When Kanye’s GOOD Fridays End, What Can Come Next?

By Jon Graef in Arts & Entertainment on Oct 1, 2010 8:40PM

Kanye might be discontinuing Good Friday come December, but we thought we'd get a head-start on brainstorming who could take its place. As always, here are our humble suggestions.

Lupe Fiasco and/or Rhymefest

Equally known for their prodigious skills on the mic, their profound label woes, and for being former Kanye associates, either one of these gifted emcees could use a Good Friday-like strategy to bolster their profiles. ‘Fest has been using social networking to release a video for each track off of second album El Che--the most recent being for “Mermaid”--while Lupe has occasionally leaked demoes from his forever-in-label-purgatory third album. Surely, these fine gentlemen could make every Friday a good one by releasing a new track?

Billy Corgan/Smashing Pumpkins

Also a prolific Twitter user, the longtime Smashing Pumpkins leader may make good use of the new-track-a-week-system. Instead of slowly trickling new songs from the Pumpkins’ self-released 44-song opus, Teargarden by Kaleidyscope, as he has been doing, Corgan could save all his tracks and unleash them in a whiz-bang microsite networking strategy. Fans would get the new music in one fell swoop. Then Corgan could retweet the inevitable critical backlash, and talk about how those snot-nosed punks don’t appreciate his artistic endeavors. Everyone wins! (Except the critics, because we’re still snot-nosed punks.)

Hozac Records

Not to cast heavy shadows over local labels, but if there’s a purveyor of local music that could be comparable to Sub Pop, it’s Chicago-based Hozac Records. Thanks to acts like the blistering-hot garage-rock we’re-actually-siblings-unlike-some-other-duos band White Mystery—not to mention The Smith Westerns, Mickey and Medications--Hozac’s profile is on the rise. The label has taken to releasing round-ups of their issued singles called Hozac Hookup Klub and putting them on disc. It’s a great resource, sure, but wouldn’t a digital release every Friday be awesome? It'd be like a new millennium twist on Sub Pop's singles club.

So who else do you think could fill Kanye’s Good Friday shadows?