Some albums sample the past. Chixtape 5 hired it. Released on November 15, 2019 through Mad Love and Interscope, Tory Lanez’s fourth studio album rebuilt the sound of 2000 to 2006 R&B with the original artists standing beside him, and it debuted at number two on the Billboard 200.
The Chixtape Idea, Grown All The Way Up
The Chixtape series ran for years as free mixtapes built on a simple, expensive idea: take the R&B records a generation grew up on and rap and sing over their bones. The catch was always clearance. Uncleared samples kept the tapes off the streaming services where his audience actually lived, so the series existed as folklore, passed around by the fans who were there.
Chixtape 5 solved the problem the hard way. Every sample was cleared, and the original artists did not just approve the flips, they showed up on them. Lanez laid out the brief himself in a Billboard interview around the release:
“Everything is 2000s-inspired. Everything is inspired by the times when things were golden for us. I think all those pieces and everything that we’ve come out with has been all about nostalgia. I’m about to take you on a whole journey musically.”
That is the album in one quote. The nostalgia is not decoration here, it is the architecture, and the guest list is the proof of work.
Jerry Sprunger Sets The Table
The lead single, Jerry Sprunger, arrived on November 8, 2019, a week ahead of the album. It flips T-Pain’s I’m Sprung from 2005, and it carries T-Pain himself, a pairing Lanez had teased in December 2018 by filming the singer’s first reaction to the flip, thirteen years after T-Pain’s debut album landed. The video remakes the I’m Sprung clip shot for shot in spirit: do-rags, bandanas, oversized tees and jerseys, a barbecue running on the front lawn. Jerry Sprunger peaked at number 44 on the Billboard Hot 100, number 34 in Canada and number 32 in the UK, and it has since been certified platinum in the United States and silver in the UK.
Around it, the album runs like a reunion special. The Take pairs Lanez with Chris Brown. Beauty in the Benz brings Snoop Dogg onto a homage to Beautiful. The Fargo Splash calls Ludacris back to the energy of Splash Waterfalls. Jagged Edge, The-Dream, Mýa, Trey Songz, Ashanti, Lil Wayne, Fabolous, Mario, Jermaine Dupri and Lloyd all appear, each on a song built from a classic of theirs. Ashanti fronts the cover art, and the rollout even rebuilt MySpace as the album’s promotional website, a joke that only works because the era being honoured is that specific.
The rollout matched the concept’s ambition. Before the date was public, Lanez posted a phone number fans could text to receive it, and the cover art, shot by Mid Jordan, put Ashanti in a poster-covered bedroom straight out of the era, flip phone in hand. NME’s review caught the album’s trick: the songs are modernised versions of cult hits, in some cases nearly two decades old, that still somehow feel like his own records.
The Numbers Behind The Nostalgia
The concept was not a charity project for old records. Chixtape 5 moved 83,000 album-equivalent units in its first week, debuting at number two on the Billboard 200 and number one on the Top R&B/Hip-Hop Albums chart, and the RIAA certified it gold in November 2021. Production came mostly from Lanez and Play Picasso, with Papi Yerr contributing across the record, and the Jalissa skits threaded through it keep the mixtape DNA intact inside an album frame. It plays like a tribute and charts like a headline release, which is a difficult double to pull off.
One Half Of A Two-Lane Catalogue
Two years later, Lanez ran the same instinct at a different decade. Alone at Prom, released on December 10, 2021, is his 1980s record, all synths and slow-motion prom lighting, and its song The Color Violet went on to become a streaming perennial long after release. Put the two projects together and the catalogue’s shape gets clear: the Chixtape lane owns 2000s R&B, the prom lane owns the 80s, and both are built on Lanez treating other eras with a producer’s respect rather than a tourist’s glance.
Catalogue pieces earn their keep when a new listener can enter anywhere and understand the artist. Chixtape 5 is the best door Tory Lanez ever built: a Toronto singer standing in the middle of the R&B he grew up on, holding his own next to the people who made it.
