Wiz Khalifa Was Specific to a Time
Assessing the legacy of “Kush and OJ” on its 7-year anniversary.
On April 14, 2010 Wiz Khalifa released his eighth mixtape, Kush & Orange Juice. Simultaneously, my friends and I were in the thick of the oft-cliched “best time of our lives.” Two months away from High School graduation, the mixtape arrived at the twighlight of our childhood. Seemingly overnight, Kush & OJ became the go-to soundtrack for every car ride, party, and hangout; while becoming the favored means of escapism during each day’s battle with senioritis. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, one would take out their iTouch, scroll to the mixtape, and press play.
At the time, while it was obvious that every kid of a certain age was obsessing over Kush & OJ, it never seemed like a moment, compared to say, Kanye’s Graduation and Lil’ Wayne’s Tha Carter III. While the latter two were hearlded as classics right out of the gate, the former benefitted from its lack of competition. To put things into perspective, Hip-hop was amidst a period of turnover in the spring of 2010. Jay-Z and Eminem were well past their primes; The unanimously-considered “Best Rapper Alive”, Lil’ Wayne, had just begun his nine-month stint at Rikers; Kanye was busy recording his first post-VMA/Taylor Swift album; And Drake was awaiting the release of his debut album, set for that upcoming June.
And so, Kush & OJ came at the most opportune time. That’s not to say it wasn’t genuinely loved, rather the exact opposite. What I mean is, if, for instance, a rapper bigger than Wiz had dropped their newest project around the same time, I wonder if Kush & OJ would’ve experienced the same lasting effects. By the time we graduated — two months after its release — although its buzz had worn off, the mixtape was still the first music played in any setting. In a way, it became background noise. In hindsight, this quality contributed to its permenant legacy.
There are certain albums that exist in your catalog of favorites not by their replayability or degree of excellence, but rather because of the personal setting they were released in. Hindsight shows that deep down, these are the special ones. Seven years on, listening to Kush & OJ rarely brings about a newfound appreciation for Wiz Khalifa, the rapper. No matter, though. More fittingly, each track induces feelings of nostalgia attached to specific memories of my last summer before going away to college. Although I’m biased in this specific exploration, music’s ability to produce qualities reminiscent of a moment in time, is a universal pleasure.
Any Hip-hop fan falling outside of my demographic may have a hard time fathoming Wiz’ significance. For anyone under-18, their only Khalifa memories are attached to the commercialized image that followed Kush & OJ, the guy that has dominated radio with shabby pop-rap singles — “Roll Up”, “No Sleep”, “We Dem Boyz”, and “See You Again.” Likewise, it’s reasonable to assume that any Hip-hop listener over 25 years-old in 2010, overlooked Khalifa as just another up-and-coming rapper. Regardless, it’s easy to diminsh Wiz’ impact as nothing more than a quick blip on the radar.
That being said, revisionist history shows this belief is far from true. In retrospect, Wiz was the first rapper to use the combined power of Twitter, DatPiff, and his standing as an independent artist, to launch one of the biggest rap careers this decade.
It’s easy to forget that in 2010 Wiz was already on Act II of his career. In 2007, he signed to Warner Bros. Records and released his debut single, “Say Yeah”, in April 2008. The track reached number 20 on Billboard’s Hot Rap Tracks, steering Wiz toward commercial fame. In the end, Khalifa parted ways with Warner Bros. in June 2009 after numerous delays in releasing his planned debut album.
At a time when independent rappers were rare, Wiz succeeded by combining the power of his cult-like following on Twitter, with the online mixtape distributor, DatPiff. For as much credit we give to Chance the Rapper for pioneering this approach, Khalifa mastered it first.
One hour after Khalifa released Kush & OJ via his Twitter page, his supporters pushed the hashtag #kushandorangejuice to the №1 spot on Twitter’s trending topics list, and “Kush and Orange Juice download” became the top-searched item on Google. In essence, he was one of the first rappers to break the internet.
In order to understand Kush & OJ’s ground-breaking precedent, you have to remember the early days of the social-media era. In April 2010, Twitter had 30 million active users; in April 2017, it has 319 million. Nowadays, promoting an album via social-media is the rule rather than the exception. Seven years ago, it was an unorthodox strategy to take matters in your own hands. With Twitter serving as the promotion tool for Kush & OJ’s instantaneous popularity, DatPiff was the vehicle.
Launched in 2005, DatPiff capitalized on Lil’ Wayne’s mid ’00s run of mixtapes, as the site monoplolized the online mixtape distribution process by the late ’00s. At the time, Lil’ Wayne held the record for most downloads in DatPiff history, with 2009’s No Ceilings amassing 1.3 million. In its first week, Kush & OJ shattered the record, accumulating over 1.4 million downloads.
In one week, Wiz became the biggest rapper on the planet. While we had seen rappers rapidly ascend to superstardom before, this was unprecedented. Although quick, Eminem, 50 Cent, and Drake’s rise was the by-product of a commercially-packaged first single. Wiz accomplished this feat through the power of social-media.
Last year, Hip-hop’s newest generation of stars — Lil’ Yachty, Lil’ Uzi Vert, and 21 Savage — experienced their own rapid ascent into mainstream Hip-hop. Even though they did so without releasing debut studio albums, their popularity was by way of “commercial mixtapes” distributed by major record labels and streamed through Apple Music. Granted, 2017 isn’t 2010, thus it’s not sensible to diminish their adoration due to necessary reliance on Hip-hop’s gatekeepers. Further, I would come across as the “get off my lawn” guy if I did so, which is ironic in of itself, considering Hip-hop’s three newest stars are Millenials like myself.
With that said, it’s hard not to feel nostalgic for a simpler time, when it was incomprehensible for a rapper to attain prominence overnight, by dropping their newest material on the internet. Nowadays, it seems that any rapper can accomplish this feat. In hindsight, the freshness of Wiz’ approach probably romanticizes the strategy itself. Maybe the legacy I’m attaching to him is skewed, in that it’s coming from a Hip-hop head who’s a part of the demographic Wiz was pandering too. While it’s all relative, one thing is for certain. When you think of the biggest rappers who broke through during the early ‘10s — Drake, Kendrick, J. Cole, Big Sean, Meek Mill, and Wiz — only Wiz’ mainstream popularity still felt like it was pushed by a cult-like following. In the end, he’s a timestamp to a specific period, and maybe that’s enough.
