If you shout loud enough, eventually they will hear you. Even before releasing his sixth – and final – album Black Rose this month, actor and soon-to-retire singer Tyrese Gibson raved to his 30 million social-media followers about how it was his best.
When the album dropped, the Furious 7 star embarked on marathon North American promotional duties, including several launches, album-signing sessions and even dropping in unannounced to department stores to encourage customers to pick up a copy. On a trip to Abu Dhabi last week, he was mobbed during a signing at the Yas Mall Virgin Megastore.
This mix of official and guerrilla tactics worked – the album sold more than 70,000 copies in its first week and topped album charts in the United States and 14 other countries – a streak now in its second week.
Not that American listeners of mainstream radio would know.
Despite the relatively big sales and critical acclaim – The National, for example, awarded the album an impressive four stars in a recent review – neither of Black Rose's two singles have made a dent on airwaves or on the only list that really matters – the Billboard 100 singles chart.
This slight particularly hurt Tyrese in the case of the second single Shame. The heart-wrenching R&B ballad is his best song yet, featuring the American Idol winner Jennifer Hudson and a video produced by Oscar-winning actor Denzel Washington.
These star-studded associations, however, didn’t help much. While Shame did the business in its own musical niche, reaching number two in the adult R&B songs chart, it is nowhere to be found in the Billboard 100 and continues to be shunned by popular radio.
Tyrese didn’t take it well. He took to social media and decried the radio blackout as a subtle form of discrimination, saying that “racism shows up in many forms”.
As part of his first moves in a self-proclaimed new crusade to "save R&B music", Tyrese wrote an open letter to American Idol presenter and influential radio personality Ryan Seacrest lamenting the way that, as he sees it, white R&B artists such as Sam Smith, Justin Timberlake and Robin Thicke get plenty of pop-music radio play, while African-American artists are stuck on genre-specific stations.
“I don’t create limits for myself and I don’t appreciate people creating limits for me,” he said.
While Tyrese is right in saying that he is facing formidable barriers to having his music heard, the claim that it is down to systemic racial bias is dubious.
African-American R&B artists are well-represented on commercial radio. Tracks by Beyoncé, Pharrell Williams, Rihanna, Usher, John Legend, Ne-Yo and Jason Derulo – to name but a few – all continue to be played on high rotation.
Williams' ubiquitous Happy, an out-and-out R&B tune, topped the charts worldwide and become officially the most played song in the US last year.
In 2013, John Legend dominated the air waves with the ballad All of Me, a song that has become a mainstay of weddings everywhere.
Tyrese's real challenge with Black Rose is its specific type of R&B, which is a smooth and vintage style recalling the greats such as Al Green and Otis Redding (particularly evident in Shame).
In other words, Black Rose is simply not commercial enough to be played on mainstream radio.
A bigger factor is that mainstream radio stations are mostly preoccupied with established acts from major record labels, neither of which applies to Tyrese – Black Rose is his first solo album in four years, and was released on his own independent label, Voltron.
This double whammy explains why Tyrese’s songs from the album have been slow to reach the mainstream airwaves – and probably never will.
Ironically, though, Tyrese’s latest album may achieve his aim, albeit in a slower fashion than he would like.
The album’s success, sales-wise, combined with Tyrese’s massive and devoted social-media following, could drive today’s generation to become more acquainted with traditional R&B.
If the album acts as their entry point into a neglected genre, then Tyrese will indeed have helped to save R&B.
