As an artist, looking back on your body of work must bring up different emotions and memories. There’s the albums that turned out to be duds and for one reason or another never achieved the success originally planned for them. There’s the mediocre projects that were nothing special but seemed to do pretty well. And then there’s the classics.
When an artist has a classic album under his or her belt, it has to be tempting to recreate that vibe or feeling and do it all again. Especially if said artist is going through a rough spot in their career at the time. Some artists might take different routes as to how they make that happen. From recording in a certain setting, to being in the company of the same people that were with them at the time of the classic albums recording.
There is one definitive way to add an excessive amount of pressure to the artist while recording a new project. That would be to name their next project a sequel to a previous classic album they have. While this may gain attention and help build a buzz for their new project faster than if they just named it a completely new and original name, the stakes are raised immediately.
Not only will they have to deliver a masterpiece for it to even be compared to the original, but anything less also has the possibility to taint the memory of the original itself. The crafting of a sequel album has to be one the most difficult accomplishments in Hip Hop. Not only is the artist usually in a completely different space as a man or woman at that given time, but announcing a sequel album puts the memories of the original into fans heads. That means the production and lyrics will have to be very similar to the original in the eyes of most fans. Otherwise why not just record a completely fresh project and let the classic hold its place in the hip hop history books? Many have tried, from Raekwon to Eminem to one of the most critically successful of all efforts, Dr. Dre’s Chronic 2001.
Some sequel albums are great, some are horrible, but the chances of living up to the original are slim to none so it seems like a much smarter decision would be to create a new project that embodies the way an artist is living at that exact time rather than trying to artificially recreate a feeling from way back. Instead of trying to piggyback off of the success of old classics, create new ones.