What do rappers lose when they give fans their grails?

D Savage is in a car, its speakers rattling with the bass of his unreleased song “I Know.” In the young rapper’s expression, there’s an understanding of the powerful potential that’s shaking his ride. This video, taken in 2016, captures the culture of snippet sharing at its best. Artists who share these small song excerpts on social media let fans in on a historically concealed aspect of artistry: the moments of pure excitement after creating something you love. Such moments feel like a hearkening to the most optimistic moments of the Napster age when the tech’s immediacy fuelled listener passion.

Increasingly, though, snippet sharing has become a more Faustian deal. If a snippet becomes popular, the unreleased studio version is known as a “grail,” a highly sought-after prize that can be obtained through leaks, hacks, or badgering the musician via social media. Artists like Playboi Carti and Lil Uzi Vert, whose careers have both been changed by snippets and the theft of the songs, have asked fans to help them decide which of their unreleased tracks to include on deluxe editions of their albums. A popular snippet’s full release is no guarantee of success — when the full song drops, a chorus of once-fans pops up like clockwork, castigating any changes or even voicing a preference for lower quality resolution of the snippet. D. Savage’s “I Know” did not escape this fate; the debate of “snippet vs studio version” continues in the YouTube comments to this day.

This new era of crowd-pleasing releases — based less on intuition and more on actual feedback and directives from fans — shows no signs of stopping. In January, Lil Yachty shared a psych-rock album called Let’s Start Here., a major pivot for the mumble rap pioneer who courted controversy with his insistence that his new direction was an effort at garnering “respect” as an artist. Not ten days after the album’s release, Yachty posted a tweet confirming that he would still be releasing the full version of a highly sought-after snippet called “Holster.”

A fine follow-up to “Poland'' with its beautifully warbled melodies, crystalline synth pads, and fun, loose lyrics, “Holster” dropped in April. As good as the song is, it’s hard to separate from the resigned tone Yachty seemed to take while announcing it, one of a weary parent attempting to offset a tantrum. Hip-hop is littered with albums drained of their creative spark by unimaginative A&R; this role is slowly beginning to shift towards the whims of the internet. At best, it’s two steps forward, two steps back.

Few artists have as deep a relationship with grail culture as Pi’erre Bourne. An influential, multi-platinum producer with an acclaimed solo rap career, Bourne has a fan base that tracks his movements more closely than stans of some superstars do (there was never as much hype for a Drake snippet as when “Pain 1993,” his collaboration with Bourne and Playboi Carti, first leaked). Bourne has gamely played conductor for his own hype, previewing songs on his Instagram Live sessions and holding onto them, sometimes for years at a time, before dropping. Leaks, however, are something Bourne is bitterly opposed to, due in part to the attachments fans can form with them. In a 2021 interview with Billboard, Bourne discussed his song “Switching Lanes,” a track from his solo album The Life of Pi’erre 5 that leaked before the project’s release. “With the leak, though, there’s but so much I can change, because people love leaks.”

His latest project, the Grails EP, makes the best of a fraught situation. The seven-track project collects songs like “IG,” which has been floating around the internet for over half a decade. To the degree that Bourne is able to complete his vision for the music while catering to fan wishes, he accomplishes it by updating the tracks with new vocals and studio-quality mastering. Some fans have greeted these changes with consternation, and the tracklist disappointed others over the perceived snub of more popular snippets. In releasing Grails, Bourne has elected for a defiant compromise, acknowledging the new sway fans have while mostly retaining dominion over his art.

When I interviewed Young Thug for The FADER in 2019, his videographer Be El Be introduced me to SabSab, a leak collector who helped the YSL camp track and remove leaked music.
Today, the artists and the more internet-savvy elements of their base have a far deeper and troubling symbiotic relationship. A profile of YoungBoy Never Broke Again published in the New York Times in 2021 detailed how executives at the Louisiana rapper’s former label Atlantic enlisted his enthusiastic fanbase to select the tracklists for his projects. Outsourcing these kinds of decisions goes beyond the purview of focus groups. Tempting as this kind of rapper-fan relationship may be for both musician and label, if they become normal, artists who may already be constrained in their ability to make decisions for themselves risk even deeper creative atrophy.

The merging of the levels of corporate control and the internet echo chamber have accelerated to lightning speed. Musicians can now be faced with a suit behind a desk dictating the ins and outs of their career as well as anonymous online supporters threatening revolt if they don’t get their treasures. There’s a certain amount of nostalgia to be found just a year ago, when Pi’erre Bourne was playing “IG” on Instagram Live for the umpteenth time in six years. “Nah, I’m just playing,” he said between giggles, “this shit ain’t coming out.” The authority in his statement had power. It indicated that the point of the “IG” snippet wasn’t a preview of an individual song, but a taste of the exciting places, unrecorded and unrealized, that Bourne’s sound could yet go.