Delicious Irony

The problem with trying to appease everyone is that you, quite simply, can’t do it. Most of us spend years trying to figure out why exactly were your thoughts – in your opinion – were viewed in a light different than its original intention, so most simply “do them” and revel in their ability to do so.

I could give a 2,000-word treatise on We Can’t Be Stopped, Bl_ck B_st_rds or any other obscure piece of vintage rap memorabilia ten times over at the main hustle, but quite frankly I won’t because a: there’s not enough hours in my day to do so without ultimately giving a “fuck effort”-like middle finger and stop caring; b: most of the visitors there are either too young or fickle-minded to really give three-eighths of a shit about that; or c: only a nominal amount of heads truly, deeply care about that shit, and said heads aren’t likely to help me maintain a roof over my head. Suffice to say, we live in the ADHD era of hip hop, where 140 characters have replaced the in-depth diatribe, and today’s artists are only as hot as the length of time their content stays on the front page of your favorite website you visit to gank music from.

We tend to get caught up in the rapture of page views and uniques, myself included. Websites have changed from being the antithesis of the radio and its entire ringtone dishonor to a form of the radio itself, and as they grow and change so does the content splayed upon them. Rather than looking as a website adapting to the tropical climate changes of music, its editors are simply dismissed as brainless “industry” tools and sell-outs. It’s a catch-22 of sorts: we’ll draw the ire of slick-talking, self-important, elitist music snobs who’ll disguise mundane insults with a #noshots hash tag, yet will be looked at as salty, emotional wrecks should we ever respond. Twitter has become the new rap diss song.

I spent my years over at the good ship Amistad knowing how to push enough buttons in a reader to garner a response, and by the time the shop went out of business (seriously, that section shut down months ago, and my “works” there vanished off the face of the Internets) I’d regressed from a faux-incendiary, half-witted scribe to a full-time cynic. I never envisioned that in the wake of print journalism’s fall from grace that the weblog would be viewed as a significant source for information retrieval. What started as a means to express personal opinions have transformed into a quasi-credible news forum where said opinions are null and void. The weblog is dead. Long live the weblog.