DJ Khaled’s Method Isn’t Sustainable.
The music industry has little to do about the music you put out as much it is about the people that are around you. If surrounded by just the right people, you will find yourself charting on the Billboard Hot 100 with industry executives at your door eating from your hand just to get you to sign with them. That scenario is the rap equivalent of luck. Who did you grow up with or meet that just had the one thing you were missing? Did you luck into meeting a fresh new DJ that had something to prove like when Salt-N-Pepa met DJ Spinderella? Or did you have a childhood friend that started his music career at the same time that you did, like Drake did with 40? Did you so happen to meet a plethora of artists that you helped produce, creating a network so large that now it seems that every single song you put out looks like the starting line-up of the NBA All-Star Game?
I will tell you now that there is really only two-people who can claim that latter, those being the late-great Eazy-E and DJ Khaled. Starting out as a DJ when he met a young Lil Wayne, Khaled would go on to produce for all-time great group Terror Squad, spearheaded by the iconic Big Pun, Remy Ma and Fat Joe. His contacts would grow and soon enough would release almost 11 full-length albums during his career, with three of them in three years. But this isn't sustainable
To begin, you have to understand the method that Khaled uses to make his album by analyzing his 2016 effort, Major Key. With a lot of his promotion coming from his Snapchat account, the album fared well commercially due to making himself more than brand - a pop culture sensation - through boisterous self-promotion and hilarious videos. The album saw the likes of artists from past, present and future giving some of their best work including Drake, Future, Jay-Z, Nicki Minaj, Big Sean, Kendrick Lamar, Chris Brown and Nas. Major Key was critically acclaimed for its cohesiveness and chemistry between the artists that never shared a studio together. The project went gold, with over 500,000 copies sold. But to get to this level of accomplishment, Khaled was forced to deviate from the hardcore boom-bap hip-hop that he had helped to innovate back in the days of Terror Squad to a much more subdued and sample heavy style that was easy to the ear and more digestible to a pop audience.
The 2017 sequel, Grateful, which saw the methods used in the previous years effort being pushed to their absolute limit. The lead single off the album, "I'm the One" is to date his most commercially successful track, reaching the number 1 spot in the Billboard Hot 100. Featuring Weezy F. Baby, Quavo, Chance and Justin Bieber, the track became one of the runner-ups for the song of the summer. But the inclusion of pop in the album didn't help it in the eyes of the critics, if anything, it damaged it. Many critics, such as DJ Akademiks, would say that features would be without chemistry, and not just on this track but throughout the entire project. It didn't help that the hilarious novelty that was DJ Khaled on snapchat and other social media were becoming stale, the album being really pushed by the fact that album was being executively produced by his infant son Asahd Khaled. While some songs on the album such as "Wild Thoughts" with Rihanna and Bryson Tiller, Beyoncé and Jay Z's"Shining" as well as 'On Everything" would fair well on the Billboard, the overall project wasn't a success compared to his previous work, proving the law of diminishing returns is right.
The 2000's saw the biggest stars of the day rap on the same tracks rarely, the biggest combination possible really being Eminem, 50 Cent and Dr. Dre but that came because they were all in the same label, that being Aftermath. But we've grown accustomed to big names coming together and making a track now. We're over following DJ Khaled on social media to see if the vocals came in yet. The law of diminishing returns is kicking in strong, with his newest song, "No Brainer" being seen as a rehash of "I'm the One" as it features the exact same group minus Wayne. How The Father of Asahd will fare is yet to be seen, but the negative response already seen by the two singles released, the other one being Top Off with Beyoncé and Jay-Z, isn't showing a promising signs of they are supposed to be the best songs. Hip-Hop never needed super teams to be good or popular, all it needed was good production, lyrical content and chemistry - big names don't always equal great things.