Smart & Angry

What I used to love about music blogs in 2007 was it was the alternative from radio and MTV. Without it, I wouldn't have discovered some of my favorite acts M.I.A., Tokyo Police Club and Wale in that era. I wanted to start a blog to show off new acts I found on the internet that no one else is talking about. One of my first Co-signs was Lykke Li. I randomly came across her on a messageboard and downloaded her music on the exact date of February 14 2007. I put her music up cause she was different and uniquely alluring in her singing.

As the years go on adding more blogs in my google reader and found more acts to add to my list like U-N-I, Raheem DeVaughn, The Hush Sound, The Kickdrums, and Chester French.

Then came Drake.

I had just survived an onslaught of overcoverage of Lil' Wayne's "Carter III" of every mundane detail of: Freestyle, Cover art, trailers to videos, irrelevant flipcam interviews that aren't about his music, gossip, being the best rapper for no relevant reason, excreta excreta. I wanted something new and came across Drake. I listened to his mixtape and only liked 2 songs and thought he was alright.

But again I saw the same patterns that ws following Lil' Wayne. It was the waves of freestyles, irrelevant interviews that went nowhere, Trailers, Tracklistings, Freestyles, covers, and more video interviews. All this built up Hype and bandwagoning taught my brain how to just glaze over the term "Drake" and move on to the next post.

More time passed and more artists were pushing their stuff out the same way, this over gurgitation of volumes of crap from every artist. Like why should I get happy about a tracklisting of an album or a stupid behind the scene of making a stupid freestyle.

Then comes discovering 2dopeboyz. I usually got my content from Nah Right for hip-hop and sometimes they would plug that they got it from 2dopeboyz. I subscribed to the blog for a while. However in a day I would get 100 posts a day from all these random artist with no editorial context AND using the same marketing plan as Drake and Lil' Wayne. What was worse was that within 10 minutes of a 2dopeboyz release, the same crap would go to all the other blogs with the same context.

Taking a step back and looking at the blogosphere culture, no one is doing any quality control. I subscribe to many hip-hop blogs thinking i would get different opinions about certain acts but no. Its just rehash of what was posted on what music comes from 2dopeboyz. There is no way that all these blogs love all the artists that they posted.

I always wanted to make this blog different by discovering music people haven't heard yet and putting my 2 cents on the discovery. But its hard to find anyone these days when post are put as lazily like this:

XV kicks a few bars during his visit to DJ Enuff’s radio show.

How do you expect me to try to listen to some guy named XV in this context when you do that to everyone 100 times a day?

Even in the indie world, blogs would push out as many acts as they can to where I can't get a vibe of taste a certain blog has because they post everything. The excitement of a blog reccommending music to me because they have the same taste as me is gone now.

Music Critic Chris Weingarten spoke at the 140 Character Conference talking about how music journalism is gone to hell. Music opinion is gone as now people push out as many artists as they can and "Hope" that one of them catches on fire.

Does this mean I have quit listening to music altogether? Of course not. Just means I have to find a better way of finding and bonding with music

-Bobojojo