In January, the hype began for a new project from J. Cole’s label, Dreamville. Having recently softened my stance as a resound J Cole hater, my interest was piqued. As fellow Reddit-based rap nerds will tell you, however, the initial hype for this project had little to do with J Cole himself, instead it was the artists he was sharing the studio with.
About a year before this album roll-out, I had started to gain a lot of interest in Dreamville and the artists coming out of it. One of my more “J Cole-appreciative” friends would always turn me on the latest Dreamville release. His recommendations were often greeted with a lukewarm response. The first was J.I.D, an Atlanta rapper quickly gaining popularity in the underground internet community. My friend had sent me The Never Story earlier in the year, and I dismissed it after one listen. After some more recommendations later in the year, I returned to it and found the project and artist deserved a lot more credit than I had previously given. He had a knack for melody, a killer flow, and filled short songs with a lot of personality and charisma.
My J.I.D awakening quickly turned into something bigger. I bought tickets to his upcoming Seattle show featuring EARTHGANG (another Dreamville artist). I looked into their work, and I was hooked. Then came Bas and Cozz. Soon I was a legitimate Dreamville fan. I would’ve worn a free T shirt!
“Having recently softened my stance as a resound J Cole hater, my interest was piqued.”
Now, a year and two more exciting Dreamville releases later, Revenge of the Dreamers 3 is announced.
Then comes one of the best hip-hop related promotion techniques in recent memory, the invite. Over the course of two or three days, artists from Vince Staples to Saba start sharing the invitation. There weren’t may chart toppers sharing invites, but that only added to the lore. It was like if A$AP Rocky’s 2013 posse cut 1Train was applied to this generation and stretched into a whole album.
Fans started compiling lists of all the artists posting invites. Then J Cole took over NBA all-star weekend. He gave a halftime performance that put the Super Bowl to shame, and spent the whole weekend promoting the upcoming Dreamville release.
Things then slowed down significantly. Artists were quiet about the release, and most of the excitement came from Dreamville artists playing select ROTD3 tracks at their shows. Then in late June, Cole announced a documentary to come from the sessions, followed shortly by the album itself.
I watched the documentary Thursday before the release of the project, and it replenished the excitement I had six months ago for the project. The 30 min documentary (available on YouTube) shows the artists working together over the course of 10 days in Atlanta. Individuals are pulled away from their work and their short interviews serve as a narrative for the sessions. The anticipation though, comes from seeing the artists work together. The energy comes straight from the studio to the documentary.
It’s also fun seeing the artists’ personalities and interactions. Buddy and J.I.D are like two kids that met at summer camp, decided to immediately become best friends and wreak havoc on the rest of camp. Smino and Saba are the cool kids that got invited to rap camp. J Cole holds his own as the OG of the sessions, something he alludes to in an interview.
There might be a sense of awe coming across in this writing, but I think that reflects what was happening in the studio. There is a feeling of wonder and amazement emanating from many of the artists during the session. Smino talks about how he has never been apart of anything like this before.
Showing off studio time as promotion isn’t anything new. Social media is making it easier for artists to document studio time as it happens. A recent example of this is Kanye West’s 2016 The Life of Pablo production. Tweets and videos from West and his collaborators flooded all social media in the months leading up to the February release. A (constantly evolving) track list was signed by everyone that came by the studio during the recording process, videos and images of West dancing on the mixing table circulated.
Pictures of different artists in the studio together are shared daily on Instagram, building hype for collaborations that often never happen. Travis Scott and Quavo announced that they finished their joint mixtape with a picture of the mixing board with their names on it. The Foo Fighters made a whole HBO show about the production of their 2014 album, Sonic Highways. Songs leak (sometimes on purpose), and people get excited.
“Buddy and J.I.D are like two kids that met at summer camp, decided to immediately become best friends and wreak havoc on the rest of camp.”
It’s becoming harder and harder to keep the production of the album a secret. Some artists are doing the opposite, by using information that will probably leak and turning it into promotion.
In the case of Revenge of the Dreamers 3, sharing the energy from the studio makes the tracks come across even better. The havoc-wreaking of J.I.D and Buddy comes across in Wells Fargo, which has a hook chanted by a group of the invitees. In the doc, the group is filmed bouncing in a circle yelling “GET MY GUN, I’M BOUT TO ROB A WELLS FARGO.” The half-cypher, half-smoke sesh, 1993, has Buddy bringing every verse to an abrupt halt. “Less rapping, more passing.”
This album is comparable to only a few other projects I’ve ever heard. The Life of Pablo again comes to mind. The premiere of the album was in Madison Square Garden during West’s 2016 Fall/Winter fashion show. All his friends and collaborators were alongside him, vibing and dancing to songs that the rest of us were hearing in full for the first time. Listeners were reminded of that scene every time The Life of Pablo came through their Spotify account.
Zack Fox and Kenny Beats recently came out with a song, Jesus is the One (I Got Depression) that stemmed from a session on Kenny’s The Cave YouTube show. The episode chronicles Kenny making a beat for Zack and the chaos that ensues in writing and rapping the verse(s). After seeing that video, it makes the Spotify track infinitely more enjoyable. This is a case when not seeing the studio time would lead to a diminished listening experience.
It’s hard not to think about the documentary when hearing Revenge of the Dreamers 3. I’ve listened to the album at least five times, and I can’t really differentiate the two. How do you rate the accomplishments of the album as something greater than an audio version of a really cool hangout? It took me a long time to do that with The Life of Pablo, but that also had the added excitement of being a Kanye West release. Does this dependency make the album lesser? I don’t think so. Is an in-studio documentary the streaming era’s version of steroids? Perhaps.
Good music invokes feelings, and many of these tracks do just that for me. There are some tracks though, that really don’t. The excitement of the studio energy is the best part of this project. When the album transition from that to a song like Down Bad, I lose a bit of interest. That might have to do with my expectation of a rap cypher heavy project, or I might just not like Ari Lennox.
That’s the downside of a project like this. It is best digested as a mixtape, a collection of songs without a through line. There’s not really a connecting stream through the project other than how often Dreamville voices come up. There’s also a lot of songs, 18 to be exact.
So, does this project deserve the full-blown criticism of a classic studio release? Probably. But even if it doesn’t pass that test, it’s still very good for rap music and music culture in general that this album and multimedia experience exists.
