Can you believe it's only been two years that I've been blogging for this site? It seems more like five years, but maybe that's because it's been such a pain in the ass. And I don't necessarily mean that as a knock against management (as if anyone even knows who works for XXL at this point), or even the assholes who post in the comments section here. (And you people really are some of the worst of the worst.) It's just that pursuing this hip-hop blog shit at a level where it's actually meaningful (so to speak), as I think I have for the past couple of years, can be one hell of a grind. I wouldn't trade it for anything though, other than maybe a job (any job) that pays a salary commensurate with what a typical college graduate might make.

I was gonna do a feature like the original Saturday Night Olympics, where I went back and listed 10 of my favorite posts from 2006 and the beginning of 2007. But when I started digging through the archives here, I was just like, fuck it. I might as well just expand it out to 25. I think this past year was a better year for me than my first year here. Plus, it saved me the hassle of having to go through them all with a fine-tooth comb and try to pick out the very best ones. There was somewhere in the neighborhood of 250 of them in the past year, so this list consists of about the top 10% of them. I was gonna try to go through the 25 and put them in a rough order according to my own personal preference, but then I got lazy. So they're just in the order that I thought of them and/or came across them just now.

Without further ado:

My 25 Favorite Posts of My Own from the Past Year

1) Dissent is the mother of ascent - My take on Hillary Clinton's big comeback in the Democratic primaries, and why voting for Ralph Nader this fall makes more sense than voting for either her or Barack Obama.

2) Is Jay-Z on the DL - Did you know that Jay-Z shares an apartment in New York with some guy who's long been suspected to be a fudge? Since this guy plays for the Kansas City Chiefs, it can't be that either of them can't afford an apartment by themselves. I wonder what it is.

3) Kill the white people! - Inside Common's ridonkulously lengthy history of racial provocations. Also, some armchair psychoanalysis into what it was that drove him to become such a racist.

4) How I know hip-hop is teh ghey - Hip-Hop used to be the straightest genre of music evar. It might still be, but it's not nearly as straight as it once was. In this post, I list a few possible explanations as to what might have happened.

5) Damn you, "Beautiful Girls" - Searching for meaning in Sean Kingston's already-forgotten summer smash. What I found: Sean Kingston isn't a guy the way I am, or other guys are. He's more like a girl.

6) A mouse like everybody else - This post marks both the point at which I realized just how deeply and truly full of shit Barack Obama is, and also the point at which I realized there's probably not anything I could say to convince anyone else this is the case.

7) Hands off Jay-Z's wallet - It's the rare occasion that I come to the defense of Jay-Z - not because, as is often suggested, I'm jealous of Beyonce (I like my broads was skinnier), but because I find him to be full of shit. However, I had to go in on these clowns Calvin Klein and Dehaven.

8) Screw buying you a draaank - I had some issues with T-Pain's "Buy You a Drank" - not just in that the very sound of it makes baby Jesus cry, but I'm also not that big on buying a broad a drank, especially if I don't know that I'm gonna get anything in exchange. My money supply is very limited.

9) Conscious rap is for gays - In which I uncover the real reason why so-called conscious rappers like Common, dead prez, and Talib Kweli are so eager to do seemingly anything with a woman other than shove their joints up inside her. No Erykah Badu.

10) Keep Jose out of Newark - As its title might suggest, my take on illegal immigration, and sanctuary cities, and that nut job who killed those poor kids out in New Jersey. Also, proof that people on the Internets will defend almost anything for the sake of political correctness!

11) The Future of the Music Business - I had some concerns when I heard that Columbia hired Rick Rubin to save the music business. Namely, I felt he had no idea what the fuck he was talking about. I don't care if he did produce License to Ill. So far, I'd say I've been proven correct.

12) Why women can't rap - Is the fact that women can't rap for shit merely my own personal, or is there actually a scientific case to be made that this is true. I've become convinced it's the latter. Sorry, ladies. (For what it's worth, you've still got pussies. Talk about a coup!)

13) Killing a dog is so 1998 - It's one thing to chuck a dog off of a cliff, but how many people can ever say that they've been accused of gay-bashing a dog? As far as I know, I'm the only person. Evar.

14) The gulliest TI in all of hip-hop - My most epic bit of conspiracy theorizing to date, complete with actual facts about one of the most heinous TIs there ever was. He may actually even be a tall Israeli, though it's hard to tell over the Internets.

15) An epic wigger battle - People seemed to really enjoy this story about some shit I once witnessed in the parking lot at White Castle, though I'm still not sure I really did it justice. To actually witness it in person was just... insane. I'm just glad I could even kinda convey that.

16) Ludacris' two favorite foods - Ludacris let some chinaman talk him into opening a restaurant by playing on black people's not so secret love of chicken and watermelon. Then he tripped and admitted it to the Atlanta Business Chronicle. On Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, no less.

17) SOHH had its own pedophile army - For the longest time, MySpace had this flaw where you could use some sort of back door entry (nullus?) to check out the photos of underage broads. SOHH had an entire army dedicated to just that, as I revealed in this post.

18) Free Lil' Wayne! - It'll be a few more months still until Lil' Wayne finally drops Tha Carter III and its awful and all these assholes bend over backwards trying to come up with excuses for him. I started preparing for it back in January. I'm a hater like that.

19) Soulja Boy Kill Ya'self - I never felt as much like an old man as when I took Soulja Boy to task for thinking Wu-Tang was something to fuck with. It wasn't that bad though. I kinda enjoyed it.

20) Niggas putting systems on bicycles - Yet another sign that New York has gone as soft as the inside of Beyonce's thigh: jigs are putting thousand dollar systems on the backs of bicycles and just riding up and down the street with them.

21) Helping massa build a new house - In which I take Jay-Z and Jermaine Dupri to task for jumping to the defense of the TIs at Universal as if they were those hoes who beat up Foxy Brown and stole her hearing aid that one time.

22) Putting the RZA out to pasture - Some time in between the late '90s and now, drugs got the best of the RZA's brain. This became especially obvious last fall with the release of 8 Diagrams, an album so abysmal it may have finally broken up the group for good.

23) Don't be a fag - The war against sagging pants was the issue du jour for like a week last fall. I explored the history of wearing your pants down around your ass, as well as efforts by lawmakers to make that sort of thing illegal.

24) Tyler Perry must be stopped - In which I prove just how vital it is that the world be made rid of Tyler Perry by drawing a connection between the kind of lonely black women who watch Tyler Perry movies, this country's religious right, and the Israel lobby.

25) Jennifer Hudson is the new Aunt Jemima - I figured there may have something more to her win at the Academy Awards than just her incredible acting ability. I was probably right. (The comments section to this one really took on a life of its own.)

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