It has only been a couple of weeks since Nicki Minaj released her album Queen. You would think she’d be happy with the end result given she’s had four years to tinker with it (48 months is basically three decades in Drake years). Not so: “Just listened to [opening track] #GangaBurns after a long day & realized that I hate how low I made the hook. Gotta get it swapped out,” she tweeted hours after the album was first made available.
Until recently, Minaj would have had no option but to grumble to herself, joining the many artists, from Radiohead to Lorde, who loathe sections of their back catalogue. But now, she can re-record parts she doesn’t like and change the files on Spotify. Indeed, she has already added another song, FEFE, to the record, noting that “because of streaming, we can update the albums”. In fact, if you downloaded Queen, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo and Travis Scott’s Astroworld the day they came out then, well, first of all you’re a very strange person who still pays to get MP3s, but also you’ll have outdated versions of those records.
Kanye was the first major artist to publicly own the fact that he was releasing an unfinished record, with his label Def Jam announcing, on the day The Life of Pablo came out, that “in the months to come, Kanye will release new updates, new versions, and new iterations of the album”. They called this “an innovative, continuous process; the album will be a living, evolving art project”, which is basically label-speak for: “We have literally no idea what Kanye might do, no one here even has his mobile number.”
In the months that followed, Kanye put Vic Mensa and Sia’s parts back on Wolves after previously removing them, and added the song Saint Pablo. Kanye appears to have encouraged his proteges to take a similar attitude to finality. Teyana Taylor, whose record was executive-produced by West, briefly floated the idea of releasing an updated version of it once the samples had been cleared. Travis Scott, also on West’s label, followed a similar path after fans complained that Astroworld track Yosemite was badly mixed.
Why stop there? There are a couple of records I would love to tweak, with or without the artist’s consent. I’d start by making a version of Rita Ora’s Your Song that comes up with a better rhyme for “sad songs” than “mad songs”, then I’d set about taking all the skits off every hip-hop record ever.
Some purists might argue that records are windows into a particular point in time and artists should leave them alone as a record of that particular moment, but then those are probably the same people who will spend £50 on a deluxe version of a Peter Gabriel album, remastered using technology unavailable at the time it was recorded, to play on their fancy soundsystems. So, who are the real philistines?
