I recognized instantly Lil Kim’s trifling and hateful catfight with Nicki Minaj for what it was as soon as it began — a manufactured scandal to generate interest in her upcoming e-Bay album. Yet, despite all the silicon parts, Kim failed to float on the surface because the music currents are in constant state of change, and it swallowed her up.
This brings up a point. You can’t just come out with a new CD anymore. Gone are the days where the music speaks for itself. It’s as if a scandal or some of other news-generating drama is packaged within the CD case and available for purchase, along with the album, at the register.
I knew that Lil Kim hadn’t been a power player in the game since the mid ’90s — which is like centuries in the music biz — so I knew that she wasn’t so much irate that Nicki was jacking her swag as much as she needs a boost to get hoisted back up into relevance. If anything, Lil Kim was jacking Nicki’s swag. Kim basically placed her reconstructed parts on Nicki’s back to climb the wall of post-fame obscurity. It worked for a minute, but the diminutive diva learned that using scandal or drama as a marketing mechanism to generate interest is extremely fleeting.
Now, you couldn’t find Lil Kim with a GPS system. Where’d she go???
So when Beyonce’s new single “Girls [Who Run the World]” is allegedly leaked online, music fans’ eyes rolled up in their heads, and they keep it pushing. And when the product isn’t worth your attention, after all that noise, the perpetrator of the manufactured scandal dies a slower artistic death.
With the 24-hour news cycle and information flowing in every direction, artists feel they need to interrupt the flow by tossing out a few cherry bombs into cyberspace to get everyone looking in their direction.
We understand the need to market your product to ensure maximum awareness. But some folk take it too far. 50 Cent has a new beef just around the time he drops a new joint. To date, however, he has yet to back up on all that gum-flapping with any of the cats he so called had a problem with. We need to get back to the days when artists actually depended on that intangible called “talent” to make it in the game.
–terry shropshire
