Charles Hamilton’s new media strategy

Charles Hamilton might succeed at deflecting attention from his constant tomfoolery just by keeping up with it at such a breakneck speed. Who can even keep up with it all?

It was one thing back when he duped some of the less skeptical hip-hop blogs to participate in a marketing campaign without paying them anything, which, for what it's worth, probably would have happened anyway, and then he had the sheer balls to rob one of the sites - it may have been the Smoking Section - of their "exclusive," in favorite of his cousin over at Interscope, ThisIsFiddy. If only he would have thought to have done something else stupid at the time, we might not have gotten the chance to blog about.

But Charles Hamilton seems to have learned his lesson. The other day, there was a shit storm a brewin' over the fact that he may or may not have stolen a beat from this guy no one ever heard of. I think he might actually be from here in St. Louis, but I don't really keep up with local hip-hop like that. There's only so many hours in the day, and I hadn't even played the NyQuil game in like four years when I did the other day. A man's gotta have priorities.

Anyhoo, what was I saying? Ah yes, Charles Hamilton. I guess he borrowed a beat from this producer he met down at South by Southwest and added some effects and tried to pass it off as his own, and the guy called him out on it. From what I understand, it was pretty obvious what was going on. Since then, the late, great Gooch (i.e. the guy who used to do the Scratch blog) weighed in over at RapPravda and said Charles Hamilton probably did jack the other guy's beat. And one of the production sites conducting a CSI-style forensic inspection of the beat, showing how the other guy's beat lies at the center of the one Charles Hamilton claims he made.

But that's all neither here nor there. Before I even had a chance to listen to both of the beats, to see if they really the same, or to ask someone who would know, I got caught up in a minor Twitter beef Charles Hamilton got into with Phonte, which I did end up blogging about. Phonte, on his own Twitter, called this up and coming generation of rappers a buncha beta males, and mentioned Kid Cudi and Charles Hamilton specifically. So they ended up going back and forth. Phonte tried to get Charles Hamilton to admit he stole that guy's beat, because I guess it was already obvious to him. All the while, there was some guy who was pretending to be Charles Hamilton, but who may have just been Charles Hamilton himself, sending @replies to half the rappers on Twitter, talking about how they need to work together. It was all such a fucking mess.

Then I checked the Internets just now, and I see Charles Hamilton and another one of his cousins over at Interscope, Wale, apparently either got into a Twitter beef yesterday and then tried to pass it off as an elaborate April Fool's joke, or maybe it really was an elaborate April Fool's joke. Anyway, I wasn't checking Twitter as much yesterday as I was the day before, and I ended up missing the whole thing. I only read about it after the fact on Nah Right. Then I scrolled down the page, and, wouldn't you know, there's a new Charles Hamilton mixtape out today. Hmm...

Now granted, a new Charles Hamilton mixtape hits the Internets seemingly every few days anyway. But I can't help but wonder if a lot of these bullshit beefs are meant to purposely toy with the news cycle. Like, if he's got another PR kerfuffle they'll send him on Twitter to get into a beef with a rapper no one gives a shit about except for on the Internets. And if he's got a new mixtape coming out, they'll have him pretend to be beefing with Wale. Or maybe the guy just gets into a lot of beefs, because he's kind of a douche, and when the label sees that happening, they put out another mixtape. Who knows?

The real question is: how is ever gonna make any money from any of this? I was getting into beefs with people over the Internets back before it was all trendy, and that's still all I'm doing. For all I know, I might still be doing this same shit when I'm in my 40s. If a Charles Hamilton album were to come out today, would it sell that many more copies for the fact that he's been involved in so many kerfuffles and skirmishes? I guess we'll see, one of these days.