When I created my Twitter account in 2011, one of the first accounts I followed was Jay Z. The man has been not only a great rapper, but a fixture in pop culture for so long that it seemed only natural to me that he’d have some interesting things to say on the first platform that really let superstars connect with the public. I was fairly wrong about this.
Hov made his opinion of the service pretty clear on Magna Carta… Holy Grail with the line “fuck hashtags and retweets,” although this was already evident from the fact that six months regularly pass between @S_C_ tweets, when the rest of us can’t seem to get through breakfast without rifling off 140 characters.
So whenever we do get a peep out of Mr. Carter you know he has something that he really, really wants to say. That was the case this weekend when the normally quiet account erupted in a flurry of activity to defend the floundering Tidal.
It’s no secret that the streaming service Jay purchased earlier this year has been struggling. To me it seemed like a rushed decision inspired by other artists who recently made a shit-load of cash off of a tech company. It quickly fell out of the iPhone’s top 700 downloads chart while at the same time, Tidal’s attack campaigns on competitors Spotify and Pandora actually helped pushed those two into the top 10.
If you want to read through the entire rant you can do so here, but the general premise is basically “Guys, stop making fun of Tidal! It’s doing fine. Really. Guys, stop!”
I like to picture this began with Jay reading the Youtube comments section (always a bad idea) of the Tidal commercial video before going “Damnit, that’s it! Bey, what’s my twitter password??” followed by a 30-minute search for the post it note that he wrote it down on when he last tweeted, in 2014.
Now, I get where Jay is coming from. He has to defend his investment. My problem with this whole thing is that it just feels a little desperate. And he made matters worse today when he announced that part of the “exclusive content” that Tidal has been dangling in front of potential subscribers would be an exclusive concert of “Jay Z B-Sides”
Yup, Jay basically just said “Hey everyone, you know all those number one hit songs that have defined me as one of the most successful artists of all time? How would you feel about a concert where I specifically don’t play those!! Anyways, subscriptions start at $9.99, but for $19.99 you get…”
This whole thing is just giving more credence to what people have suspected for a while: that his wealth and success have caused the rapper who once lost 92 bricks to lose touch with his roots. Hopefully he can crawl back from this too, but for now I’m giving Mr. Carter a 15 point deduction.