Jermaine Dupri has used the release of Sexyy Red‘s latest album to make a point about the true current state of Hip Hop and how he believe the genre can be salvaged..
Appearing at United Masters’ SelectCon conference in Atlanta over the weekend, the So So Def legend spoke in conversation withe the distribution platform’s CEO Steve Stoute and offered his thoughts on the matter.
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“People gotta stop lying,” he said. “That’s the beginning of the answer…The industry still tries to make you believe that if you a hot artist and you got a single, that selling albums don’t matter…Akademiks posted today about Sexyy Red album only doing 28,000 copies.
“In the era that I came in the music industry, if you sold 28,000 copies, you didn’t get no other chance to walk in the building again. N-ggas was not talking to you if you sold 28,000 records. It’s such a disconnect between people understanding the streaming situation and actually what you looking at.”
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He added: “I came from an era where the numbers were 80,000 100, 200, 800, 900. This feels like it’s going backwards to me.”
It should be noted that while Sexxy Red’s latest project In Sexyy We Trust actually sold 27,000 equivalent units, in today’s music industry, that was enough to land the release at the no. 17 position on the Billboard 200 album chart. Check out the clip below, which begins at about the 18:40 mark.
While Sexyy’s album sales might have disappointed Dupri, she’s still one of the biggest rising names in rap.
Last week, Lil Baby announced he was gearing up for another Sexyy Red collaboration that she herself seems to have confirmed.
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The Atlanta native shared an unreleased song snippet on his Instagram Stories that featured vocals by the pair.
“All my n-ggas a plug, I ain’t never gotta buy no weed,” the 26-year-old can be heard rapping in the preview, following which her peer takes over.
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Soon after the Grammy winner teased the track on social media, the St. Louis spitter shared the clip on X (formerly Twitter), though neither have shared a release date for the song yet.
Sexyy Red and Lil Baby previously joined forces on “Lick Me” earlier this year, which was released as part of In Sexyy We Trust.
Music aside, Sexyy Red has has been branching out of late.
The “Pound Town” rapper, who is a lifelong wrestling fan, made her debut on WWE NXT earlier this week, where she announced that she will be hosting the upcoming Battleground event at the UFC Apex in Las Vegas.
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She also met pro wrestling veteran Shawn Michaels backstage, and the pair appeared in a video together in which they could both be seen singing the chorus to his theme song “I’m A Sexy Boy.”
Soon after, WWE chief content officer and head of creative Triple H responded to the clip on social media, joking: “Let’s all be glad he didn’t start twerking.”
