The Game Done Changed....

I’m not gonna lie. I’m an elitist. I learned this while talking to an ultra-conservative, libertarian at my job yesterday regarding Obama and Palin. So now that I have this information about myself I wondered how it applied to other areas of my life, specifically (for this blog) hiphop. And what I realized is that I have to come to terms with the fact that the game has changed.

Now aside from the fact that personally to me emcees are just less creative and that music has become about who can fashion the best “dance” song or ringtone, but the way emcees market and advertise has changed dramatically. Its no longer about making a hit, its about getting hits. Its not about selling a million units, its about having a million visitors. In the electronic age, your buzz is not simply generated by your mixtapes and how hot your tracks are, but by how much controversy you can stir up from your youtube video. Joe Budden, Solja Boy, Ice T, and a hoard of other artist are now capitalizing on the fact that 90% of their target audience is on the internet. And not just using the internet occassionally, but I mean hardcore attached to the internet. Not just on their computers at home and work, but they follow these things on their cell phones. This is proven by Twitter which means that as a follower, you are basically saying ‘I am so dedicated to this person that I am willing to check their twitter page 50 times a day just to see if they bought ice cream the same flavor as me’. But these artists know what they’re doing. This is all part of the entertainment package. You don’t just get mediocre music with your artist, but now you get up to the minute details of their boring ass life, which only seems less boring because they happen to make mediocre music.

I guess I can’t hate what’s going on, but the elitist side of me does. The elitist side of me hates fakes ass “reality” shows because studios don’t want to pay writers to come up with creative shit like Cheers, Seinfield, and 24. It hates that because I can take a camcorder (or phone video) of me talking shit about somebody else and because its somewhat funny it gives me a pass to make wack ass music devoid of any creativity. It hates that what has happened is that the listening audience is more focused on the day-to-day activities of an artist’s girl than the artist’s music. It hates that the world has become so brain-dead that it can’t see how instead of creating our own adventures and our own excitement we rather leech off someone else’s.

Guess I need to get my camcorder ready. GREY EP COMING BITCHES!!! I need to start a beef.

ONE

Cashmere the PRO aka RJ