These Days, You May Be Dreaming If You Think Your Album Will Come Out On Time

Yesterday’s Houston Chronicle had a piece on delayed hip-hop albums; among the albums profiled is UGK’s UGK (Underground Kingz), which after having its release date held up for a year is reportedly going to debut at No. 1 next week. (Who knew that waiting for the bottom to fall out of the CD market would pay off so handsomely?) Also mentioned in the piece is Mike Jones, whose album The American Dream was unceremoniously pushed back to October after vanishing from Atlantic’s schedule last month:

If UGK’s delayed date was (mostly) the result of artistic license, Jones’ still-unreleased American Dream is a victim of label limbo. Its release was teased for April on posters at the South by Southwest Music Conference in Austin. Then a July 3 date was set. The album would be packaged with a straight-to-DVD biopic of the same name.

It was a perfect Fourth of July tie-in that never happened, likely because of the tepid reaction to singles Mr. Jones and My 64.

American Dream — the disc and the DVD — is now scheduled for October.

“It has been very frustrating,” Jones says. “The album originally was supposed to come out in April, but the movie wasn’t ready.”

Jones’ 2005 disc, Who is Mike Jones? sold more than 2 million copies, setting the stakes high for this follow-up.

I’m sort of mystified by the fact that “Mr. Jones” was tepidly received–the singalong chorus-choir combo alone definitely helped endear it to my ears–but as my fiance suggested upon first listen, maybe since the album’s been so delayed so far, it should be pushed back even further, to next May? After all, there’s a movie coming out around then that could be an excellent tie-in with the song’s proclamation that “you’ll never catch Mr. Jones.”

Record labels take the rap [Houston Chronicle; HT Kate]