My Thoughts On Posthumous Albums

 

            What’s up guys, hope you are all having a fantastic week. This weekend I saw Pop Smoke’s second post-humous album come out and I’ve heard mixed reviews on it. I’m currently listening to it and the more I listen, the more frustrated I become. The concept of a post-humous album is to pretty much release unreleased music from an artist who has died suddenly. Before, I feel like this was an honest attempt to have a certain artist who meant a lot to fans exit the music industry with a bang through an album dedicated to those who were a part of the journey. An example of this for me would probably be Mac Miller who had family and friends creating a final project to give to those who supported him so much. To me, the album “Circles” was a touching attempt at recreating a Mac album with effort and love. However, I have seen some examples of post-humous albums being used as a cash cow against those who aren’t alive to fight it. The hip-hop/rap scene today has definitely been a huge culprit in releasing multiple posthumous projects for the sole reason of getting top album of the year. Unfortunately, I think this is the case with Pop Smoke’s album, “Faith”. Upon looking right at the tracklist, I knew this wasn’t a genuine project but rather a checklist of seeing which rappers are the most relevant. Let me go over the features in this album:

·         Kanye West

·         Pusha T x 2

·         Rick Ross

·         The-Dream

·         21 Savage

·         42 Dugg

·         Rah Swish

·         TRAVI, Beam

·         Bizzy Banks

·         Takeoff

·         Future

·         Chris Brown

·         Dua Lipa

·         Pharell Williams

·         Kid Cudi

·         Quavo

·         Kodak Black

HOLY SHIT THOSE ARE A LOT OF FEATURES! In a modern project that’s released in the rap scene today, I would see either half or less of those number of features. With this flood of popular rappers suddenly including their work with Pop Smoke, it just comes off as an insincere attempt at making music with an artist who has amazing potential. If anything, it kind of looks like these rappers saw the opportunity to make a song that was going to make a lot of money and was like “Sure, why not.” The songs themselves don’t redeem the artists from this point of view because there are a lot of songs scattered in this album like “Back Door” that doesn’t sound like Pop Smoke’s sound but rather a random song by other artists with Pop Smoke doing the background vocals and chorus. Even if some of these artists were trying to make an honest attempt at making a song for Pop Smoke, there isn’t much for us to go off of when the lyrics are the exact same as those in the artist’s discography. The issue with this is that there’s a belief that is that Pop Smoke wasn’t alive to create this whole song, so we had these artists fill in the blanks. But wait a minute… wasn’t the point of a posthumous album to release songs the artist was alive to make but wasn’t to release them?

Another thing that bothers me is the number of projects that are released posthumously for each artist. An artist that I can’t believe is still releasing music posthumously is Prince. He’s an amazing artist, but god damn is his label milking his name to the last drop. Each project is marketed to being the pure, untouched project that shows Prince for who he was but in reality, they’re just snippets or redo’s of prior songs. For Pop Smoke, I feel like this second album was too much. Pop Smoke died on February 19, 2020 and his first posthumous album was released on July 20, 2020. This album was a much better rendition of what a project by Pop Smoke sounded like. There were some pop bangers, a couple of hard and tough songs with rappers, and even some slower songs that touched his opinion on relationships. While it doesn’t look much different from “Faith” with a similar amount of features and songs, I’ll look past it because this was the first (and should maybe be only) project released posthumously for Pop Smoke. It was also a great time to release this project because with everything else happening during that year, it would have been great to have a project to hold on to during the summer. But now, you’re telling me there’s enough music to create a 20 song album a whole year after that? If there were some great songs, why not include it already in the prior album? Again, this to me comes off as an effort for the label and those who have the rights to take advantage of Pop Smoke’s moment in fame to make some money. This is a tough and honestly challenging topic for me to go over because I personally have lost a lot of artists I loved and have enjoyed some songs after his/her death. But there comes a point where something has to be said about the state of posthumous albums and the evil truth that can sometimes be easily hidden by promoting an effort to do good.

I hope you guys enjoyed this post as much as I did. This blog has been a great platform for me to release my thoughts on topics like this and I want to do more of this later. I hope you all have a great week and I’ll catch you later!