Will XXL fail miserably?

First of all, I forgot to mention yesterday that there was a big thing about me in the paper here in the STL a few months ago. If you haven't already, you might want to check that out. My new XXL colleague kris ex a/k/a gunyogurt figures in it prominently.

• The Mad Blogger [Riverfront Times]

I don't get the idea in general that very many people who visit this site aren't already familiar with my own site, but there you go anyway.

Anyhoo, it seems to be the opinion of some - namely, the marginally talented Stanley Crouch doppelganger Hashim Warren - that xxlmag.com is at the risk of going the way of so many failed hip-hop sites, including 360hiphop.com and Urban Box Office. I wonder if this is really the case.

The bush league hip-hop journalist sayeth:

Their motivation was the bottom line of a spreadsheet, not love for the culture, and hip-hop fans have always been good at sniffing that out.

Where are all these sites now? Most have died, and now only exist in what I like to call the Online Hip-Hop Graveyard.

You see, the Puerto Rican woman who runs SOHH, where Hashim works, does so out of sheer love for the culture, including breakdancing and graffiti writing. The copious amount of ads from the US Army are just there to pay for the bandwith.

That amount of love each month will run you.

XXL, meanwhile, is secretly owned by Jimmy "Double Fantasy" Iovine, one of history's most heinous Tall Israelis. It's only goal is to make as much money as possible. You can trust that any money that comes from this site's military ads is going to fund the international zionist conspiracy.

That said, I'm not too sure what there is to suggest that this site will somehow fail. Its print counterpart hasn't exactly failed, now has it? According to editor-in-chief Elliott "Yellow Snow" Wilson, who I once spoke with briefly, it does extremely well.

Not to put anybody's business out there in the street, but I approached SOHH about blogging for them before I started blogging here, and they basically told me to go fuck myself. I'm not sure, but I get the feeling in general they don't like me.

Not that I was ever that crazy about the idea of working with SOHH. Let's face it, the quality of the content there is generally pretty awful. I mean, I'm sure they try hard (out of love); it's just that they don't have any talented people working for them.

But then I was willing to deal with that for $500 a month. Not that that's how much they pay their bloggers, but, you know, I'm saying if it was. They don't pay me shit here, other than the privilege to tell chicks in the club that I work as a columnist for XXL, which is mostly true.

I've yet to actually try that, but when I do, you can rest assured I'll write about it here. Chicks will bang you if they think you work for an important magazine, right? I should hop on that before my new shoes get dirty. It could be a minute before I get another pair.