Unlikely Mix: Rappers, Dragons and Fantasy
HBO Hires Hip-Hop, Latin-Music Artists to Promote 'Game of Thrones'
By Robbie Whelan
March 4, 2014 6:29 p.m. ET
Time Warner's HBO hopes to attract more rap fans to watch 'Game of Thrones' with a hip-hop mixtape featuring rappers like Big Boi. HBO
On a Tuesday night a few weeks ago, the rapper Wale showed up with his entourage at Premier Studios in New York's Times Square, entered the vocal booth, and over a string-heavy march-like instrumental track, started rapping about medieval-style mythical warfare:
I'm tellin' whoever messin' with me
I can bring you that Khaleesi heat
Use my King, knack for words, as an actual sword
I can decapitate a rapper…
The subject matter was unusual for Wale (real name: Olubowale Victor Akintimehin ), whose last album, "The Gifted," released by Maybach Music Group and Atlantic Records, dealt with more typical hip-hop themes: rising from modest means to a life of driving Maserati sports cars, dating sexy women and wearing expensive chains.
This time, he was rapping about "Game of Thrones," a TV series based on fantasy novels written by George R.R. Martin and beloved by fantasy geeks. (Ned Stark, a key character in the series, is famously decapitated in Season 1; Khaleesi refers to a character known as the "Mother of Dragons").
Rapper Big Boi Getty Images for HBO
Over the years, rappers have influenced the buying habits and brand preferences of urban audiences just by mentioning the items in a song, helping to drive sales of everything from Dom Pérignon champagne to Nike basketball shoes.
Now Time Warner Inc. TWX +0.58% 's HBO, the premium cable channel that produces and airs "Game of Thrones," has hired 10 hip-hop and Latin-music artists to rap about the TV series, which the network hopes will encourage more rap fans to watch the show. The result, a 10-song hip-hop "mixtape" called "Catch the Throne," is expected to be released online on Friday. HBO declined to say how much the campaign cost or how much the artists are being paid.
A team of producers at New York's Launch Point Records layered samples of dialogue from the show and music from its dramatic, orchestral score over hip-hop beats, while the artists rapped verses about sword fights and fire-breathing dragons.
In addition to Wale, the album includes songs by rappers Common, Big Boi of the Atlanta-based group Outkast, as well as several Latin-crossover artists including reggaeton star Daddy Yankee and rapper Bodega Bamz.
The goal is to reach out to the show's urban, "multicultural" audience, a demographic that includes African-Americans and Latinos, and help capture more viewers and expand the premium cable channel's subscriber base.
"Our multicultural audiences are a very important part of our subscribers, and we don't want to take them for granted," said Lucinda Martinez, HBO's senior vice president for multicultural marketing.
The latest effort began after HBO's marketing executives realized that "celebrity influencers"—famous rappers and others with large followings on social media and the radio—from the hip-hop world were fans of the show. Magazeen, a Jamaican-born dancehall-rap artist, says he watches "Game of Thrones" on DVD while on tour, and that his favorite character is the murderous boy-prince Joffrey Baratheon.
"It's a lot of sword-swinging, a lot of fighting, man—It's just raw!" Magazeen said.
HBO typically airs episodes of its series multiple times a week and makes them available through on-demand and online-streaming services. Across all those platforms, "Game of Thrones" has about 14.3 million viewers, HBO says, making it the network's most-watched series. Yet HBO wants to expand the appeal to include larger numbers of African-Americans, Latinos and the broader "urban" market.
Over the course of the third season, which aired in 2013, viewers of "Game of Thrones" prime-time telecasts were on average 13.2% black, 9.2% Hispanic and 76.6% white, according to Nielsen.
Overall, 16.8% of HBO's prime-time viewership was black last year, while 12.3% was Hispanic and 72.9% was white, Nielsen says. The channel's prime-time black viewership has fallen in each of the past two years, while the percentage of Hispanic viewers is down slightly from two years ago.
HBO points out that blacks and Latinos are overrepresented in HBO's subscriber count relative to their makeup in the wider population, and says that Nielsen's numbers don't capture the full size if the network's audiences because they don't take into account HBO Go, the company's online-streaming video service and other viewing platforms.
The mixtape is also part of a broader strategy on HBO's part to attract more viewers generally. Michael Morris, an analyst at Guggenheim Securities, said that HBO's subscriber base has been stuck at roughly 30 million in the U.S. for the last few years, although in an earnings call with analysts last month, Jeff Bewkes, chief executive of Time Warner Inc., said the channel had added two million subscribers last year, the biggest yearly increase in nearly two decades.
"I think it's interesting that as HBO looks for growth, they may be looking at certain segments of the population that have been underserved in the past," Mr. Morris, the analyst, said.
Chicago-based rapper and actor Lonnie Rashid Lynn Jr., better known by his stage name, Common, said that he has watched "Game of Thrones" through the middle of Season 2, and said he loves its complexity and the depth of characters such as Tyrion Lannister, a raconteur, womanizer and royal adviser played by Peter Dinklage.
He compares the mixtape to records made in the early 1990s by Staten Island hip-hop collective Wu-Tang Clan, which featured audio samples of dialogue from 1970s Chinese action movies and references to Shaolin Kung Fu, an obscure martial-arts method associated with a Buddhist monastery in central China that Wu-Tang Clan brought into the mainstream.
"Twenty years ago, Wu-Tang was breaking ground," Common said in an interview. "Nowadays, people are open to anything. There are no limitations in hip-hop culture."
Common said his song on the mixtape is about what it feels like to battle to be top dog, and the things people are willing to do get there. "I sit and think when I'm in my zone / This life is like a Game of Thrones," he raps over a rising swell of strings and timpani drums.
Antwan André Patton, also known as Big Boi, an Atlanta rapper known for his lightning-quick verbal style, is a die-hard fan of the show, and says he has watched the whole series and is currently reading one of the books on which it is based ("I wanted to see what happens in the next season," he said.). On the HBO mixtape he, too, raps about Khaleesi, "the mother of dragons," over a military march-style instrumental track, with a chanted chorus of, "Dungeons, dragons, kings and queens!"
For the musicians involved, the HBO mixtape, which will be distributed for free on the Internet, will be an opportunity to reach millions of new listeners.
Some, like Wale, aren't regular watchers of the show. But for others, like Big Boi, who is also a fan of the Harry Potter series and comic books like Daredevil and Thor, being on the mixtape is an honor.
"I'm really happy. I get to be part of the process of one of my favorite shows," he said.
Originally Posted by Hebrew Hammer
GM of Hadaka Korosu
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