Last week, about 100 never-before-heard Young Thug and Rich Homie Quan songs appeared on the Internet. 

While the rap game is no stranger to leaks, the timing was odd. Young Thug’s “Barter 6” just dropped a month ago, and Rich Homie Quan’s new mixtape “If You Ever Think I Will Stop Goin’ In Ask Double R” (“Double R” is short for Royal Rich, his son), came out only three weeks ago. And when projects leak, it’s usually somewhere between 10 to 30 songs. The leaking of 100 songs at once is like seven albums dropping by the same artist.

These leaked songs are a collection of unreleased works — like an earlier draft of Jamie XX and Young Thug’s collaboration “I Know There’s Gonna Be (Good Times),” songs that may have sat in the studio forever or may have ended up on future projects. With lots of production credits from London on da Track and Metro Boomin, it’s hard to imagine that all of these would have sat in the vault forever. Especially considering that even in their unfinished state, some of them are really good.

But a lot of those songs weren’t ready for release. They were unmastered and still needed further refining in the studio. Now that they’re released to the public, though, those songs are as finished as they’re going to be. Young Thug’s engineer Alex Tumay took to Reddit to talk about his disappointment with the leak shortly after they hit the Internet:

“These songs were a huge part of the past two years of my life. Most of those tracks probably would’ve ended up coming out for free when they were completed and the time was right, but they are for the most part unfinished. Whoever leaked them has no respect for music or the work that goes into creating it. Now there is a very real chance that these unfinished versions will be the only ones that people ever hear. I don’t have the time to devote to mixing/arranging the leaks for free, and I doubt there’s any interest to pay to have them mixed now that they leaked, so these will be the most complete versions people hear. We spent months on months, more or less living in the studio, creating these tracks.”

 

Tumay declined further comment, saying he would prefer not to bring more light to the leak than he already did.

The leak did more than just ruin those songs by releasing them unfinished — they threw Rich Homie Quan right into the middle of what could have been a huge PR fiasco.

From the leaks, the song “I Made It” features Quan rapping about rape. These lyrics were featured on a Complex article that called out Quan, that said, “We wish Quan would have had the presence of mind not to say this sh*t in the first place.”

Eminem and Earl Sweatshirt have rapped about rape in songs that they intentionally released, and faced controversy for doing so. But “I Made It” was never intended to be released. In a Breakfast Club interview that Quan did Wednesday morning, he said that the song “was not lyrically what I wanted to say and was not completed … I apologize that it’s out; and I have asked my lawyer to pursue a cease and desist on the song immediately. To be clear, I would never condone rape.”

Whether you believe Quan was genuine in his apology for those lyrics or not, it doesn’t matter. To judge an artist on his works before they’re allowed to complete them, whether it’s based on lyrical content or the mastering of the audio, is unfair.

To track down where leaks come from is always an exercise in futility. This time around, Complex did some investigating and found that the leak most likely came from someone in a circle of music completionists who trade files of unreleased music to one another messing up badly. Whatever he was trying to trade the 100 songs for, it can’t have been worth the damage done to Young Thug’s team, Rich Homie Quan’s publicity, and all the great music that could have came from those one hundred songs.

Leaks are inevitable. In the Internet age, the leak of a project is as much a part of the process as the actual release. But leaking unreleased music, intentionally or not, in the hopes of building a huge collection for oneself, is counterproductive, selfish and plain stupid.

So this should be a lesson learned on all sides. Studios and artists need to place their music under as much security as possible, because there are idiots out there who will ruin it. And to the leakers out there — a lot of the time, you’re fighting the good fight. But in times like this, please have some trigger discipline. You may end up causing friendly fire to the very artists you’re a fan of.

Momin Rafi is a sophomore newspaper and online journalism major. You can email him at mrafi@syr.edu or reach him on Twitter at @Mominat0r.

Published on May 21, 2015 at 2:52 pm