Welcome to Greg’s Newsletter NUMBER 99. I’ll be checking in next edition with a look back at some hits and misses since launching this in January of 2015 (!!!!). And there will be an announcement as well. Stay tuned.
But for this issue, I want to talk about The Blog Era. It’s a new podcast series by my buds Jeff and Eric Rosenthal, of hip-hop sketch comedy/podcast ItsTheReal fame and Pharell’s OTHERtone production company. You can find it on your preferred podcast platform.
It’s a history of an upstart group of hip-hop bloggers (Nah Right, 2DopeBoyz, etc) who bypassed and outran traditional music media gatekeepers and created a new music ecosystem, in turn launching the careers of rap’s future superstars (Drake, J. Cole, Wiz Khalifa, Kid Cudi etc.). As up-and-comers, those artists eschewed the major label route and went direct to the bloggers. The years 2008-2012 were the sweet spot—it was a very specific time, with technology, communication, and cultural forces combining and I’m so glad the story is being told.
And while The Blog Era covers the more mainstream side of the hip-hop internet (if you could even call it that at the time), there were other corners of the internet a part of this, too. Sites and bloggers giving voice and shine to the underground, the emergent, the left field, connecting artists and audiences from Europe to Asia, to the US. Sites like MOOVMT, 92 BPM, Classic Drug References, Renaissance Soul, and Fresh Selects. An absolutely essential crew to my musical knowledge and taste, to this day.
Back to The Blog Era. The podcast has brought back a lot of memories for me. I started following the ItsTheReal guys in 2007-2008, on Tumblr (which absolutely needs its own retrospective!!). I reposted their sketch comedy stuff and chatted with Jeff on GChat (to this day, one of the nicest human beings I’ve ever met, who is somehow—despite EVERYTHING he and his bro are doing—will be down for an hour long Facetime sesh whenever).
I also got to witness, firsthand and up close, as Chicago’s Andrew Barber and FakeShoreDrive went from covering and championing the culture to truly being a part of and helping shape the culture from within in the late 2000s (Episode 4 gets into FSD in more detail).
So, yeah, it’s been a little bit fun to reminisce. But also: projects like The Blog Era are so, so important. As our lives have become ever digitized over the years, so too has art, culture, and consumption. There are “Blog Eras” to be told about internet subcultures big-and-small.
We tend to assume that all things digital are preserved, and that’s just not the case. Sites go offline. Chat histories are erased. Videos and songs are taken down. And I’m not advocating that everything should be tracked and documented all the time online—not at all!—but rather that it’s important when people thoughtfully tell these histories.
There are specific periods in my life that crossed over to the online that I would love to go back and document. The online Nike scene in the pre-Niketalk, 1990s era. Early Tumblr. Google Reader and sharebr0 culture of the late 2000s/early 2010s.
There’s something interesting about The Blog Era being released as some of the tentpoles of 2010s media—Buzzfeed News, VICE—are literally dying. We’re in a creator-led world of media and maybe socio-economic forces could have given us the foresight to say “yeah, duh, that was inevitable.” I don’t know.
But a lot of this played out organically, sometimes in reaction to the digital media world and its gatekeepers. The Buzzfeeds and VICE’s of the world, well, they were launched to much fanfare with VC backing and splashy CEOs and executives claiming they were building the future of media.
Turns out, they weren’t building the future of media. It was never going to be a VC-backed, top-down industry. (And despite that, people are still trying.) Simply having a shiny new media entity with some new formats doesn’t solve the intractable demise of traditional media and journalism in the face of broader economic, political, and local trends. And, unfortunately, the amazing editors and journalists—the people who do the really good, important work—end up paying the cost in the end.
That’s why histories like The Blog Era become so important. They’re telling a story of a of a particular convergence of technological change, communication, and culture. Because so often it’s not that people with unlimited resources who change the game, like the VC-backed media of the last decade. Not every new hip-hop blogger set out to “fundamentally change the music industry” like the folks behind the media industry constantly claimed they would do with news.
No, these bloggers—and the artists they were inextricably linked to—had new tools, new ways of creating and consuming and sharing and talking about art. And fostered thriving communities surrounding it all.
It was organic and, like, yeah, of course at some point (as you’ll hear in the podcast) they knew they were fundamentally changing the music industry. But it started with people, and new ways of doing things, and communities.
And however big or small those little communities and corners of the internet are, they all have histories worth telling.
Episode 7 of The Blog Era drops tomorrow (Wednesday, May 24). Go dig in!
The Blog Era and Telling Internet History [No. 099]