Who's that mysterious influential blogs supported rapper ? Are you Steady Bloggin guys involved in the Facebook conspiracy?Do you believe that « Influential blogs » in rap music are necessarily manipulated by Stevielike guys?
Sometimes it’s not completely conscious or as well thought out as Stevie did, so I don’t know if we can talk about manipulation, but there are definitely some artists that are being helped by some blogs. It can be explained by friendliness. As artists eventually get closer with bloggers/journalists for instance. There is this one blog of a skating clothing brand, talking a lot about rap music; this is exactly what I’m saying… Rappers they highlight always have a small success thanks to their support… And after chatting here and there, I realised that it’s just a huge friendliness network. Neither the rappers nor the bloggers are completely aware of it.
And there’s also some quite vicious stuff. Here’s a funny one. I’m part of a Facebook group gathering almost all the American bloggers, something like 10 rappers and a bunch of producers… One day we asked ourselves, if we all started to praise somebody at the same time on our different websites, wrapping up the whole thing well, like taking a beat from that well-known producer, a featuring with this hot cat and shit… Would we succeed in making believe he’s dope ?
We took someone from the group who didn’t know how to rap, someone ghostwrited his lyrics and we made him rap on some beat from a producer everyone would know… One after the other, every blogger from the group wrote some stuff to explain why it was dope… It worked. But even more than everything we could have imagined. As this artist went highly praised by all the « tastemaker » blogs, for real. We found him in some year-end blog lists from bone-headed hipsters websites nearly interested in rap, some articles saying it was revolutionary, including some big players like Complex, Fader, Spin, Pitchfork… And now… well this artist has a career. Not amongst the rap audience, but amongst kind of retarded hipsters who love to believe that they listen to rap music, it’s a hit. This artist is touring now, hanging around with stars and shit… I think I won’t reveal his identity for now, but someday someone will, for sure.
Anyway, I don’t know if it’s a proof that these kinds of practices do exist, but it’s a proof it definitely works.
More on a RNT model, there are the Baller’s Eve guys, responsible for launching Yelawof, Trinidad James and a few other careers. The boss of this radio/blog seems to hang out and find new talents pretty much everywhere, then manages them a bit undercover before pretending he discovers them when posting on his blog.
The hunt is on
the whole thing with an english translation at the end: http://www.dasswassup.com/musics/buzz-a" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false; ... akingsoda/
if only the world was so righteous