Well at the least the traditional ones. You know the sites with the word “hip hop” in their url that were started by 16 year olds from Manitoba or by nerdy guys who were trying to be rappers, but suck balls. But seriously, what has happened to these great sites?
Admittedly, I used to visit the big three hip hop sites frequently (still occasionally do), because they were the only places on the net to go to get your hip hop fix. That is until the whole web 2.0 revolution occurred sometime in 2004-2005 (computer nerds correct me?), what has happened since then is the internet has actually become a place for cool ass n*ggas like me to set up a website and air out whomever and whatever I damn well please (we e-thuggin over here baby *Birdman voice*). In other words the rise in power of blogs and message boards as the source for all things hip hop has tipped the scales on the traditional hip hop sites. Why?
Hip hop has always been the voice of the streets and ultimately of the people. So in the online world this should be no different. We need a place to share our illegal music, talk about which rapper needs to get smacked, and for pictures of the next video chick. These traditional hip hop sites come off mad boring, they like the CNN of hip hop, (funny thing is at one point it was cool to say that) [sidebar: word to PE]. But really all these sites do is reprint stories from MTV and Billboard (and they do so like three days after the news has been plastered all over the blogs and message boards).
Not only that but the majority of stuff they post is about garbage ass rappers no one cares about and I know I’m not alone when I say that (word to my n*ggas). Ultimately, the problem with the traditional hip hop sites is that they are not tastemakers and really never were. They don’t dictate what’s cool and what’s hot, they just report on anything remotely Black or urban. They’ll pretty much do anything for hits. If MTV says dudes rocking dresses is cool they’ll all be talking about how good Lil Wayne looks in a dress [sidebar: that’s some funny shit, I’ll be saying hell nah to that shit]. My point is, the web 2.0 revolution and its affect on the online hip hop world is that the blogs and message boards dictate what’s popping and what’s not. Simple as that.
*Tell Em Why You Ain’t Mad Yo! Tell Em*
I admit the big 3 have tried to step their game up by adding bloggers, but who the hell reads any “worker” blogger? You ain’t a boss if you working for some computer nerd who lucked out on a website cause his parents could afford hi-speed before the rest of us could [sidebar: hi-speed since ’03]. But seriously…Do these bloggers, do these “news reporters”, do these “college journalist”, have freedom of expression? Can they say fuck their respective hip hop site like this “fuck yorapper.com“. No. You know why? Because their advertisers got them by the balls. This differs in comparison to this site and other independent blogs in that we got the advertisers on our balls baby.
Now I don’t even hate for the sake of hating, I do like what shirt sizes has done with their site, but again they owned by Harris Publications aka The Man (and I have a huge problem with this). So I really don’t give them too much credit. In fact, I respect the hustle of the Big 3 and I’d rather see them win then them (sorry I gotta go for the underdog). But I think they’ll all be going out like jerry curls and disco anyway (who buys magazines?). Because once again, blogs and message boards are taking over (“one computer at a time” *Akon voice*).
I do think, however, Rawkus, is onto the right idea, by banning together the best hip hop blogs and then creating a social networking community around it. This is really the way the online hip hop universe should look from a commercial perspective. It gives the advertisers the views they want and gives us, the user, a one stop place for all our hip hop. No has time to go on to ten million sites for their hip hop news and then a separate site for their social networking, we need it all in one place. Right?
The problem is (there’s always a problem isn’t there?) the tastemakers (like me) will never go corporate unless its our own company. And as far as I’m concerned, any tastemaker that goes corporate revokes their tastemarker pass and becomes a peon blogger. Haha. So what does all this really mean? Yall are stuck with me. 100.
