s him or not. Come on man, it’s him … it’s gotta be him … is it him? Lights UP: It’s Jay! Wearing a Juicy Couture T-shirt that says “Give to Receive,” a noticeably slimmer J takes in the screaming crowd (all with their Roc symbols up). Bam: He’s right into the first cut on the new album, “Pray.” The swagger is so uncontrollable, walking the line of being being overly confident but not. The song has a totally different feel then on the album, his voice and lyrics are so clear that they stop the crowd in their tracks and all you hear is an “Oohhhhhhhhhh,” as if there were only 10 of us huddled around him in a cipher.
“No Hook” followed, and the crowd screamed along. “I’m feeling ya’ll energy tonight, I can’t even lie,” he says. He then points out that the front of the crowd is rocking, the back of the crowd is keeping up, but the people in the upper balcony are acting a little bougie. He lets them know they need to get it together before he has to curse them out.
“This ish right here / This ish right here,” a line from comedian Katt Williams’ HBO special is used as the base of a freestyle interlude. This immediately followed by “P.S.A.” and “Heart of the City” — but then “I Know,” from the new album, causes the energy in the room to drop. It may have been a preplanned break, because when he followed with “Kingdom Come” and “Blue Magic,” everyone was right back where they needed to be.
Another freestyle interlude leads to another great song of the night, the appropriately titled “Success.” The energy begins to flag again, but then out come Beanie Sigel (who I think might be pregnant, based on the size of the belly) and Memphis Bleek for “Crew Love.” The Roc family is soon joined by another member as Freeway comes out for “Rock the Mic” and “What We Do.” It was the first time in years I felt like the Roc crew was back strong.
Freeway and Bleek leave and J asks Beanie if he wants to get ignorant, which is the last thing you ask a dude like Beans from Philly — unless you’re referencing the song “Ignorant Sh–” from the new album.
After performing “Big Pimpin’,” Jay-Z says, “Thank you, I had a good time.” STOP!! Jay, I love “Big Pimpin’ ” but I know you ain’t going to go out like that. The band begins to play again, so Jay-Z cuts and you know he’s going to come back. About 15 minutes later, a voice goes, “We don’t have to go home!” — it’s Jay! Back onstage for “What More Can I Say,” followed by the final guest appearances of the night: Jermaine Dupri and the world’s greatest hype man, P. Diddy. You know Diddy had to get a mic even though he didn’t quite know all the words to the song, but the crowd barely noticed because they were back to head-bobbing and hand-waving. To close it out, Jay called for Beans and Freeway to come back up but Beans was literally in the middle of the crowd so he asked Freeway to hold him down on the final song, “Roc Boys.”
Overall, the concert showed some signs of opening night stiffness, but there were definitely moments of brilliance, and as fans get to know the new album better those low-energy moments will probably fade.
And you know Jay has touched the masses when you look next to you and see Mike Tyson bobbing his head.
Keith Caulfield, L.A.
Jay-Z is on course to achieve his 10th No. 1 album on The Billboard 200, as his "American Gangster" set (Roc-A-Fella) leads Nielsen SoundScan's Building Chart, released today (Nov. 7).
If Jay-Z locks his 10th No. 1, that will tie him with Elvis Presley for second place among artists with the most chart-toppers. Only the Beatles have more, with 19.
Unweighted sales for "American Gangster" through the close of business yesterday from the Building Chart's panel of reporters stood at 179,000. That's the third largest figure seen on the Wednesday Building Chart since SoundScan began compiling it in September. Jay-Z trails only the first-day numbers for Kanye West's "Graduation" (437,000) and 50 Cent's "Curtis" (310,000).
Jay-Z's last album, 2006's "Kingdom Come," opened atop The Billboard 200 last fall with 680,000.
On the Wednesday Building Chart, Chris Brown's sophomore Jive set, "Exclusive," was in second place with 107,000, while the Eagles' "Long Road Out Of Eden" was third with 89,000. Garth Brooks' new "Ultimate Hits" (Pearl Records) claimed the fourth slot, with 61,000.
Two more new albums -- Cassidy's "B.A.R.S. The Barry Adrian Reese Story" (Full Surface/J) and Angels & Airwaves' "I-Empire" (Geffen) -- were among the top 10 sellers.
Billboard estimates that the merchants who report to Nielsen SoundScan's Building Chart -- Trans World Entertainment, Best Buy, Circuit City, iTunes, Border's, Target, Anderson Merchandisers, and Handleman Co. -- represent 79% of the U.S. retail market.
the album has been getting great reviews pretty much everywhere. Pitchfork just reviewed it today and gave it an 8.6. probably my favorite music critic Tom Breihan reviewed it. here's the review:
Quote:
Jay-Z
American Gangster
[Roc-A-Fella/Def Jam; 2007]
Rating: 8.6
The story goes like this: After seeing an advance print of the Ridley Scott heroin-trade epic American Gangster, Jay-Z found himself inspired. The movie details the story of the Vietnam-era Harlem kingpin Frank Lucas, and Jay saw so many parallels between Lucas's life and his own. Over the course of a few weeks, Jay recorded his own widescreen epic, a concept-album about the rise and fall of a gangster like Lucas, an imagined what-if trajectory for what might have happened to Jay if he'd never left the drug trade.
It makes for a good story and a great marketing coup. By attaching himself to a big-budget crime epic, Jay guaranteed himself cross-media presence and positioned himself to regain some of the grimy credibility he'd lost with 2006's Kingdom Come, the would-be comeback that found Jay rapping about brands so expensive most of his audience had no idea what he was talking about. In working to create the impression that he'd sacrificed commerce for art, Jay recast himself as an artist rather than a CEO, a canny commercial move at a time when rappers like Kanye West are outselling CEOs like 50 Cent. As a piece of media-manipulation, American Gangster is dazzling. But as music?
Well, as a concept-album, American Gangster is kind of a wash. Over the course of its first 13 tracks, the album loosely outlines the criminal rise and fall we've seen in so many movies: the desperation of youth, the excited early schemes, the slow hard-fought rise, the lavish celebration of that rise, the eventual joyless inertia involved in maintaining that success, the sudden and inevitable descent into a prison-cell anonymity worse than death. That story animates the album, but it doesn't dictate its movements. Throughout, Jay-Z breaks that narrative whenever he feels like it, taking care to force in all his standbys: The sneering aristocratic death-threats, the breezy uptempo party-songs, the (especially forced) for-the-ladies seduction-song.
Jay actually corrupts the impact of his own moralistic rise-and-fall story by ending the album with a pair of bonus tracks, "Blue Magic" and "American Gangster", that trumpet Jay's own triumph over the vast impersonal forces that landed his protagonist in prison. On "Blue Magic", he even growls, "Can't you tell that I came from the dope game?" like it's a point of personal pride, immediately after he depicted an inevitable criminal downfall. On his wide-scope art-piece, Jay still can't put aside commercial success and relentless self-aggrandizement, even if those twin impulses **** up his concept.
So American Gangster doesn't quite work as a concept album, but it's difficult to imagine the record would be better if that concept had been fully realized and fleshed-out. Jay's evident obsession with the post-Don Imus furor over nihilistic rap lyrics has ****-all to do with his gangster narrative, for instance, but Jay's willingness to break narrative and address that obsession leads to lines like this one, where he calls out recent rap foe Al Sharpton on "Say Hello": "Tell him I'll remove the curses/ If you tell me our schools gon' be perfect/ When Jena 6 don't exist / Tell him that's when I'll stop saying 'bitch,' bitch!" The album's story gives it enough structure to feel huge and all-encompassing, but Jay floats in and out of it as fluidly as he switches between the first and second person. And so the drug-dealer story serves an important purpose: It rips Jay out of the royal materialistic old-man haze that ruined Kingdom Come and recalls the titanic, invincible snarl that made him great in the first place.
On American Gangster, he's fallen back in love with language, making slick puns and jamming his lines with internal rhymes and vivid, detailed images without letting those devices detract from the emotional punch of his mini-narratives. "No Hook" has some of the most complicated rhyme-patterns he's tried in years, but it's all in service of a sad picture of the conflicts of anyone who makes a living doing dangerous, immoral things: "'Stay out of trouble,' mama said as mama sighs/ Her fear her youngest son being victim of homicide/ But I gotta get you out of here, mama, or I'm [long pause] die [long pause] inside." (Nobody uses long breathless pauses like Jay-Z; when he's at his best, as he is here, those silences can say as much as his words.)
On "Roc Boys (And the Winner Is)", the buoyant and celebratory ode to financial success, Jay thanks every device and corrupt institution that made his rise possible: "The Nike shoebox for holding all this cash/ Boys in blue who put the greed before the badge." On "Blue Magic", his wordplay is so dense that it can take multiple listens to parse: "Blame Reagan for making me to a monster/ Blame Oliver North and Iran Contra/ I ran contraband that they sponsored." (Maybe I'm dumb, but it took me a while to realize that the second of those lines ends with the exact same four syllables as the next line's beginning.) On "Fallin'", the song about the dealer's comeuppance, Jay sounds like he's spent a lot of time thinking about the fate he avoided: "Come January, it gets cold/ When your letters come in slow and your commissary's low." And on "Ignorant ****", a Black Album outtake revisited and revamped here, Jay positively relishes the contradictions of rap, a genre where every artist theatrically proclaims himself to be more real than everyone else: "Actually believe half of what you see/ None of what you hear, even if it's spit by me/ And with that being said, I will kill *****s dead."
Musically, American Gangster is lush and spacious. The sampled voices of Al Green and Marvin Gaye float through the record like ghosts of Jay's past, sweetly offering encouragement like benevolent angels. Jay's handpicked lineup of producers keep his voice grounded in thick, organic globs of 1970s soul. Diddy and the Hitmen, the reunited production who gave old Bad Boy albums their flamboyant elegance, turn in five tracks on the album, and their work drips with ambition. On album-opener "Pray" they outfit Jay with churning strings, screaming guitars, cinematic sound-effects, and a histrionic gospel choir; the horns, windchimes, and rolling drums of "Sweet" are almost exhausting in their richness. But not all the production is that warm and languid. On "Success", Jay and guest Nas rant paranoically over No ID's disorienting storm of organ-wails and murky, off-kilter drums. On "Ignorant ****", Just Blaze layers up a furious storm of tinny synths and guitars, giving Jay's ****-talk a trashy "Miami Vice" veneer. And "Hello Brooklyn 2.0", built from an old Beastie Boys track, is a stark corrective to all those florid harps and violins: all booming bass and skeletal handclaps, Jay sounding more at home than guest Lil Wayne.
When Jay taped his episode of "VH1 Storytellers" in Brooklyn last month, he kept comparing tracks from the album to moments from The Godfather and Scarface. American Gangster isn't really about Jay's own memories, and it's certainly not about Frank Lucas. Instead, it's an album about Jay's mythic legacy, his place in a pantheon of larger-than-life outlaws. Problematically enough, it works because it reconnects Jay with the verbal and musical eloquence that allowed him to escape from an outlaw's life. If it took a big Hollywood movie and a half-baked concept to get him back to that, then thank God for big Hollywood movies and half-baked concepts.
also probably one of my favorite things to do after listening to a hip-hop album is to find out where all the samples came from. It helps you enjoy the songs even more when you know how great a producer flipped the sample. this link here has pretty much every sample for American Gangster
This deserves to be a #1 album more than some of his other albums..and this album going #1 ties him with Elvis for #1 albums...thats some legit company...get that #1 Jay!!
If you loved KC, then this album isnt really gonna be your thing...unless you are just a Jay fan no matter what...KC was more pop friendly and this is DEF a street driven album...