Homeboy Sandman returns with a new single, "Banned in the USA," the third release from his forthcoming mixtape, I Can't Sell These Either, due out on Nov. 17.
He rhymes over Dominic Frontiere's "The End of Love" and suggests in this music age, maybe his songs are just not vulgar enough to satisfy the taste of the algorithm.
"In 1990 The 2 Live Crew was banned for being too vulgar. 33 years later Boy Sand is banned for not being vulgar enough. Very bugged out," he writes on his Bandcamp page.
"Word up/I got a couple of fans, they hold me down/I drop a monumental album every couple of months/But I’ma keep it real/There's lessons my school teachers ain’t never teach/I thought that being the best alive would have some better reach/I know my follicles died so I don’t look the part/Far as that marketing that people really took to heart/But I’m a work of art..." he offers on the opening verse.
The artwork for the single is by Lukas Baron AKA Luke Warmth and features Spotify streaming info data from Chartmetric, driving home an interesting point — his fan conversion rate is often three times that of artists like 21 Savage, Ice Spice, and Travis Scott, but his playlist reach is a fraction of theirs. That leads to another revelation:
"Cue Instagram to cultivate a whole generation/Of kids that’s never moved to read about the movie Birth of a Nation/Boy Sand read all the time/We can’t give him no shine/He ain’t even online/He gon have these people using they minds/He gon have these people losing their minds/If it was really about pushing what people like when they heard it/It'd be mics getting murdered instead of Pop Smoke/It’s not a joke/And that’s just one example of a lotta folks/It’s more than kinda gross/If you can’t see the forest for the trees/You’re probably someone that believes that advertising doesn’t work on you/Which is the reason advertising works on you..."
Take a listen to the new track here.