In case you missed it, Tyler the Creator and DJ Khaled debuted their new albums in the same week and the former took the number 1 spot with Igor, which shifted 165,000 units. Unfortunately, Khaled didn’t take the loss too gracefully, posting a now-deleted Instagram video that seemed to call out Tyler’s album.
“I make albums so people can play it and you actually hear it,” Khaled states in the video. “You know, driving your car you hear another car playing it, go to the barbershop you hear them playing it, turn the radio on and you hear them playing it, it’s playing everywhere.”
What the DJ/producer/not-very-inventive-hype-man seems to have missed, though, is the fact that the exposure of a record is literally what gets it on the charts. Tyler’s album – which Khaled seems to be referencing when he says he doesn’t make “no mysterious shit” (lol) – simply did better.
And there has been some controversy about the way that DJ Khaled’s album was sold in promotional bundles and how that counted towards album sales. But the fact is, grabbing a bunch of the most-hyped names in hip hop, slapping them on a fairly generic trap beat, and introducing each song with the same soundboard – “another one,” literally – just doesn’t stack up against Tyler, the Creator’s innovative songwriting, production, and visuals.
Amusingly, Tyler seems to have slyly acknowledged Khaled’s shade as well. He’s responded to a comment that says “wow doin pretty good for some ‘mysterious shit’” on Twitter and jokingly commented on an Insta poll about which album’s better, saying: “who tf listens to tyler the creator?”.