When NYC rapper and
50 Cent doppelganger
Troy Ave was profiled for his spot on the 2014 XXL Freshmen list, he seemed to overestimate his own status: "I thought the Freshmen cover was going to make it happen. Now, it’s going to happen either way. If they didn’t put me, it would be an outrage." It was a weird thing to hear from someone without a charting single or breakout mixtape to his credit. There were no reports of majors circling trying to scoop him up like the list’s other indie floaters,
Chance the Rapper and
Vic Mensa. He didn’t have a signature moment remotely as catalyzing as
Rich Homie Quan’s "Type of Way" or
Lil Durk’s "Dis Ain’t What You Want". Many were unsure of what exactly he’d done to even warrant selection. Yet, there he was, standing among several lauded up-and-comers (many of whom had already arrived) proclaiming himself their equal with little to no proof. One month later, he was on the main stage at Hot 97’s annual Summer Jam concert sharing a stage with
Nicki Minaj,
Nas, and 50 himself.
Fast forward to two weeks ago and Troy Ave was again performing on the main stage at Summer Jam, this time as a surprise guest and closer, promoting his new album,
Major Without a Deal, which boasts big-time NYC guests (50,
Cam’ron,
Fat Joe,
Fabolous,
Jadakiss, and
A$AP Ferg) and a single, "Doo Doo". NYC rap tastemakers have been force-feeding Ave as the city’s Next Great Hope for some time now, and it’s granted him quite a bit of unwarranted primetime exposure. Last May, Drew Millard wrote
a takedown of Troy Ave’s rising stardom for Noisey, citing specifically the shadiness of his relationships with figures in New York rap media (Ave ironically took to Hot 97 to trash Millard in response), and it’s hard to argue there isn’t some sort of backchanneling taking place considering the last rapper to perform on the main stage at Summer Jam in back-to-back years—
2 Chainz—had 14 songs reach the Top 15 on the
Billboard Rap Chart during that span. Troy Ave has zero. The NYC hip-hop machine has been pushing Troy Ave’s music as the new (read: current yet stodgily nostalgic) sound of the city, but there was a hitch: nobody is buying it, literally or figuratively.
When the Internet received word that
Major Without a Deal had sold only 4,373 copies in its first week, with just 30 of the albums being physicals, so many jokes flooded Twitter so fast that Troy Ave became a trending topic almost instantaneously. Even
Kreayshawn, whose own flop once served as fodder for the rap masses for entirely different reasons, took some time out to
throw a jabat Ave. Amid a sea of memes, the jig began to surface.
Billboard rushed quickly to momentarily halt the ridicule,
pointing out that the album was almost exclusively released to digital retailers that Friday (June 5), cutting its sales week in half. Additionally, the physicals would only be shipped that next Tuesday (June 9), altering the figures. It noted that Troy Ave’s previous album,
New York, had sold 6,000 copies total since its 2013 release, hinting that this would be an improvement. However, the article also makes a point of mentioning that Ave has yet to chart on any of
Billboard’s singles or airplay charts.
Regardless of the final numbers, though,
MWAD is a certified flop. Even by indie standards, it doesn’t stack up to the other rap releases from artists at similar points this year. Fellow XXL Freshmen alum Dizzy Wright moved 8,575 of
The Growing Process in his first week.
Joey Bada$$sold a whopping 53,990 copies of his
debut, tapping into the same NYC Golden Era nostalgia that Ave covets. Last week, in the midst of Troy mania, LA rapper Dom Kennedy moved
9,117 copies (20,678 with streams) in a debut. Only Bada$$ received the kind of exposure Ave has and his numbers are 10x bigger. By any conceivable measure, Troy Ave fell far short of the lofty expectations manufactured by his falsified prestige, self-inflation, and opportunism.
(
Major Without a Deal currently sits at #100 on the iTunes Albums Chart and #13 on the iTunes Hip-Hop/Rap Chart, one slot above
Kanye West’s
Graduation. The most recent Billboard Top Album Sales Chart suggests that the initial data for the incomplete digital sales week was accurate at 4,373 copies. The physical copies reportedly went out June 9th. According to Hits Daily Double, for the sales week ending 6/16/2015, the album didn’t chart in the Top 50, with #50—
Kidz Bop 28—selling 3,680 copies. From this, we can safely surmise that the final sales figures are no higher than 8,052, which still constitutes a flop for one-and-a-half weeks' worth of sales.)
Troy Ave’s response to the sales criticism was to
provide unverifiable data, claiming he pocketed 95% of the album’s profits, adding 30 thousand singles sold and proclaiming his final haul somewhere around $120 thousand. But as Pitchfork contributor Craig Jenkins
noticed, that would mean—in a best case scenario—it would be highly unlikely any collaborator got paid. It’s also worth noting that Troy Ave
signed to BMI Music, which handles artists’ licensing fees and royalties, in April of last year, and he arranged a distribution deal for
MWAD with EMPIRE distribution, so the idea that Ave is collecting all of his profits is, at best, inaccurate. In any case, Ave’s response isn’t an effective counter response to public response, which seems to overwhelmingly indicate Troy Ave isn’t what he was sold as and people know it.
The response to
Major Without a Deal’s reported flop tells us something about how the rap public at large really perceives Troy Ave and how it engages with his narrative, which revolves mostly around the achievements he never really earned. The natural reaction to the news wasn’t shock or even dissatisfaction; it was applause and ridicule. The scorn was the manifestation of a collective sense of gratification from rap fans whose long-held suspicions about Troy Ave had just been confirmed. This was never really about Troy Ave’s independent album selling poorly; it was about his touted status being revealed as a farce; it was about the industry rainmakers' ploy being exposed.
Troy Ave has been receiving an inordinate amount of push for someone with such middling talent, and rap fans all over have recognized there’s something suspect about his sudden ascension to the top rung of the New York rap hierarchy. Whether it’s his connection to Hot 97 (three of the station’s personalities hosted his June 3rd concert at SummerStage), his ties to MTV News (documented in the Millard piece), or his uncharacteristically heavy presence on blogs like Rap Radar (which produces 24 pages' worth of results for the Troy Ave tag, but only 16 for the Joey Bada$$ tag, 14 for the Young Thug tag, 12 for Rich Homie Quan, and seven for Chance), it's evident that Troy Ave has blatantly benefited from industry collusion and gladhanding rap politics.
It’s obvious backchanneling will continue to take place in rap and that "industry plants" and various forms of payola will always play a big part in shaping the sonic landscape. Troy Ave isn’t the only one out there; he just happens to be our most recent and most flagrant example. Media will always have a hand in framing an artist’s narrative, but there’s a big difference between establishing a narrative and weaving one where none exists. The industry overestimates its power when it thinks it can merely force feed us an artist and manufacture success; that time has passed. But if Troy Ave is any indication, it’s nigh impossible to sell people something they don’t actually want.
