What Happened To The Charlie Wilson Album?
Earlier this year, I posted the video for “Supa Sexxy”, former Gap Band singer Charlie Wilson’s collaboration with T-Pain. At the time, I wonderd why the track wasn’t more popular. Now, it’s eight months later and the album of the same title seems to be lost forever. But why?
To me, a Charlie Wilson album, if promoted well at all, seems like somewhat of a gimme. The Gap Band is still all over radio–in particular, “Outstanding”, which has some of the best bongo action of any R&B track in history.
Wilson’s last album, hot off his appearance on Snoop’s “Beautiful”, did relatively well; it debuted at No. 10 on the Billboard 200 and “Supa Sexxy” did OK at urban radio. Then a somewhat poor choice for a second single, “Homeless,” was sent to radio, and for some reason a third track, “There Goes My Baby” was released to iTunes.
“Homeless”:
“There Goes My Baby”:
Still, with nearly a year of working the album’s tracks–including two that got some traction at radio–the album doesn’t appear to be scheduled for release at this point, with its preorder page disappearing from Amazon. To me, this just seems like a bizarre saga of poor management by his label, Jive. The album is full of guest appearances–T-Pain, Chris Brown, Justin Timberlake, Snoop–and sometimes negotiating the rights to promote singles with artists on other labels can be a nightmare. But Timberlake and Brown are also on Jive. Why wouldn’t the label lead with those tracks? With Timberlake a decent distance from new material of his own, you’d think radio would be interested in whatever he was up to musically these days
It’s one thing to bump an act back with little name recognition or chart success, but Charlie Wilson’s a pretty strong brand and recording an album with production by Stargate and a guest spot by Lil Wayne couldn’t have been cheap. Wouldn’t it help the company’s bottom line if the record was actually made available for sale?
“Shawty Come Back” (featuring Lil Wayne and Baby):
Charlie Wilson [poorly updated label page]
