Bury it under dewy pianos and sensitive cooing sugar-coat it with emo-pop choruses tuck it behind compressed guitars. It turns out that the answer to the above question- "What do major labels think it takes to sell rap albums in 2010?" - is simple: hide the rapping. As an actual album, it is wretched- a dishearteningly generic and hollow product with no soul or demographic or viewpoint that arguably bottoms out three separate times. As a primer on what major label execs think they need to do to sell a rap record to a mass audience in 2010, Bobby Ray is a queasily fascinating document. Atlantic invested time and effort into "grooming" B.o.B, and since record companies tend only to take notice when their pre-planned strategies pan out (ground-level phenomena like Gucci Mane tend to get dismissed as flukes), we can expect to see a lot more records patterned explicitly on The Adventures of Bobby Ray. In 2003, when people still bought CDs, these numbers would have been embarrassing for a high-profile hip-hop debut, but in 2010, they are, apparently, victory-lap worthy. To put that in perspective: Bobby Ray sold 84,000 copies. The result should serve as a cautionary tale to all involved, except for one small detail: The Adventures of Bobby Ray was the No.
They catered to all his worst instincts, and he gladly surrendered himself to theirs. The long road from that to The Adventures of Bobby Ray seems dominated by record execs who manicured, man-handled, and placated the rapper.
It was B.o.B in a nutshell: arrogant, self-aware, undeniably promising. The logic was counterintuitive, even a little ridiculous, but the song itself was warm, fluid, and surprising. "They say that I'm changing/ Cuz I'm gettin famous," went the chorus to 2008's "Fuck You", a bluesy lope of acoustic guitar and twangy harmonica that recalled vintage Dungeon Family. B.o.B began griping about the trials of fame long before he had any.
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