Why BROCKHAMPTON Broke Up

Middle 8 · ten points from the transcript
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  1. The usual boy band is assembled by a powerful producer. BROCKHAMPTON was assembled by a teenager posting on a Kanye West forum looking for people to make music with.
    ▶ 00:01:04
  2. They started as AliveSinceForever with over 40 members across the country, including designers, engineers, videographers and management, before Kevin Abstract cut it to 14 and renamed it after his street in Houston.
    ▶ 00:01:22
  3. The decision to all move to Los Angeles together came from watching The Social Network, copying the Palo Alto house as a model.
    ▶ 00:01:59
  4. After the first mixtape underperformed they drew up a one-year plan to flood the market, which produced the Saturation trilogy, close to 50 tracks and more than a dozen videos in six months.
    ▶ 00:02:35
  5. The thing that separated them from an actual boy band is that they produced themselves. Romil, Jabari and Kiko are named as the three main producers, and the video treats that as the group's greatest strength.
    ▶ 00:05:44
  6. In March 2018 they announced an album and then a 15 million dollar deal with RCA for six albums in three years, which is the moment the brotherhood became a business.
    ▶ 00:06:43
  7. Sexual misconduct allegations against Ameer Vann surfaced that summer, the album was shelved, the tour cancelled, and he was out of the group.
    ▶ 00:07:02
  8. They scrapped everything and made Iridescence at Abbey Road in ten days, deliberately copying Radiohead's fourth-album break from what people expected, and Abstract himself was barely present.
    ▶ 00:09:33
  9. By then they were living in separate houses, so they instituted Friday therapy, sitting in the kitchen talking through whatever each of them was going through, and those conversations fed the next record.
    ▶ 00:11:15
  10. The video's conclusion is that Vann's exit, rather than his absence as a musician, is what broke them, and Abstract's own words carry it: cutting off someone he had known since he was 14, in public, is something he thinks about every day.
    ▶ 00:21:14