What connects both hip-hop and the internet is the fact that they are both relatively young phenomena that achieved prominence around the same time. The true economic and social power of hip-hop culture became evident in the mid 1990s, and the same can be said about the rise of the internet. Examining the ways in which these two phenomena interact is illustrative of the successes and failures that artists experience when dealing with a new distributive medium.
The hip-hop websites I have picked can be divided into four categories: blogs, news providers, message boards and social networking sites. What connects these sites besides the genre itself is that they’re all examples of websites that have either successfully brought hip-hop culture to the internet, or failed miserably in their attempt.

Blogs

Hip-hop blogs have replaced the hip-hop DJ. If you truly want to be on the cutting edge of hip-hop culture, ditch your radio and check out your blogroll. Because of the widespread acceptance of blogs in hip-hop culture, they make up the bulk of my analysis.

Nahright.com

In the world of hip-hop blogs, Nahright.com is both the most influential and popular site out there. Founded in May 2005 by a journalist named Eskay, Nahright.com is now the most trusted avenue for rappers to debut new material. Because of this, Nahright.com has replaced MTV and radio as the place to go for the newest in hip-hop music and videos. What’s truly remarkable about this is that all of it’s done through Eskay’s WordPress and Gmail accounts.

The simplest way to explain the success of Nahright.com is that the site is the easiest way to remain current in a culture that values the “new.” By updating multiple times daily, Eskay offers new music that is completely legal at a rapid pace, and the design elements of the site are truly effective at delivering the most content with the least amount of clutter. However, while Nahright.com exceeds at simplicity, it fails in aesthetics, and the site’s visual elements leave much to be desired.
Eskay uses the “Contempt” theme from WordPress, and it is a basic two-column template that offers very little in customization without a substantial knowledge of computer programming. While there is nothing wrong with a basic WordPress template, a site as important and influential as Nahright.com could embrace the visual power of the internet without sacrificing simplicity and ease of use. Even something as simple as a typographic change would improve the site’s appearance, because as it stands, Eskay’s font choice is more suited to a term paper than a cutting edge hip-hop site. If you were to analyze this site based on Eva Brumberger’s definition of visual thinking, Nahright.com can be processed intuitively, and it requires very little intellectual cognition (Brumberger, 380). This is not a bad thing though, because the site’s purpose is to provide you with new material, and you don’t have to solve any visual problems to do so.

Although there is nothing visually reprehensible about this site, there is nothing visually appealing either. Furthermore, the verbal elements of Nahright.com are sparse, and new posts are usually accompanied by one or two lines of text explaining what they mean. However, the site is great at establishing ethos, because when you’re there, you feel like you’re getting new music from a credible source.

The real strength of Nahright.com does not lie in Eskay’s verbal or visual skills, and the site relies on its superior content to bring you back again and again. Despite these two flaws, Nahright.com is one of the best hip-hop websites on the internet and this can be explained by applying the same criteria that is used to evaluate shopping websites. In their 2004 study, Website Design: Viewing the Web as a Cognitive Landscape, business professors Deborah E. Rosen and Elizabeth Purinton point out that high quality content, ease of use, speed and update frequency all play a major role in the success of a shopping website (Rosen and Purinton, 787). Although Nahright.com is not a shopping site, it does succeed in all of these categories, and Eskay frequently delivers high quality content in an efficient way.

TheMeaningofDope.com

If Nahright.com is solely concerned with what is current, Themeaningofdope.com is devoted to the past, and this site is an excellent example of how hip-hop culture has embraced the web. The creator of this site has dedicated his time to digitizing older artifacts from hip-hop culture, and the final product is like visiting a vintage record store where you can find your favourite song from the pre-digital era.

Themeaningofdope.com perfectly combines simplicity with subtle beauty, and this site is an example of how something as simple as a WordPress template can be made to look spectacular. Although Themeaningofdope.com uses the same “Contempt” theme as Nahright.com, the creator has made some subtle changes that bring out the visual potential of a blog. For example, the background and sidebar are faded, and employ the use of grey scale to impart a feeling of vintage “old school” hip-hop. Although this may sound boring, it is extremely effective at placing you in a time period when music was on vinyl and hip-hop wasn’t obsessed with commercialism. If there truly is a grammar of colour, this site’s colour scheme perfectly utilizes grey scale shading to represent the past. Instead of making grey seem old, Themeaningofdope.com makes it seem cool, and for that reason, the site is very effective at communicating with colour.
The verbal elements of this site are typical of most hip-hop blogs in the sense that they serve an explanatory function. However, the minimal amount of writing that is present helps transport you back to the late 1980s, and traditional slang from that era is used heavily. Because of this, the visual and verbal aspects of this site are complimentary and reinforcing. Themeaningofdope.com is an excellent example of how someone can take new technology to re-invigorate old ideas. If there were hip-hop blogs in the late 1980s, this is what they would look like.
KanyeUniverseCity.com/blog

Kanye West is arguably the most popular rapper in the world, and his approach to blogging is as unique as his approach to hip-hop. By filling his blog with posts about high fashion, home décor and avant-garde art, Kanye has created an interesting online experience that differs from most hip-hop sites. Although the visual quality of his blog is very professional and polished, the same cannot be said about his writing. By analyzing Kanyeuniversecity through Eric P. Kumpf’s categories of visual metadiscourse, the problems of his site are revealed.
After the release of his last album, Kanye West shunned the media and used his blog as his main communication tool. The problem with this is that Kanye writes with little regard for heft or chunking, and his writing looks like this:

THANK YOU EVERYBODY FOR MAKING 808’S & HEARTBREAK THE NUMBER ONE ALBUM IN THE WORLD!!!!! LOVE LOCK DOWN HAS SOLD 1.3 MILLION SO FAR ON ITUNES AND HEARTLESS AND SEE YOU IN MY NIGHTMARES SOLD OVER ONE THOUSAND EACH LAST WEEK.

Kanye’s embrace of CAPS is a slap in the face to well structured and visually appealing texts, and his writing style clearly violates at least three categories of visual metadiscourse: Heft, Chunking and Expense (Kumpf, 407 – 413).

The problem with CAPS is that it is hard to take someone seriously when they use it as their main mode of communication. If the way words are arranged is supposed to have as much of an effect on the message as the words themselves, Kanye West’s writing appears juvenile and immature. Furthermore, it is hard to decipher the meaning of a text when it is presented as an overwhelming wall of words, and an otherwise eloquent statement turns into a jumbled rant.
What is even more strange about Kanye’s embrace of CAPS is that it is looks incredibly cheap on a website that is otherwise very expensive. The placement of CAPS above high quality images of art is a contrast that is visually unacceptable, and this limits Kanye’s ability to promote “high culture.” If Kanye West really wanted to elevate hip-hop by infusing other cultural elements, he should have taken into account the awkward way in which he writes. Because of his sloppy presentation of text, the effectiveness of his well designed website suffers greatly.

Illdoctrine.com

Illdoctrine.com is a video-blog, or “vlog” that was created by the New York based DJ, Jay Smooth. Jay Smooth updates his site every week or so with a new video, which takes the form of him engaged in a one on one dialogue with the camera. Smooth’s topic choices usually revolve around hip-hop, but he never specifically talks about the artists themselves and focuses on the political, social and linguistic aspects of hip-hop culture. Because of this, Jay Smooth is a hip-hop intellectual, and his blog is probably the best one out there if you’re looking for an intellectual perspective on the issues of the culture. Since Jay Smooth delivers all of his ideas via video, there is no distinction between the verbal and the visual on his site.

The blog postings on Illdoctrine.com are short 2 to 3 minute video clips of Jay Smooth speaking on a specific issue. Although the content of the clips is very thoughtful and enlightening, the visual aspects of the videos are not spectacular from a design standpoint. However, the way in which Smooth presents his speech is equivalent to a well-written essay in the sense that he understands the structure of an effective argument. Instead of just simply reading his ideas in front of the camera, Smooth employs clever video editing to make his rhetoric much more effective.
Illdoctrine.com is a great example of a website that examines the more controversial issues of hip-hop culture in a unique and effective way.

News Websites

Before bloggers broke stories and debuted new music, hip-hop news websites were efficient one-stop shops for everything related to the culture. The two websites examined here are the most well-rounded and popular hip-hop news sites on the internet to have survived the blog invasion. Unfortunately, only one of them succeeds at delivering news in an appealing way that successfully blends the verbal and the visual.

SOHH.com

SOHH.com is a popular hip-hop news website that recently underwent a major transformation. In the summer of 2008, the website was hacked by white supremacists who defaced it with racist content. Not only was the site vandalized, the hackers also manage to render SOHH.com completely useless, and it took web designers several months to repair the damage and create a new site. Unfortunately, the new version of the once excellent news source is not an improvement on the original, and this is largely to due to the visual elements of the website.

The most noticeable problem of the new SOHH.com is that the site overwhelms you with heft, and there is just too much going on in such a small space. Instead of opting for a simple design, SOHH.com’s web team decided to cram as much content as possible onto a page that was already chock full of photos and advertisements. This makes navigation difficult, and the ubiquitous sidebar that guides you through most news websites is nowhere to be found. The site also has no concept of branding, and their logo is featured in small print, and its design lacks any typographical originality.  Instead of presenting the logo on a main banner at the top of the page, it is relegated to the corner of an ad that occupies the main banner’s place.

Perhaps the most infuriating aspect of the new SOHH.com is that as soon as you sign on, you are automatically subjected to annoying videos. If I wanted to watch TV, I would watch TV, and when I arrive at a website that is primarily text-based, there is nothing more annoying than being bombarded with video and sound. The most visually offensive aspect of the site is the design of the actual articles themselves, as the content is surrounded by large green banners that contain anywhere from five to ten ads provided by the Google Ad Service. The low-quality presentation of the articles is detrimental to the journalistic quality of the site, and it is hard to establish a positive ethos.

If SOHH.com is supposed to be a credible news source, their design elements are not congruent with that mission. Establishing an ethos based on trust is important for media outlets, and SOHH.com’s designers have failed at this. The old SOHH.com was much more organized and easy to use, and the lack of overbearing ads and videos made the site comfortable and trustworthy. If SOHH.com were to be analyzed in print terms, their new design is comparable to the New York Times changing its look to resemble the New York Post.

Allhiphop.com

Allhiphop.com is the CNN of hip-hop news. Established in 1998 by two friends in Delaware, the website now receives tens of millions of visits per month, and brings in millions of dollars in revenue. Allhiphop.com’s success is not accidental, and the site is a well-designed and effective news provider. The key to the site’s success is that it embraces both the verbal and visual aspects of journalism and hip-hop and perfectly transfers them to the digital realm.

Beginning with the design, Allhiphop.com looks and feels like a website for a major news network, and the content is laid out in a logical manner. The site’s news stories are prioritized by their importance or chronology, and the ads are from major corporations and are not overbearing or intrusive. The site is navigable, and the colour scheme is a sleek black, grey and red, which makes it feel important and professional. This colour choice also has a very urban feel to it, and reminds you that you’re reading about hip-hop and not the stock market. Clearly, Allhiphop.com has managed to combine the positive design elements from both journalism and hip-hop.

Allhiphop.com also succeeds as a news provider because the site managers have mastered the tone of print journalism and hip-hop culture. For example, Allhiphop.com relies on the detached tone of a journalist for news stories, but embraces profanity and slang for editorials.
The use of profanity in the editorial section fits in perfectly with hip-hop culture, because hip-hop music is about expressing yourself in a loud and colloquial manner that shuns convention.
Allhiphop.com quickly establishes itself as a credible, professional and trustworthy news source that has not lost touch with the culture it chronicles. It is the best example of an effective hip-hop news website and it is clearly number one for a reason.

Message Boards

Message boards are an essential element of online hip-hop culture because they are the main forums for arguing about music. Hip-hop culture’s obsession with competition has manifested itself online, and the Ill Community is a great example of the web mirroring real life. However, the Ill Community is also an example of how the more negative aspects of the real world are exported online.

The Ill Community (http://community.allhiphop.com/go/forum/viewboard)

The Ill Community is the message board for Allhiphop.com, and it has become so popular it can be considered its own entity. Members of the Ill Community can contribute their opinions on myriad of topics, and there is a forum for everything from music to hygiene. Although the Ill Community provides unlimited potential for expression, the way in which people do so is troubling, and the forum emulates many of the negative aspects of hip-hop culture.

In the Ill Community, there are several rules that forum members must abide by in order to retain their posting rites. For example, the rules for the Ill Community state that racism is not tolerated and any violation of this rule results in a ban. This is similar to hip-hop culture, which has established itself as a culture firmly against racism. Members of the Ill Community who break this rule are chastised and banned and this is one of the more positive aspects of the forum. However, there are no rules about homophobic or sexist remarks, and the forum’s posts are filled with these comments. The widespread homophobia and misogyny on the Ill Community is symptomatic of the negative aspects of a culture where these social problems are widespread. The strict no-racism policy of both the Ill Community and hip-hop culture loses its credibility when rules about discrimination are not applied universally.

The Ill Community is so popular that it has spawned its own vocabulary that is highly reflective of hip-hop culture. Although the standard short forms like “LOL” and “BRB” are present in the writing of members, community members have moved beyond these short forms and created their own terms. For example, when a member creates a post that receives a thousand or more comments, it is considered a “platinum post” much in the same way that a successful album is referred to as a “platinum record.” Going platinum in the music business is a celebrated achievement, and the same can be said about going platinum in the Ill Community.
Although the visual aspects of the Ill Community are completely standard for a message board, the verbal element is incredibly interesting because the site managed to adopt the worst elements of hip-hop vernacular. Studying the ways in which online communities develop their own languages and norms is fascinating, and forums like the Ill Community could be a fruitful topic for academic research.

Social Networking Websites

Social networking websites have evolved from simple communication devices to powerful marketing and advertising tools. In an industry as commercial as hip-hop, it was not long until business savvy rappers made moves to cash in on this trend. The website examined here is the most business savvy rapper’s attempt at offering advertisement disguised as a social experience.

Thisis50.com

50 Cent is an artist in crisis. Once the best-selling and most dominant voice in hip-hop culture, 50’s record sales and popularity dropped in late 2007 and he has struggled ever since. When faced with a crisis, some of us turn to religion. Others turn to drugs. 50 Cent however, turned to the internet.

In an attempt to make himself relevant again, 50 and his team created Thisis50.com, which is a social networking site for fans of 50 Cent and hip-hop in general. Hoping to cash in on the popularity of other networking sites like Facebook, Thisis50.com delivers a sub par social experience that doubles as ad space. However, 50’s site has proven to be quite popular, and other rappers have emulated his approach. Why this has happened is a mystery, because Thisis50.com is a terrible website.

The main problem with Thisis50.com is that there is so much happening at once the site ends up exceeding the internet bandwidth and processing power of a modern computer. As soon as you log in, you are immediately overwhelmed with photos, videos, music and advertisements, and the site takes an excessively long time to load. If your internet browser doesn’t crash because of the overwhelming heft of the site itself, your eyes are assaulted by the poorly laid out text and pictures. Although this may sound cruel, this site has nothing positive to contribute to field of web design, and unfortunately the same can be said about the site’s verbal elements.

Thisis50.com is supposed to be a social networking site, but the only meaningful thing you can contribute to the site is a few comments about what is already posted. Although the site allows you to have a personal profile, your options are seriously limited as to what you can say about yourself as an individual. If Thisis50.com were a successful social networking site, then the verbal contribution of its members wouldn’t be constrained by the site itself.

Thisis50.com is an example of the blatant, unapologetically commercial element of hip-hop culture. In this sense, the site is also a failure, because the design aspects of the site are so poor, that even the ads seem sub par.

Bibliography

Brumberger, Eva R. “Making the Strange Familiar: A Pedagogical Exploration of Visual
Thinking.” Journal of Business and Technical Communication 21 (2007): 376-401.

Kumpf, Eric P. “Visual Metadiscourse: Designing the Considerate Text.” Technical
Communication Quarterly 9 (2000): 401-424.

Rosen, Deborah E, Purinton, Elizabeth. “Website Design: Viewing the Web as a Cognitive
Landscape.” Journal of Business Research 54 (2004): 787-794.

“Untitled Post.” Kanye Universe City. 3 Dec. 2008.
< http://www.kanyeuniversecity.com/blog/?em3106=215401_-1__0_~0_
1_12_2008_0_0&em3298=&em3282=&em3281=&em3161=>.

According to the internet traffic monitor Technorati.com, there are over 110 million registered blogs in  existence, proving that the blog is now as ubiquitous in cyberspace as e-mail. Only time will tell if this is a good thing, but in the meantime blogs are multi-dimensional digital writing forums and as the above data shows, people have embraced them with zeal. With 110 million bloggers expressing themselves daily, there is another group in cyberspace that has an exponentially larger digital voice: the people who enjoy spending their time commenting on blog posts. The forum for this type of writing is the blog comment box (BCB) at the end of each blogger’s post, which has now become an extremely popular form of digital writing inside other digital writing.

Now that’s meta!

In Eric P. Kumpf’s journal article “Visual Metadiscourse: Designing the Considerate Text”(Technical Communication Quarterly, Volume 9, Issue 4) Kumpf attempts to identify and categorize visual metadiscourse. In keeping with this train of thought, I’ve decided to attempt a brief visual analysis of BCB writing. In order to do so, I’ve organized the various forms of BCB writing into 4 categories: CAPS, comments on comments, profanity as a visual art form, and self-promotion. I’ve only analyzed CAPS in depth, but I’ve included examples of the remaining 3 categories in order to provide a greater understanding of this emerging medium.

CAPS:

The use of CAPS is perhaps the most common form of BCB writing, which is interesting because CAPS makes a mockery of the majority of Kumpf’s visual metadiscourse categories, violating the rules of heft, first impression, chunking, attraction and style. The sole purpose of CAPS is to express rage, and sentences are usually accompanied by one, (or if especially angry) three exclamation points. The use of CAPS also implies that the comment is especially important, because anything that’s important should be said loudly.

The use of CAPS creates a very poor first impression rendering the merit of the comment obsolete. It is as stylistically unappealing and ugly on the outside as it is on the inside. It also overwhelms the reader with heft, turning what otherwise might be a poignant 3 sentence observation into a gargantuan wall of words. Chunking is chucked aside, and the text is transformed into one large, ominous and unreadable square block. Don’t attempt to read CAPS, it’s a visual and textual quagmire.

With that said, the only redeeming quality of CAPS is that it’s consistent, but it’s consistent in the same way as a toothache: constantly painful and irritating. CAPS is clearly a most inconsiderate form of text and if Kumpf’s article was a blog post, an example of a BCB writer who used CAPS to write a comment would look like this:

Comment number 1:
Posted by CAPSMASTERFLEX @ 9:58 pm October 26th 2008

YOU OPPORTUNISTIC ACADEMIC!!! BY CATEGORIZING THE CONVENTIONS OF VISUAL METADISCOURSE YOU’LL BE CITED IN OTHER JOURNAL ARTICLES FOR YEARS!!! CLIMB DOWN FROM YOUR IVORY TOWER!!!

Comments on Comments:

Comments on comments are perhaps the most meta thing that a writer can partake in, and if a reader of Kumpf’s article wanted to refer to CAPSMASTERFLEX’s blog comment, it would look like this:

Comment number 2:
Posted by Referential @ 10:12 pm October 26th 2008

^^^
LMFAO @ this comment

Profanity as an Art Form:

Profanity as an art form involves the use of profanity in a whole new way, often linking curse words together in an aesthetically pleasing manner. Comment number 3 illustrates this.

Comment number 3:
Posted by Belligerent @ 10:30 pm October 26th 2008

F*ckingtenuretrackbast*rds

Self-Promotion:

Self-Promotion is a common form of BCB writing and it is very appealing. I find it attractive because it allows the reader to choose if he or she wants to learn more. This form of BCB writing gives a strong first impression, and has the potential to be very attractive if the reader chooses to explore what is offered. Comment number 4 illustrates this.

Comment number 4:
Posted by ShamelessSelfPromoter @ 10:36 pm October 26th 2008

Dope article Kumpf, for the more talk on metadiscourse be sure to peep:

www.CoarseMetaDiscourse.com

Conclusion:

Clearly there are numerous categories of BCB writing, and the exploration of the textual and visual properties of the writing inside of writing is the most meta thing one can do.

Cartoons courtesy of:

http://blogoehlert.typepad.com/eclippings/2004/10/im_probably_the.html

and

http://inatie.wordpress.com/2007/03/18/happy-meta-day/

Asher Roth is a nerdy white college kid from the North Eastern United States and he also happens to be a lyrical monster when he’s on the microphone. XXL Magazine recently declared him one of the top 10 up and coming rappers for 2009, and Asher is set to do big things this year with his unique approach to hip-hop.

His latest release “The Reading” is a 3 minute barrage of rhymes dedicated to the art of rhyming and the necessity of reading. Although an Eminem comparison is warranted (both sonically and pigmentally) Asher Roth should definitely be in your iTunes library.

Enjoy the track my fellow digital writing nerds.

Asher Roth – The Reading

As a student in my fourth year of post-secondary education, it is hard to suppress the instant feeling of apprehension that I experience when presented with electronic writing pieces like Patricia Monaghan’s “Examination” or Jennifer Ley’s “Our Digital Lascaux”. While the content of these pieces could very well be brilliant, I find their presentation instantly repellent. If we are to take Dene Grigar’s interpretation of the postmodern definition of literature as “any writing of particular value to someone” (Grigar 387), the problem for me lies in the fact that I immediately dismiss the value of this type of work. This is largely due to the way these works are presented, and my instant dismissal inspires guilt, because I know very well that electronic writing, and the artistic merit of said writing, cannot be so easily relegated to the trash bin on our desktops. In other words, I’m guilty of the digital equivalent of judging a book by its cover, which I consider to be a particularly heinous crime. So why am I so easily capable of this almost unconscious act of pretentious dismissal?

After some introspection, I realized that the root of my problem is grounded in the fact that I live two separate lives. The first is my regular life: a post-modern existence that embraces the changing value systems in our socially constructed society and the new ways that technology helps us view the world. This person steals music online, writes using contractions and thinks art belongs and can exist anywhere, including the walls of an alley.

My other life involves my fledgling academic career as an honours student in the history program, and it is one that is characterized by an adherence to the values of a detached Rankean objectivity. This person believes a painting should be in an art gallery and a poem should reside in the walls of a bound book. When this version of my identity confronts hybrid forms of writing that “by their design and presentation, defy conventions of the print medium” (Grigar 387) its immediate reaction is dismissal.

Clearly, in order to appreciate electronic writing, a synthesis of both lives is necessary. In order for me to even begin to understand the poetry or story telling that is presented in this new form, I have to combine the embracing values of my one life, and the scholarly tools and methods of analysis that exist in the other.

Grigar uses Terry Eagleton’s critical work to illustrate that the definition of literature is subjective, and that it “changes with the zeitgeist of a period, and that it is dependent upon events and ideas that develop as well as beliefs of the dominant social group” (Grigar 387). So clearly I’m in the wrong zeitgeist, or at the very least, I live in two separate ages with two distinct spirits. However, synthesizing my two separate lives for the purpose of a greater understanding is not a difficult task and analyzing the roots of something as strong as an instant apprehension to electronic art is illustrative of our adherence to tradition, often to the detriment of an enriched experience.

Zinc is dope!

But if you’re not convinced by that brisk piece of evidence, please consult the “About this Blog” page found at the top of my site.

Thank you.

- DSuth