The Irony of Mandatory Fun

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Muldernscully
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The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Muldernscully »

I find it ironic that Al's first album with no obvious hit lead single (Sorry, Handy is not lead single material) is his first album that charts #1 on Billboard. This just goes to show what a marketing genius Al is. He realized that his 5 parodies were all good but not of them were great, worthy of being the lead single. So, he comes up with this 8 videos in 8 days campaign that is a huge success. Nobody even cares that there is no lead single, everybody's just talking about him having the number one album and he's more popular than ever!

I hope this idea of Al's of not having the traditional album works out for him. I think he was correct when he discussed that in this day of Youtube parodies, it's difficult for Al to have the first, original parody idea for a song. By the time these 5 parodies came out, several youtubers had already done multiple parodies of the songs.

I'm excited to see him come out with parodies when the original is still fresh, kind of like what he did with the T.I. song.
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tomatochives
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

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Kevbo1987
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Kevbo1987 »

Muldernscully wrote:I find it ironic that Al's first album with no obvious hit lead single (Sorry, Handy is not lead single material) is his first album that charts #1 on Billboard. This just goes to show what a marketing genius Al is. He realized that his 5 parodies were all good but not of them were great, worthy of being the lead single. So, he comes up with this 8 videos in 8 days campaign that is a huge success. Nobody even cares that there is no lead single, everybody's just talking about him having the number one album and he's more popular than ever!
I'm not really sure it was a case of Al not thinking that any one of the parodies was good enough to be a lead single. I think in Al's case, it's more of a realization that the concept of a "lead single" isn't all that relevant anymore. Al doesn't actually release "singles" to radio stations, so there's not really all that much of a point to worrying about which song is the lead single. It also wasn't lost on Al that in the internet age, some of his songs that weren't "lead singles," or really weren't promoted at all, have become more popular than the songs that were intended to be the lead single. "eBay" is the most prominent example that comes to mind.
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Jigawatt »

Very true, Kevbo. In the case of MF, while I don't think Al would have ever considered Word Crimes to be a lead single, that seemed to be the parody into which the general non-fan public could really sink their teeth. Scientific evidence: family members of mine who would normally not give Al the time of day contacting me to let me know that it was the greatest thing ever. :lol:
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mellow weasel
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by mellow weasel »

Jigawatt wrote:I don't think Al would have ever considered Word Crimes to be a lead single
Well, in this interview he kind of says he would have, if it wasn't a year old by the time the album came out.
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Muldernscully
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Muldernscully »

mellow weasel wrote:
Jigawatt wrote:I don't think Al would have ever considered Word Crimes to be a lead single
Well, in this interview he kind of says he would have, if it wasn't a year old by the time the album came out.
Thanks for the link, mellow.
If I had come up with my ‘Blurred Lines’ parody in the summer of 2013, I would have thought it would have been a good single. When the album came out, it was still the most popular track on the album, but I wasn’t as confident about saying it’s the first single because by that time there were like 10,000 parodies of the song on YouTube. You don’t want to come out a year later with your parody.
It's like I said, Al didn't feel like anything was lead single material. In hind sight, he was right about Word Crimes and it should have been the first track on the album.
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Kevbo1987
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Kevbo1987 »

Yeah, but there's a difference between what you said and what Al said. You said Al realized that his parodies were good, but not great, and none of them was good enough to be a lead single. In that interview, Al was only addressing "Word Crimes," and he was saying he didn't feel it could be a single because he was too late with the parody. He would have considered "Word Crimes" to be lead single material (meaning he thought it was good enough to be the lead single) if "Blurred Lines" hadn't been so dated at that point. I still say that I don't think that the reason Al didn't issue a lead single had nothing to do with his perceived quality of the parodies.
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Muldernscully
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Muldernscully »

Fair enough. What do you think his reason was for not issuing a lead single?
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mellow weasel
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by mellow weasel »

Muldernscully wrote:Fair enough. What do you think his reason was for not issuing a lead single?
He already explained his opinion, and had a good point. If you don't remember, scroll up and read again. Also Al explained his reasons in many interviews, it's not some kind of a mystery :stern:
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Re: The Irony of Mandatory Fun

Post by Kevbo1987 »

Muldernscully wrote:Fair enough. What do you think his reason was for not issuing a lead single?
I think he had a couple of reasons. First, Al gets very little radio airplay, so there isn't much of a point to issuing a single. Also, as Al has said, he wanted to try to make as large of an impact as possible during Mandatory Fun's release week. He saw that a great way to do that was to release one new music video per day for eight days, which would garner much more attention than simply releasing one single.
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