Honey Bee Inn
I just found a truly excellent blog that comments extensively on HipHop as a culture - Broken-language.tumblr.com.
In particular, the blog’s curator has one self-written article about HipHop Journalism, Racism, and conceptions of what “good hiphop” is. You can read it here - “A Word on…
I appreciate you taking the time to read and reply to my Keef thing. Thanks for keeping up with my writing. That said, your takeaways from the article are just not what I was going for. That it’s water under the bridge to you that what I’ve suggested here is for us to hand “journalistic power” over hip hop to “white media” is hard for me to take as a black dude out of Harlem and one of a literal dozen or so people of color getting regular work writing critically and deliberately about rap who, I thought, went to great lengths to dismantle this black/white rap media axis within the piece.
Make no mistake, what I want is death for the race-based line of delineation in rap criticism, to be rid of the self-loathing, anti-intellectual implications of cordoning off thorough and considered writing as the territory of white people. What I want is for rap internet tastemakers to actually do some tastemaking sometimes, instead of indiscriminately flinging content out onto the internet and puffing out chests online like people actually care which site they get their CDQ mp3s and behind the scenes video stills from. To that end I’ve taken it upon myself to create exactly the kind of writing I want to see online, quite literally sacrificing free time and day job stability to yap about bullshit ass rappers on the internet. (I should be writing a review right now instead of filibustering on Tumblr, actually) If I have an agenda, it’s for more rap to get more shine on more outlets, and I’ve made damn sure I put my time and effort where my big mouth is. I wish everyone else would.
PS: Re: Odd Future, I wasn’t commenting on their originality or whatever, and you can definitely trace their musical lineage a couple different ways for sure. I was pointing out the ridiculousness of a new & interesting rap entity having to go everywhere but the rap blogosphere in order to get coverage and only getting bylines on sites purported to be authorities on rap after their clout makes them too good for traffic to ignore. I saw this firsthand as someone who was writing about Domo Genesis and MellowHype in 2010 who watched indie rock blogs catch on and rap blogs sluggishly, sometimes begrudgingly latch onto the movement after the shit had already cracked the festival circuit. What good is a rap blogosphere that doesn’t break new rap?
What in the fuck was that Kanye?
I told you to do some shit for the kids
You can give me your muhfucking graduation ticket right now
You will not walk across that stage, you won’t slide across that stage
Muhfucka can’t pull you across that stage Kanye
Who told you, see, I told you to…
Wrote another Complex list. As a Texas born New Yorker from a family of South Carolina natives, this one was right up my alley.
