Trey Songz: Second Wind
By Dasun Allah
— A rapper’s mindset helps the R&B bad boy breathe new life into his latest album, Ready.
Trey Songz is one artist for whom the metaphor of the “second wind” works on many levels. With the recent success of his third studio album, Ready, ignited by the fourth and fifth singles: “I Invented Sex” and “Say Aah,” Trey Songz has come to a long-awaited breakthrough in a career that has long lingered on the cusp of R&B’s top tier. Ready is the 23-year-old singer songwriter’s highest charting effort to date—debuting at number 3 on the Billboard 200 and currently Top 10 on the R&B/Hip-Hop chart. It was Trey’s first album to sell more than 100, 000 copies in its first week and four of the album’s singles have appeared all over Billboard—the latest being “I Invented Sex,” which is rapidly climbing the R&B/Hip-Hop Top 10 [check out the steamy video clip below; you sure won't see it on 106 & Park]. With his first headlining spot on a national tour, Trey Songz finally seems poised to fulfill his stated goal four years after his debut I Gotta Make It, . Ready is a fitting testimony to perseverance coupled with a rapper’s mentality.
When Songz says “I think like a rapper,“ the comparison applies to both his music and his marketing. His songs are often written from a hip-hop perspective, and in utilizing mixtapes to broker a buzz, Songz capitalizes on strategies that have served rappers from 50 Cent to Gucci Mane and Lil Wayne very well in recent years. He has empoyed this viral marketing technique since the very start. “I had a deal when I was doing mixtapes,” says Songz. “I wanted people to hear my music without restraints, without the A&Rs, without the label. I wanted people to hear my thoughts and what my music would be without boundaries.” That ideal serves him to this day. “That’s what it began as and I kinda just kept wanting to feed the public because with the Internet now… I can hit a button and the song goes out to 300,000 people instantaneously.”
Working the mixtape grind like a rapper helped Songz to be more than prepared for Ready. It seemed like every time a hot rap record came out, Trey Songz would soon use the beat to create his own version. “It goes directly to the fans and in that way I know what my fans want from me,” says Songz. “I don’t have to wait for a label to say: ‘Maybe that’s not going to work in this format,’ or ‘It’s not going to work because of this, it won’t research well, this, that, or the other.’ The fans love it. I have that on my side now, which is why I believe this album is more of me than any other album has been.” Such thinking led to prolific song production—Songz estimating that he put out close to 80 songs in total. Apart from his official Atlantic Records release, two new mixtapes, Genesis and Anticipation, were released earlier this year. On one song in particular, Songz entered the battle arena and may even have provided a second wind for one of his elders, or at the very least, a little huffing and puffing.
In June, he released a song over Jay-Z’s “Death of Autotune” track that took R. Kelly to task for following recent trends instead of setting them. “I knew initially when I did it that there would be a great amount of people that wouldn’t understand it,” says Songz of the diss track, titled “D.O.K.” or Death of Kellz.
“For a lot of R. Kelly fans I was saying what we’ve been wanting to say for so long… As of late, R. Kelly hasn’t been doing that music that’s like ‘Wow!’ And as a fan, as a human, as a person, I stated my opinion on that record. And I think a lot of people took it as I thought I had the right to say so as a musician, I had the accolades to say so… and that’s not the reason I’m saying that. I’m saying it because I’m a disappointed fan.” Kellz may have dismissed the Songz shots with elephant-and-fly analogies, but nevertheless, he took a page from the rapper playbook and jumped into the mixtape market himself this year.
While The Trey Songz vs. R. Kelly situation may represent yet another Hip Hop element evident in contemporary R&B, the R&B balladeer with the badass B-Boy swagger is nothing new. At the root, R&B was the streets of its day. The Doo-wop groups of the 40’s-60’s would gather on inner-city street corners and harmonize in much the same manner as emcees congregate in ciphers to trade verses today. Artists such as Aaron Hall and Jodeci help craft the template for the modern R&B bad boy and with Songz and contemporaries such as Pretty Ricky and Pleasure P, the line between R&B and Hip Hop as the soundtrack to the streets will continue to become increasing blurred. In the meantime, as videos for “I Invented Sex” and “Say Aah” make their way into circulation, Trey Songz has more than just a second wind. He can look at his current accomplishments and exhale a contented sigh of relief.
ABOUT THIS AUTHOR
Reply