Rihanna, Drake, Kanye West & Frank Ocean Should Drop Their Albums on the Same Day
The year's all but done. The Big Fall Album seats have more or less been filled. Adele's 25 is coming; so are records from Justin Bieber, Coldplay and One Direction. And yet, as 2015 sews up its final seams, we're still seeing albums teased by four of music's biggest personalities.
Rihanna cancels a performance so she can finish her Unapologetic follow-up. Frank Ocean bails on a festival for the same reason. Kanye West comrades say he played his record on loop at a club and that it's perfect and coming any day. In a Drake cover story, his team says his album, which he titled a year and a half ago, is arriving "imminently."
None of these have been weeks-long teases; this has been going on all year. Will any of the droughts end before the calendar flips? January's a bleak time to send a big album into the world; if we reach New Year's Day without any of these projects, we're likely back at square one. With seven weeks left in the year, we're left to wonder, for nowhere near the first time, when Kanye, Rihanna, Drake and Frank are actually planning to make moves.
And really, it could happen: after all, Beyoncé clinched 2013 with 18 days left on the clock, dropping a self-titled "visual album" on iTunes with zero warning and effectively hoisting a buzzer beater we didn't even know had been shot until it swished through the net. That's the sort of shock-and-awe these four horsemen of the albumocalpyse have the power to recreate—and they shouldn't do it individually.
The way to win this outrageously competitive moment in music, to change the entire fourth-quarter conversation, is to team up, Avengers-style. The easy solution to conquer the expectations these artists have both constructed and fallen victim to is this: Innovate. Make history. Four albums, one day.
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