Thirty Three Jones
We ran the first installment of this piece last week and the response made clear that there were a lot more names worth accounting for. So here's the second dispatch from the ghost city of the blog era. Same premise: who were they, what did the site mean, where did they end up. Almost 99% of this research was done with google searches and limited (aka zero) fact checking by anyone other than myself, with gaps filled in by my now rapidly fading memory, so don't be shy in correcting me if I got any of it wrong.
Note: I included the History of Hip Hop mix as the featured youtube video for this post because I couldn't come up with a decent image concept to cover everything, and that mix is one of the greatest artifacts to come out of the blog era so it seemed fitting enough.
Palms Out Sounds / Haldan
Haldan ran Palms Out Sounds out of New York starting in 2005, and built one of the more quietly influential blogs of the era. Where a lot of sites were racing to post the newest thing first, Palms Out was slower and more deliberate, running a Remix Sunday series and posting music with genuine taste across a spectrum that ran from hip-hop to electronic to whatever it was you'd call certain tracks that defied category. He also built it into a small label, releasing vinyl and cassette compilations. The trail went cold for a while, but Palms Out has been reborn in recent years. Haldan has been posting again on the relaunched site,and also released a charitable cassette compilation in 2022 raising awareness about broken windows policing.
Unkut / Robbie Ettelson
Robbie Ettelson started Unkut in 2004 during night shifts at a printing job in Australia and turned it into one of the most respected interview archives in the history of hip-hop journalism, while also gaining some early notoriety for coining the phrase "bagholder" in reference to rap crews. Over a decade he conducted more than 180 phone interviews with rappers, DJs, producers, and journalists, producing long-form conversations that got into corners of the culture other sites ignored. He wrote for print magazines across the US, UK, Italy, France, Germany, and Japan, collected the best of his work into a book called Past The Margin: A Decade of Unkut Interviews, and has been posting intermittently on the site ever since. As of July 2025 he was appearing on hip-hop radio shows, playing home-made remixes on CD and talking about stout. He runs a Substack called The Eight Pint Hype but Unkut is still up.
Poisonous Paragraphs / Dart Adams
Dart Adams came out of Boston as a man of many labels: ex-emcee, film student, record and video store manager, graf writer, streetballer, etc. He ran Poisonous Paragraphs starting in 2005 as a sprawling, exhaustively researched hip-hop, film, and culture blog until it shut down in 2008. He's continued without stopping: writing for Complex, NPR, Mass Appeal, Okayplayer, Boston Globe Magazine, Andscape, Ebony, and a dozen other outlets, hosting the Boston Legends podcast, running the Producers I Know/Fat Beats imprint (which now seems to be deceased, at least from the link i could find), and serving as a fact-checker and co-author on music history books.
Wake Your Daughter Up / Travis
Wake Your Daughter Up, often abbreviated as WYDU, was run by Travis aka Travgee, a hip-hop blog with a genuine feel for the eclectic end of the genre. He's now part of the Wreck Show podcast. I spoke with him on IG about a year ago to see what he was up to, which was part of the inspiration for this whole research effort.
Hip Hop Is Read / Ivan
Hip Hop Is Read was run from 2007 onward by Ivan Rott, and it occupied a specific and valuable lane: serious, thoughtful, long-form writing about hip-hop that treated the music as literature worth close reading. The blog was cited by Vibe as one of the 50 best rap blogs (a list I still feel slighted by, but no shots at any of these fine folks that were on the list). Hip Hop Is Read is still up with new content being posted fairly regularly, but I'm not entirely sure if it is still run by the same guy.
The T.R.O.Y. Blog
T.R.O.Y. was part of the Philaflava forum ecosystem, one of the deeper and more contentious corners of old-school hip-hop internet (and a topic that deserves it's own post at some point). The blog and forum were a home for people who took the history seriously, who argued loudly about who was being undervalued and who was being overrated, and who occasionally had those arguments get genuinely heated. The Philaflava forum produced some remarkable writing and some remarkable drama, and T.R.O.Y. sat at the intersection of both. The founder is still creating content over at Take It Personal Radio.
Ego Trip / Sacha Jenkins
Ego Trip wasn't a blog, but it was the ancestor of everything the blog era tried to be and I thought it was important to include Sacha Jenkins' story since I covered Elliot Wilson in the last post. Ego Trip was a publication built on genuine expertise, sharp opinions, and the conviction that hip-hop deserved to be taken seriously on its own terms. Sacha Jenkins co-founded it with Elliott Wilson in 1994 after a falling-out with childhood friend Haji Akhigbade, who had started Beat Down Newspaper with him two years earlier. Ego trip ran for 13 issues over four years, produced two seminal books - the Book of Rap Lists and the Big Book of Racism! - and spawned several VH1 television shows including The (White) Rapper Show (my review of which led to a phone call from MTV/VH1 to defend themselves). Jenkins went on to co-write Eminem's autobiography The Way I Am, work on The Boondocks television adaptation, serve as creative director of Mass Appeal, and direct a few small films. He died on May 23, 2025, at 53, from complications related to multiple system atrophy. He was, as the Complex obituary put it, "a master of many mediums" whose work produced the purest expression of what hip-hop criticism could look like when it was done with love and without fear.
Lemon-Red / Chris Lemon-Red
Lemon-Red (named after a dipset lyric about earrings if I remember correctly) was a blog and mix series that operated out of Chicago in the mid-2000s, curating a mix-of-the-month series that brought in DJs and producers from across the genre-blurring world that Palms Out and the Hollerboard were also mapping. Chris solicited mixes from artists like DJ /rupture and Paul Devro and treating each entry as something worth presenting properly. The site went quiet around 2007, and I can't find anything about Chris though I have a vague memory of him doing something with Boston Phoenix newspaper, but that could just be my senility talking.
Someone else has restored the site where all of the old mixes are still available.
Caps and Jones / The Illegible DJ Caps & Pandemonium Jones
Will Creeley and Brian Curtis were The Illegible DJ Caps and Pandemonium Jones respectively, a Brooklyn duo who released a self-pressed mixtape called Moving in Stereo in 2005 that Spin magazine named one of the 40 best albums of that year. The tape combined nostalgia records like Toto, Hall & Oates, and Neneh Cherry with hip-hop, Brian Eno, The Stooges, The Pixies, Wire, and whatever weird records Caps had pulled from his eccentric collection. The blog and site operated in the same spirit, documenting their taste before taste became a content strategy.
Will Creeley, now going by The Honorable DJ Caps, went in a direction that might be the most surprising career pivot in this entire article. He is currently the Legal Director of FIRE, the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression, a nonpartisan nonprofit dedicated to defending free speech. He has testified before the Senate Commerce Committee and filed briefs in First Amendment cases before the Supreme Court. The DJ who couldn't believe anyone heard his mixtape is now one of the leading free speech lawyers in the country. Brian Curtis / Pandemonium Jones continues to dj and apparently works at a farm according to his IG.
The Rub / DJ Ayres, DJ Eleven, Cosmo Baker
The Rub wasn't primarily a blog, rather it was originally a party, a monthly residency that ran at Southpaw in Park Slope starting in 2002 and later at Bell House in Gowanus, built around DJ Ayres, DJ Eleven, and Cosmo Baker playing hip-hop, disco, dancehall, funk, and R&B in a room that felt like a house party that had gotten very good at being a house party. But they had a blog at itstherub.com (no longer active, don't try typing any form of "itstherub" into your browser address bar or you risk some weird malware), and the History of Hip-Hop mix series they released was a genuine artifact of the era. Cosmo Baker returned to Philadelphia in 2016 and has been running the Philly branch of Scratch DJ Academy ever since. DJ Ayres has stayed in New York and continues to gig and release music. DJ Eleven runs 11 Inch Records and has stayed active in the DJ community.
The Vinyl Addicts / Smoov
The Vinyl Addicts was a blog that lived at the intersection of crate digging, hip-hop history, and the collector sensibility that produced some of the era's best deep-cut writing. Smoov ran it with a focus on the rare and the overlooked, the kind of site that existed because someone had a specific knowledge set and the discipline to turn it into regular content. The site is no longer updating and Smoov's IG page is private.
SoManyShrimp / David Drake
SoManyShrimp was David Drake's blog, launched around 2004, and it was the rare site that combined genuine humor with actual critical intelligence. He went on to write professionally for Vibe, the Washington Post, Complex, the FADER, and others and is now an A&R. The SoManyShrimp domain eventually became a podcast and radio show that Drake ran out of Chicago, featuring artists from the footwork scene and beyond, and he now posts on Substack.
HoustonSoReal / Matt Sonzala
Matt Sonzala started HoustonSoReal in 2005 as a way to promote Houston rap to an audience that wasn't paying attention, and became one of the most important voices for Southern hip-hop during the period when that still required argument. He was writing about UGK, Slim Thug, Devin the Dude, and Paul Wall for Source and Murder Dog before he started the blog, and the blog accelerated what he was already doing. He ran the hip-hop programming at South by Southwest for eight years, doing more to put Houston and Texas artists on national stages than anyone else in that position had managed. He later went to Red Bull to help launch their Sound Select program. He's currently based in Austin, booking events globally under Pushermania Promotions, and still writing.
Beer and Rap / SergDun
SergDun started in SoManyShrimp's orbit and launched his own operation with Beer and Rap The site has been intermittently active for twenty years and SergDun's last post that I can find was in May of last year but he is somewhat active on IG if you go hunting for his account.
The Smoking Section / John Gotty
John Gotty, whose pen name is a combination of his first and middle name not a reference to the mob boss, a distinction he has had to clarify repeatedly including apparently to Google, which refused to approve his Google+ profile on impersonation grounds was a former high school English teacher from Nashville who built The Smoking Section into one of the major hip-hop blogs of the era. It grew to over two million monthly unique visitors at its peak. Gotty was also an early and prominent sneaker collector, and The Smoking Section covered that intersection before it was standard hip-hop media practice.
He shut down The Smoking Section and launched Still Crew, a music and culture publication, which he ran for several years on Medium and its own platform. His most recent public professional credit is Senior Editor at ESPN, which tracks for someone who built his career on making cultural criticism readable. He remains active on social media under @JohnGotty.
Kevin Nottingham
Kevin Nottingham ran his self-titled blog through the early 2010s as one of the more reliable discovery sites of that period, covering independent and underground hip-hop with genuine enthusiasm and frequency before shutting down in 2014. Around that time he also started up Hip Nott records.
The site KevinNottingham.com is still live, but it seems to be a personal account for someone else deep in the IT Industry now.
Hip Hop Isn't Dead / Max
Hip Hop Isn't Dead was run by Max, and it occupied the earnest end of the underground spectrum, the kind of blog that genuinely believed the title and was trying to prove it with every post. The site was active through the late 2000s and continues to post into 2026 though the last post was in January.
Spine Magazine
Spine was a print magazine, not a blog, but it had a website that posted mp3s that were often grabbed by many blogs at the time. It covered hip-hop and urban culture with a design sensibility and editorial ambition that matched the best of what the era produced in print. Issues are now collectibles. The people behind it went on to other things in media, design, and journalism, but the magazine itself didn't survive the collapse of hip-hop print that took out most of its peers.
ProHipHop / Clyde
Clyde launched ProHipHop in 2005 as what he described as the first hip-hop trade blog meaning it covered the business and industry of hip-hop rather than the music itself, which was a genuinely distinct and useful thing to exist in the blog era. He went on to write about music technology and the DIY music business at Hypebot from 2011 to 2014, and subsequently got deep into crypto, launching CryptoArtNet.com and NFTEntrepreneur.com. He's been active on Medium and social media under the name FluxResearch and seems to now be focused on writing about investing in the Defense Industry (think Palantir, drones, and everything that is leading us towards Terminator becoming a reality one day). The path from hip-hop trade blog to NFT entrepreneur to Defense-minded financial strategy is one of the stranger trajectories in this whole accounting, but here we are.
Werner Von Wallenrod / John McKelvey
Hopefully he'll come along and fact check this after the fact (his comment on a recent post gave me the drive to finish this followup), but Werner (his pen name) has been writing about hip-hop on the internet longer than almost all of us. He was a writer and editor at The Source in the late '90s, contributed to Hip-Hop Connection, Diggers With Gratitude, The Miami Herald, Rebirth Mag, Record Collector Magazine, and others, and has been running his Humble Little Hip Hop Blog since the early 2000s with a focus on the deep cuts, the regional obscurities, the records that fell through the cracks of the official canon. He is one of the purest expressions of what blogging was supposed to be: someone with real knowledge and enough discipline to keep doing it for twenty years.
Potholes in My Blog / David Reyneke
Potholes in My Blog was co-founded by David Reyneke, a South African expat whose forum posts on hip-hop boards were good enough that people started following him before he had a site to follow, along with contributors including Andrew Martin. The blog launched around 2009 and quickly established itself as a genuinely eclectic operation: the music taste ran across hip-hop, R&B, the beat scene, jazz, and occasional left turns into indie rock that the readers tolerated because the hip-hop was good enough to earn the trust. "Your lifeline to good-ass music" was the tagline, and they mostly delivered on it. The blog shut down in 2015 as the MP3 blog model more or less collapsed. Reyneke subsequently pivoted to running Potholes Music, an independent label with a focus on forward-thinking hip-hop and soul, which continues to operate, and there is a youtube channel.
DJBooth / Dave Macli
DJBooth was founded in 2003 by Dave Macli as a college project. He was a mass communications major who needed a place to host interviews and couldn't find an existing platform that fit, so he taught himself enough HTML from library books to build one from scratch. The site launched as one of the first platforms to stream hip-hop music directly on the page, before SoundCloud, before Audiomack, before any of the infrastructure we now take for granted. Macli turned it into a proper business, brought in Brian Zisook as a partner, and found managing editor Nathan Slavik via a Craigslist post in 2007. Slavik had been covering national politics and taken DJBooth as a freelance side hustle before realizing it was where he actually wanted to be. The "1 Listen Album Reviews" series was genuinely influential. The site grew to a couple million monthly unique visitors and was part of the Complex Media Network before Macli and his partners launched Audiomack in 2012 as a streaming platform built around the same artist-first principles DJBooth had operated on from the beginning. DJBooth was eventually folded into Audiomack. Dave Macli remains CEO of Audiomack, which has grown into a legitimate streaming platform particularly popular among emerging artists and in Afrobeats and global hip-hop markets. Nathan Slavik went on to co-found Quality Produce, a content and marketing agency.
Different Kitchen / ian
Other Music from a Different Kitchen, which everyone just called A Different Kitchen, run by Ian Steaman, was Toronto's most important hip-hop blog, which also made it one of Canada's most important hip-hop blogs during a period when Canadian hip-hop was still having to prove itself to an audience that wasn't looking north by default. Ian started the Blogspot incarnation around 2007 and built it into a genuine tastemaking operation, covering Drake when Drake was still a mixtape kid, championing Toronto artists like Rich Kidd and Andreena Mill alongside Bay Area rap, Southern rap, and whatever else he thought was worth the bandwidth. In September 2022 Ian released Quinceanera: Marvelous Ish, a 15-track compilation album of all-new and unreleased music to celebrate the site's 15th anniversary. The site now throws a 404 error, so I am not sure if that means it's fully shut down or just having web host issues. Ian was always supportive of this site and seemed like a genuinely good guy.There are still a few more names that I haven't covered yet. Drop a line in the comments for any specific names you'd like to hear about.
Complex resurfaced their 50 Best New York Rappers of All Time list this week, and the response was predictable: Azealia Banks told them to get defunded, Jadakiss told Fat Joe he doesn't care about the ranking, and the rest of us argued about it on our phones as soon as it hit xTwitter. The list is imperfect in the way all lists of this kind are engineered to be imperfect enough to drive clicks, but it's also genuinely interesting to think through, and rather than just argue about it, I built a mix.
The concept was simple: one song from each of the 50 artists, my choice. No restrictions on era, album, or format. One song per artist, and we keep it moving.
Some picks were easy, some required a bit of thought. I will be upfront that finding something I actually wanted to hear from A Boogie Wit da Hoodie and Cardi B required more digging than the rest of the list combined and Nicki Minaj gets her slot via the Monster verse, because really nothing she has done since has hit that bar. Also I really wanted to end the mix with NY State of Mind to close things out thematically, but On the Real has always been my favorite Nas track so...
The mix runs about an hour and thirty minutes, let me know in the comments what picks you would have chosen differently!
Tracklist
- GZA The Genius -- Liquid Swords
- Kool Keith -- Livin' Astro
- Mos Def -- Sunshine
- Foxy Brown -- Get Me Home
- ODB -- Shimmy Shimmy Ya
- Brand Nubian -- All for One
- Nicki Minaj -- Monster verse
- Chef Raekwon feat. Ghostface -- Rainy Dayz (Long Remix)
- MC Lyte -- 10 Dis
- Big Punisher feat. Joe -- Still Not a Player
- MF Doom -- Doomsday
- Fat Joe -- Dat Gangsta Shit
- De La Soul -- Me, Myself and I
- KRS-One -- MCs Act Like They Don't Know
- DMX -- Ruff Ryders' Anthem
- French Montana -- Pop That
- Lloyd Banks -- Warrior
- Ja Rule -- Holla Holla
- Jay-Z -- Brooklyn's Finest
- A$AP Rocky -- F**kin' Problems
- Big L -- Ebonics
- Noreaga -- Superthug
- Fabolous -- Breathe
- Q-Tip -- Vivrant Thing
- Method Man -- Bring the Pain
- Big Daddy Kane -- Ain't No Half Steppin'
- Jadakiss -- Checkmate
- Slick Rick -- Children's Story
- Public Enemy -- Fight the Power
- Run-D.M.C. -- Sucker M.C.'s
- Eric B. & Rakim -- I Know You Got Soul
- Mase -- Feel So Good
- Grandmaster Flash & Melle Mel -- White Lines
- Cardi B -- Bodak Yellow
- A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie -- Drowning
- Kool Moe Dee -- I Go to Work
- Pop Smoke -- Dior
- 50 Cent -- Ski Mask Way
- LL Cool J -- I'm Bad
- Busta Rhymes -- Woo Hah!! Remix
- Prodigy -- Keep It Thoro
- Ghostface Killah -- Nutmeg
- The Notorious B.I.G. -- Warning
- Lil' Kim -- Queen B*tch
- Biz Markie -- Just a Friend
- Styles P -- Good Times
- Jim Jones -- We Fly High
- Cam'ron -- Oh Boy
- Kool G Rap & DJ Polo -- Ill Street Blues
- Nas -- On the Real
There's a specific moment in mid-2006 where you can locate the exact spot this all started. Tom Breihan was writing "Status Ain't Hood" for the Village Voice, one of the better hip-hop blogs running at the time, not in spite of the institutional masthead but largely independent of it, and he had developed a habit of quoting rap lyrics with the slur intact. He wasn't saying it, he was quoting it. There's a difference, arguably, if only because it removes the immediate physical danger of getting slugged in the mouth for saying it. The hip-hop writers who came up through print had navigated this question in various ways for years, usually through dashes or asterisks or the clinical construction "the N-word," all of which carry their own awkwardness.
In July 2006, Kris Ex, then blogging for XXL, called Breihan out specifically on this, characterizing him as someone "who would never say the N-word, but seem[s] to go out of [his] way to quote rap lyrics that use it." It was a pointed and fair observation, and Breihan, to his credit, didn't dismiss it. He reached out to Kris Ex directly, they talked, and he started doing something different.
He started writing "ninja."
As in: quoting a Lil Wayne mixtape lyric as "And a ninja drink like the late Fred Sanford / And a ninja smoke like there is no cancer." The substitution was phonetically adjacent, rhythmically functional, and funnier than asterisks, which was Breihan's stated reasoning. "I did that instead of using [asterisks or dashes] just because I thought this way was funnier, and it kind of defused the situation," he told Ben Westhoff of the Dallas Observer in a 2008 piece on the word's continued presence in hip-hop discourse. "It draws absurdity to the situation. I'm a white dude writing about rap and, obviously, on a certain cultural level, very much out of my depth."
That's a remarkably self-aware thing to say, and it's probably why the conversation around this has remained complicated rather than settled.
Breihan's career up to that point had been built on being genuinely good at writing about rap from an outside vantage point. The Village Voice had a long history of serious criticism, and "Status Ain't Hood" was well-regarded in the blog-era ecosystem. He went on to write for Pitchfork, GQ, Grantland, and others before eventually landing at Stereogum, where he's spent the better part of a decade writing "The Number Ones," a column working through every Billboard Hot 100 chart-topper in chronological order. That column became a book in 2023. He is, by any measure, a music writer with a real body of work and a demonstrated commitment to the craft.
Which makes the "ninja" thing worth taking seriously rather than dismissing in either direction.
What happened after Breihan started doing it is where it gets complicated. The substitution traveled. Other writers, predominantly but not exclusively white, picked it up as a practice, and what had been one critic's idiosyncratic solution to a specific editorial problem became something closer to a convention. By the time Ben Westhoff was writing about it in 2008, it had already moved beyond the "Status Ain't Hood" comments section into broader usage. Dallas Penn's site hosted a response at the time from Combat Jack, Reggie Osse, the attorney and podcaster who passed away in 2017, that summed up the structural problem clearly: "White rap critics are between a rock and a hard place here - they can either expose themselves to allegations of racism by keeping quotes and song lyrics intact, or they can resort to inevitably awkward substitutes like 'ninja.'"
A fair statement of the dilemma. But it doesn't settle whether "ninja" was a good solution or just a more comfortable one.
The case for it is straightforward enough. When you're quoting lyrics verbatim, you are not using the word, you are transcribing it, and there's a real editorial argument that reproducing quoted material accurately serves the reader and the work being discussed. Asterisks obscure meaning. "The N-word" in the middle of a lyric quote reads clinically, breaks the rhythm, and treats the reader like they might not know what word is being referenced, which is its own kind of condescension. "Ninja" at least acknowledges the specific word's presence in the lyric without requiring the white writer to type it in full, and the absurdity Breihan mentioned is real: you know what it means, he knows what it means, everybody knows what it means, and the comedy of the substitution is actually kind of candid about that shared knowledge.
Breihan himself was also clear about his scope. He specified on the Dallas Penn comment thread in real time that he used "ninja" only when quoting songs or interviews, never in his own voice. That's a meaningful distinction. He wasn't using it as slang. He was using it as a typographic stand-in for a quoted word, which is a different thing.
The case against it requires sitting with what actually happened when it spread.
The problem with a creative solution to a social problem is that the creative part tends to travel further than the social awareness that motivated it. Breihan came to "ninja" out of a genuine engagement with the criticism Kris Ex raised. He didn't dismiss it, he tried to respond to it, and he had the self-awareness to acknowledge the inherent strangeness of his position. That context mattered. But the writers who picked it up later didn't all carry that context with them. What they got was a phonetically similar substitute that lets you quote the word without typing the word, and it's kind of funny. That's a much more comfortable place to write from.
There's a version of this critique that says "ninja" didn't solve the problem of white writers quoting the slur. It just made white writers more comfortable doing it. The awkwardness of asterisks or dashes or "the N-word" was functionally useful precisely because it was awkward, because it forced a pause, because it made both the writer and the reader sit with what was actually being said. "Ninja" smoothed that over. It made the quote more readable, and in doing so, it probably made writers less likely to think carefully about whether they needed the quote at all.
There's also the question of what "adjacent" means in practice. "Ninja" is not the slur. But it shares enough sonic DNA with the slur that it operates, in context, as a near-equivalent, which is presumably the point, since it's used to substitute for it in quoted lyrics. If you're not allowed to say the word at a concert and you say "ninja" instead, you are not not-saying the word. You're saying it at one degree of removal. The logic that made the substitution seem clever is also the logic that made it a little too comfortable as a widespread practice.
This question doesn't have a clean answer, and a fair treatment of it probably has to acknowledge that. Breihan didn't invent a convention out of bad faith. He invented it out of a genuine attempt to respond to criticism from inside the culture, and the criticism came from a Black writer who engaged with him as a peer. The conversation that generated "ninja" was a more productive one than most of these conversations turn out to be. And the word's travel into broader use, into gaming culture, into meme formats, into casual substitution among non-Black fans singing along to songs, happened downstream of Breihan's specific editorial context, in places where nobody was thinking carefully about any of this.
The problem may have always been structural: that the convention of quoting rap lyrics verbatim in criticism was itself something worth interrogating, and that "ninja" was a band-aid on a question that needed more surgery. It's also possible it was a reasonable editorial compromise that got misapplied in places its inventor didn't intend. Both of those things can be true simultaneously.
Tom Breihan is, as of this writing, still at Stereogum, still working through the Hot 100 in chronological order, still producing work that gets read seriously by people who care about this stuff. The "ninja" period at the Village Voice was a specific moment in a long career, and like most specific moments it tells you something true about the time it came from, the blog era, the early engagement between rap criticism and racial identity in digital spaces, the question of who got to write about what and with what vocabulary. Those questions haven't gone away. They've just moved to different rooms.
The ninja got out of the room, though. That part's undeniable.🥷
On the morning of January 16, 2007, thirty police officers in SWAT gear descended on a recording studio on Means Street in Atlanta. They were accompanied by representatives from the Recording Industry Association of America, who wore dark jackets with RIAA stenciled across the back in large yellow letters, which is either the most brazen or most delusional institutional cosplay in the history of music enforcement. DJ Drama aka Tyree Simmons, born in Philadelphia, built in Atlanta, at that point the most important mixtape DJ alive, was arrested along with his partner Don Cannon. Their bank accounts were frozen. More than 80,000 CDs were seized and scheduled for destruction. The charge was racketeering, filed under RICO, the same statute used to prosecute organized crime families, because the state of Georgia had decided that making promotional hip-hop mixtapes was structurally equivalent to running the mob.
It was not the first time the RIAA had put boots on the ground against the mixtape economy, and it would not be the last. But it was the one that clarified, for anyone who had not been paying attention, exactly how the government and the music industry intended to treat Black creative culture when it operated outside the boundaries they preferred.
The Economy They Were Raiding
The mixtape in its 2000s form was not a piracy operation in any honest sense of the word. It was a promotional infrastructure, a distributed marketing system that record labels used to generate street-level buzz for artists, paid for in many cases by those same labels, and tolerated by all parties until it became too profitable and too independent to ignore. DJ Drama's Gangsta Grillz series launched or revived the careers of T.I., Lil Wayne, and Young Jeezy. The It's Okay (One Blood) Remix tape, the Dedication series, Da Drought 3... these were not bootlegs of existing albums. They were original promotional works, assembled with the participation of the artists whose careers they were building, distributed through a physical street network that reached fans the labels couldn't reach through conventional channels.
The business worked because everyone in the chain benefited. Labels would pay $10,000 to $15,000 to finance a tape even while their legal teams were simultaneously investigating the same practice. Artists got exposure. DJs got paid. Fans got music. The legal fiction that kept the whole thing afloat was the "for promotional use only" sticker that appeared on every cover, which both parties understood to be meaningless. Drama was selling 50,000 to 75,000 CDs a month at $5 to $10 apiece and clearing $50,000 to $60,000 a month in income.
The raid that ended it, as Don Cannon later explained, was triggered by a miscommunication at Atlantic Records. CeeLo Green had approached Drama and Cannon about a promotional tape pulling from his old Goodie Mob sessions. An Atlantic exec who didn't know what the tape was called the RIAA, assuming it was a bootleg. The RIAA, which had been looking for a high-profile target, called the Georgia SWAT team. Drama found out afterward that the organization whose gold and platinum plaques hung on his wall had helped put him in handcuffs. "The labels wouldn't know what was coming next if it wasn't for mixtapes," he said later. "It's the veins of the culture. Everything in hip-hop from '95 to 2007 came from mixtapes."
Before Atlanta: The Street-Level Targets
The Drama raid was the most visible moment in a campaign that had been running for years and that had already taken out smaller, less famous targets with considerably less press coverage.
In June 2005, the RIAA and the New York City Police Department raided Mondo Kim's, the flagship location of Kim's Video and Music at 6 St. Mark's Place in the East Village which was one of the most beloved independent music and video stores in New York, an institution for the city's downtown culture going back to 1987. Five employees were arrested. Five hundred mixtape CD-Rs were seized, along with 27 music DVDs, nine DVD burners, and several store computers. The RIAA spokesperson described the seized material as "urban in nature." The store never fully recovered from the legal and reputational damage, and Kim's Video closed its last location in 2014.
In Miami, a figure known in the local scene as Mr. Marc ran Hip Hop Connections, one of the city's most important online and physical retail operations for mixtape culture. His story, documented in a Medium oral history of the RIAA crackdown (which seems to have disappeared from any search engine results that I could dig up, so I am going largely off of memory here), illustrates the specific mechanics of how enforcement worked at the street level: a record label sent a cease-and-desist over a single CD he had listed on his site, he complied and sent back the remaining stock, and assumed the matter was resolved. What he did not know was that his compliance had flagged his entire operation to authorities. An undercover officer posed as a flea market vendor and came to his office weekly to buy wholesale up until the arrest that followed. The raids on Mr. Marc's business sent waves of fear through Miami's hip-hop retail community and drove him to legalize his websites, which he managed to do. Many of his peers were not in a position to do the same. The RIAA was specifically targeting what it called "hot spot" cities including Atlanta and Miami, and the enforcement model relied on working up from retail operators to distributors to the DJs at the center of the ecosystem.
The Contrast That Should Bother Everyone
In June 2024, the RIAA filed suit in federal court in Massachusetts against Suno, a generative AI company whose text-to-music model had been trained on copyrighted sound recordings without license, consent, or payment to the artists whose work it consumed. Sony, Warner, and Universal followed with their own actions. In October 2023, Universal Music Group, Concord Music, and other major publishers had already sued Anthropic, the company that makes Claude touts itself as the ethical counterpart to OpenAI and ChatGPT, for training its large language model on copyrighted song lyrics scraped from the web at scale. In January 2026, a $3 billion publishing lawsuit was filed against Anthropic by UMG, Concord, and ABKCO, described as the largest non-class-action copyright case in U.S. history.
These companies trained their models on the entirety of recorded human creative output, including music, books, lyrics, artwork, and code, without asking anyone for permission, without paying anyone for access, and without - in most cases - disclosing what was in the training data. The legal defense they offered was fair use, the same argument that mixtape DJs had been making for years about promotional, non-commercial distribution.
The difference in how these situations were handled is not subtle. No SWAT team showed up at Anthropic's offices. No one's computers were seized and scheduled for destruction. No one was charged under RICO. OpenAI, which trained GPT on a dataset that included material from pirate libraries, was not raided; it was valued at $157 billion! Anthropic settled the authors' class action lawsuit for $1.5 billion in September 2025, the largest copyright settlement in U.S. history, without any admission of wrongdoing and without interrupting its operations for a single day. Suno and Udio, sued by the RIAA for training their music generation models on copyrighted recordings, proceeded through civil litigation while continuing to operate and raise venture capital. Warner settled with Udio in October 2025. Universal and Sony continue litigating.
The mixtape economy, at its peak, generated an estimated $30 to $50 million in annual sales, according to the RIAA's own figures. Anthropic's most recent valuation was $61 billion. OpenAI is valued at more than three times that. The scale of the IP consumption is incomparably larger. The enforcement response is incomparably smaller and slower.
The Argument They Would Make
The charitable reading of this disparity is that the legal system operates on different timelines for different kinds of disputes, and that civil litigation, which is what the AI companies face, is in fact a more proportionate and appropriate response to copyright infringement by sophisticated commercial actors than criminal prosecution. The mixtape raids were a choice made by local law enforcement agencies working with RIAA representatives who wanted visible, high-profile action; the AI litigation is playing out in federal civil courts and will ultimately produce precedent that governs the whole industry. One could argue that the legal framework is working the way it is supposed to work, just slowly.
The less charitable reading, which is harder to dismiss, is that the enforcement choices in both cases reflected who the infringers were and what kind of cultural and political capital they possessed. DJ Drama was a Black man in Atlanta running a tape operation out of a recording studio. OpenAI was a San Francisco technology company with venture backing and board members with connections to every significant political institution in the country. The RIAA could put a SWAT team outside Drama's door on a Tuesday morning. It could not put one outside Sam Altman's.
Drama said it himself in the aftermath: "What we were doing is not wrong. Gangsta Grillz is the biggest thing, arguably, ever in the mixtapes history. This is what y'all make billions off. Don't sit here and tell me that what we're doing is wrong." He was right then. The AI companies, ingesting the entire creative output of human civilization and arguing fair use while their valuations climb into the hundreds of billions, are making a version of the same argument with considerably better lawyers and considerably less risk of spending a night in Fulton County Jail.
The RIAA showed up to the mixtape raids in yellow letters on dark jackets. They filed paperwork against OpenAI. The difference between those two responses is the story.
Continuing the somber theme of Memorial day, we had another hip hop legend pass away over this past weekend that I wanted to take a minute to acknowledge. Robert Ginyard aka Rob Base died on May 22, 2026, four days after his 59th birthday due to cancer. Born in Harlem in 1967 during the decade when the neighborhood was still processing the wreckage of urban renewal and the departure of the middle class, he grew up in the thick of the culture that would become hip-hop, met his future partner Rodney Bryce (aka DJ E-Z Rock) in the fourth grade, and spent his early years running with groups called the Sureshot Seven and Cosmic 3 MC's before the two of them figured out what they actually were together. Their first single, "DJ Interview," came out in 1986 on the World to World label. Nobody outside Harlem heard it:
Two years later, with a distribution deal from Profile Records and a record built around a vocal sample from Lyn Collins' 1972 funk track "Think (About It)," they made one of the most recognizable songs in the history of popular music, and the conversation about Rob Base never fully moved past it. That's a shame. The record after "It Takes Two" deserves a longer look than it usually gets.
The thing about "It Takes Two" is that it did something specific that tends to get lost when it gets filed under "party classic" and forgotten about until the next sporting event or TV commercial. The record crossed over by being equally credible on the hip-hop block and on the dance floor. It hit #36 on the Hot 100 in 1988, went platinum, peaked at #3 on the Hot Dance Music/Club Play chart, and got played on radio stations that generally did not play rap. Rob Base and E-Z Rock were operating at the intersection of hip-hop and what was starting to be called hip-house, the fusion of New York rap aesthetics and Chicago house music's dancefloor mechanics, before that intersection had really been defined as a thing. They helped build the road.
The immediate follow-up was "Get on the Dance Floor", released later in 1988, and it actually outperformed "It Takes Two" on the dance chart by hitting number one for two weeks in January 1989 and peaking at #11 on the R&B singles chart. Club kids would tell you it is a better pure club record than "It Takes Two" though it rarely gets thought of as part of Rob Base's legacy within the hip hop world:
"Joy and Pain" came out as the third single from the It Takes Two album in 1989, built around a sample of the Maze featuring Frankie Beverly song of the same name. It was a choice that was either very brave or very naive, given that Frankie Beverly is one of the most protective artists in R&B history when it comes to his catalog. Beverly came after Base legally, which generated the kind of bad press that metastasizes into rumor and derailed some of the momentum the duo had built. Despite that the record still reached the Top 10 on the dance chart and #11 on R&B:
By 1989, DJ E-Z Rock had stepped back from the duo due to personal issues, and Base went solo with The Incredible Base. The timing was bad as the legal trouble over "Joy and Pain" had preceded the album, the momentum was gone, and a solo debut without E-Z Rock's presence felt incomplete to a lot of people who had loved the duo format. "Turn It Out (Go Base)" from that period was a club hit that demonstrated Base was still capable of putting out a hit with his partner, though it didn't reach the same level of popularity by any means:
The duo reunited for "Break of Dawn" in 1994, a cleaner-sounding record that showed both of them had kept up with where hip-hop and dance music had gone in the intervening years. By that point the window had mostly closed commercially, but the record holds up as a document of two guys who still knew exactly what they were doing, and as a sidenote I believe it sampled the Isley's Between the Sheets a couple of months before Big Poppa came out and made it synonymous with Bad Boy:
DJ E-Z Rock died in 2014 at 46, from complications related to diabetes. It Takes Two is 37 years old and still sounds like a room full of people who decided to have the best possible time. By the raw metrics, Rob Base is one of the most successful artists in the history of hip hop. The asterisk is that almost all of that success flows from a single song, which unfairly creates the impression of a narrower legacy than his actual catalog supports.
Sonny Rollins died yesterday at his home in Woodstock, New York. He was 95. Born Walter Theodore Rollins in Harlem in 1930 to parents from the Virgin Islands, he came up playing with Thelonious Monk, Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, and Bud Powell all before he turned twenty, and went on to record more than sixty albums over a seven-decade career that established him as, in the assessment of most people who paid attention, the greatest living improviser in jazz. His 1956 album Saxophone Colossus gave him his nickname and the world "St. Thomas," a calypso-rooted standard that reflected his Caribbean heritage and became one of the most recognizable instrumental compositions of the twentieth century. He took two legendary sabbaticals from public performance, the most famous of which found him practicing alone on the Williamsburg Bridge rather than subject his neighbors to the sound, and returned from each one playing better than before.
Hip-hop's relationship with jazz is deep and well-documented, and Rollins sits somewhere near the center of it. The producers who built the genre's golden era - Pete Rock, DJ Premier, Large Professor, J Dilla, Madlib - were crate-diggers first, and the Blue Note and Prestige catalogs Rollins recorded for in the 1950s were the foundational text. Some of that connection is specific and confirmed; some of it is atmospheric, the sound of a saxophone built into the DNA of beats that were assembled by people who had listened to Saxophone Colossus until the record wore thin.
The most directly documented hip-hop sample of Rollins is J Dilla's "Jack Handy" which samples "Lover Man" as recorded by Rollins and Coleman Hawkins on Sonny Meets Hawk! :
The broader trace is harder to cite on a track-by-track basis but easier to feel. When Pete Rock built the horn-heavy sound of Mecca and the Soul Brother in 1992, he was pulling from the same Prestige Records well that produced Saxophone Colossus. When Large Professor was excavating jazz records for the sessions that became Illmatic, Rollins was part of the vocabulary those producers were working in. When Ghostface Killah and Raekwon started building the Wu-Tang aesthetic around jazz-inflected production from RZA and later Pete Rock and DJ Premier, the lineage ran directly back to the Harlem tenor players of the 1950s and no one cast a longer shadow than Rollins.
Gang Starr's "Jazz Music" from Step in the Arena is a useful document for this era, less because it samples Rollins specifically and more because it names the debt outright. DJ Premier and Guru built an entire aesthetic around the proposition that jazz and hip-hop were the same tradition at different points in time, and Rollins was the figure who more than anyone else kept that tradition alive and rigorous across the decades that separated them:
What Rollins said about death in a 2020 New York Times interview has been circulating since the news broke yesterday: "Everybody is afraid to die because it's the unknown. But my mother died. My father died. My brother died. My sister died. They're all great people. If they can die, then why can't I die? My body is going to turn into dust. But my soul will live forever." A man who spent seventy years making the saxophone sound like a human voice saying something true didn't need to be afraid of being remembered. Put on Saxophone Colossus today. It still sounds like nothing else.
Memorial Day. We hang flags (some years anyway) and fire up grills and, hopefully for a second or two in between, we think about what it means to lose somebody. Hip-hop has had to bury a lot of its own taken by violence, illness, accidents, addiction, take your pick. Not everyone on here was a saint, but they all contributed something to the culture.
I pulled this list together through a mix of wikipedia, old XXL articles, and my own fading memory:
A
Archie Eversole, July 26, 1984 - April 3, 2022 -- We Ready
A$AP Yams, August 26, 1988 - January 18, 2015 -- Yamborghini High
B
Bankroll Fresh, December 4, 1987 - March 4, 2016 -- Hot Boy
Big Hawk (H.A.W.K.), December 12, 1969 - May 1, 2006 -- Southside
Big L, May 30, 1974 - February 15, 1999 -- Ebonics
Big Pun, November 9, 1971 - February 7, 2000 -- Still Not a Player
Biz Markie, April 8, 1964 - July 16, 2021 -- Just a Friend
Black Rob, July 9, 1968 - April 17, 2021 -- Whoa!
Brother Marquis (2 Live Crew), February 12, 1970 - June 3, 2024 -- Me So Horny
Bugz (D12), 1979 - May 21, 1999 -- Revelation
C
Camoflauge, January 29, 1982 - May 19, 2003 -- I'm Da Man
Charizma, 1973 - December 16, 1993 -- Red Light Green Light
Chinx, October 4, 1983 - May 17, 2015 -- Cocaine Riot
Chino XL, January 6, 1974 - July 28, 2024 -- Riiiot!
Combat Jack (Reggie Ossé), February 20, 1969 - December 19, 2017 -- The Combat Jack Show
D
Dallas Penn, July 9, 1970 - April 30, 2024 -- Internets Celebrities
DJ Unk, November 28, 1982 - January 24, 2025 -- Walk It Out
DMX, December 18, 1970 - April 9, 2021 -- Ruff Ryders' Anthem
Dolla, July 2, 1987 - May 18, 2009 -- Who the F*** Is That?
Drakeo the Ruler, June 1, 1993 - December 19, 2021 -- Flu Flamming
E
Eazy-E, September 7, 1964 - March 26, 1995 -- Boyz-n-the-Hood
Enchanting, August 4, 1997 - February 9, 2024 -- Track & Field
F
Fat Pat, September 4, 1970 - February 3, 1998 -- Tops Drop
FBG Duck, October 17, 1993 - August 4, 2020 -- Slide
Fredo Santana, July 4, 1990 - January 19, 2018 -- Jealous
G
Gangsta Boo, August 7, 1979 - January 1, 2023 -- Where Dem Dollas At
Guru (Gang Starr), July 17, 1961 - April 19, 2010 -- Mass Appeal
H
Huey, September 12, 1988 - June 25, 2020 -- Pop, Lock & Drop It
J
Jam Master Jay (Run-DMC), January 21, 1965 - October 30, 2002 -- It's Tricky
JayDaYoungan, July 15, 1998 - July 27, 2022 -- 23 Island
Jimmy Wopo, September 4, 1996 - June 18, 2018 -- Elm Street
Juice WRLD, December 2, 1998 - December 8, 2019 -- Lucid Dreams
Julio Foolio, June 23, 1998 - June 23, 2024 -- Who I Smoke
K
King Von, August 9, 1994 - November 6, 2020 -- Crazy Story
L
Lil JoJo, November 15, 1994 - September 4, 2012 -- BDK
Lil Peep, November 1, 1996 - November 16, 2017 -- Awful Things
Lil Snupe, October 1, 1994 - June 20, 2013 -- Meant to Be
M
Mac Dre, July 5, 1970 - November 1, 2004 -- Feelin' Myself
Mac Miller, January 19, 1992 - September 7, 2018 -- Self Care
Magnolia Shorty, October 28, 1982 - December 20, 2010 -- Monkey on the D*ck
MCA (Beastie Boys), August 5, 1964 - May 4, 2012 -- SabotageMessy Mya, November 12, 1988 - November 14, 2010 -- A 27 Piece
Miss Melodie (BDP), March 21, 1969 - July 17, 2012 -- Self Destruction (Stop the Violence Movement)
MO3, April 2, 1992 - November 11, 2020 -- Errybody
Mr. 3-2, September 3, 1972 - November 10, 2016 -- Southside Still Holdin'
N
Nate Dogg, August 19, 1969 - March 15, 2011 -- Music & Me
Nipsey Hussle, August 15, 1985 - March 31, 2019 -- Racks in the Middle
The Notorious B.I.G., May 21, 1972 - March 9, 1997 -- Juicy
O
OG Maco, February 21, 1992 - June 25, 2024 -- U Guessed It
Ol' Dirty Bastard, November 15, 1968 - November 13, 2004 -- Shimmy Shimmy Ya
P
Paul C, 1965 - July 17, 1989 -- The Mike & Dave Show
Phife Dawg (A Tribe Called Quest), November 20, 1970 - March 22, 2016 -- Award TourPimp C, December 29, 1973 - December 4, 2007 -- Int'l Players Anthem
PnB Rock, December 9, 1991 - September 12, 2022 -- Fleek
Pop Smoke, July 20, 1999 - February 19, 2020 -- Welcome to the Party
Proof (D12), October 2, 1973 - April 11, 2006 -- Kurt Kobain
R
Rich Homie Quan, October 4, 1989 - September 6, 2024 -- Type of Way
Rico Wade, July 30, 1971 - March 29, 2024 -- So Fresh, So Clean (Outkast)
S
Saafir, 1970 - September 22, 2024 -- Box Car Sessions
Scott La Rock (BDP), March 2, 1962 - August 27, 1987 -- South Bronx
Seagram, 1970 - July 31, 1996 -- Get My Grind On
Sean Price, March 13, 1972 - August 8, 2015 -- Kimbo Price
Snootie Wild, August 1, 1985 - February 27, 2022 -- Yayo
Soulja Slim, September 9, 1977 - November 26, 2003 -- I'll Pay for It
Static Major, November 9, 1974 - February 25, 2008 -- Lollipop (with Lil Wayne)
Stretch, 1968 - November 30, 1995 -- Stretchin' Out
T
Takeoff (Migos), June 18, 1994 - November 1, 2022 -- Ric Flair Drip
The Jacka, April 6, 1977 - February 2, 2015 -- Drought Season
Trouble, November 21, 1987 - June 5, 2022 -- Bring It Back
Trugoy the Dove (De La Soul), September 21, 1968 - February 12, 2023 -- Me Myself and I
Tupac Shakur, June 16, 1971 - September 13, 1996 -- Dear Mama
X
XXXTentacion, January 23, 1998 - June 18, 2018 -- SAD!
Y
Young Dolph, July 27, 1985 - November 17, 2021 -- 100 Shots
Young Greatness, February 7, 1984 - October 29, 2018 -- Moolah
Young Scooter, September 28, 1986 - September 27, 2025 -- Colombia
I am sure I missed some names here, no disrespect to any I did. If there is someone I overlooked drop a name in the comments and I'll add it. Rest easy to all of them.
Including Cadence Weapon as the primary video here, since his substack article was the inspiration for this unusually lengthy post. Linked further down below.
If you spent any time on music Twitter or Bluesky in April 2026, you saw the discourse. A Brooklyn indie rock band called Geese - good band I'm told by folks more fluent in the genre, I'm certainly not - became the unlikely lightning rod for a conversation that had been building for a while: what does it mean when the virality you're seeing isn't real?
The short version: in March 2026, the co-founders of a digital marketing agency called Chaotic Good sat down with Billboard's On the Record podcast at SXSW and more or less admitted, on tape, to manufacturing fake internet buzz for their artist clients. They called it "trend simulation." They said things like "everything on the internet is fake" with the casual confidence of people who had decided this was a feature rather than a bug. Within weeks, a widely-shared Substack post by singer-songwriter Eliza McLamb had connected the dots between Chaotic Good's methods and Geese's TikTok ubiquity, Wired had published a story with a predictably grabby headline, and the music internet had done what the music internet does, which is argue at high volume for a week and then move on.
But the underlying question - how do independent artists, and for the audience of this site specifically independent hip-hop artists, compete in an algorithmic environment where the playing field is actively being gamed by people with money - didn't go anywhere. That one's worth sitting with.
What Chaotic Good Actually Does
Jesse Coren and Andrew Spelman founded Chaotic Good in February 2025, coming out of years of managing indie-pop artists through their company Mutual Friends. The service they built is, depending on your perspective, either a sophisticated form of digital PR or a bot farm in a peacoat. Possibly both.
The mechanics, as they described them to Billboard: Chaotic Good creates networks of social media pages - hundreds or thousands of accounts, primarily on TikTok - and uses them to flood the zone with content featuring a client's music. Songs get dropped into the backgrounds of videos. Live clips get shared. Comments get posted. The goal is to generate enough volume across enough accounts that TikTok's algorithm registers "this artist" as a trending topic and starts pushing them into real users' For You Pages. Once the algorithm catches, real engagement follows because the algorithm is now doing the work of showing the music to people who might actually like it. Spelman called it "trend simulation," which is a tech investory-friendly name for what is essentially coordinated inauthenticity.
Their client list, as disclosed at SXSW, includes Travis Scott, Childish Gambino, Mitski, Tame Impala, Coldplay, and Zara Larsson. Geese and Cameron Winter were specifically discussed as artists whose TikTok presence was amplified through what Chaotic Good described as "distributing clips of them performing and doing some interviews." They denied falsifying streaming numbers in either case claiming that the virality was manufactured, but the streams that followed were real people making real choices after the algorithm served them the content.
This matters for hip-hop for an obvious reason: Travis Scott is on that client list. So is Childish Gambino. These are not obscure artists who needed a leg up. They are established, commercially successful rappers with major label infrastructure behind them. The clip farm isn't a last resort, it's apparently become a standard tool of the industry at every level.
Hip-Hop Has Always Understood Manufactured Buzz
It's worth pausing to note that this is not actually new. Hip-hop has a long history of manufactured virality it just used to involve different mechanisms. Street teams were clip farms for the pre-internet age: actual humans, hired to plaster stickers, hand out mixtapes, and create the impression of a groundswell where one was still being assembled. The Cash Money and No Limit albums of the late '90s weren't blanketing radio because DJs independently decided to play them, rather there were people making calls and writing checks. The "organic" discovery of a new artist has always involved more infrastructure than the mythology suggests.
What Chaotic Good sells is that infrastructure, optimized for the current algorithmic environment. The platforms have changed. The underlying transaction - you pay to simulate demand; if the music is good enough, real demand follows - hasn't.
Independent Canadian rapper Cadence Weapon, writing in his Substack about the Geese situation, put it plainly from the artist's perspective: "As an independent artist currently promoting a new album on a shoestring budget, learning about the jet fuel that other acts have access to can be troubling. Many of these bands already had big labels, booking agents and PR at their disposal before they started using performance-enhancing droids to take them to the next level." The irritation there is real and fair. But McLamb, the artist who originally surfaced the story, arrived at a more pragmatic place: "If a label wanted to contract Chaotic Good on my behalf, I would accept such a deal handily and gratefully."
What It Costs
Chaotic Good doesn't publish pricing, and they've been notably cagey about specifics since the controversy. Their "Narrative Campaign" page disappeared from their website within 24 hours of the discourse peaking. But you can triangulate from what the industry generally charges for comparable services.
A full-service digital marketing agency retainer runs $2,500 to $15,000 a month for ongoing work. Premium agencies with proven track records and celebrity client lists charge more. For a campaign-based engagement - a single release cycle, say, six to eight weeks - you're looking at $5,000 to $50,000 depending on the scope, the network of accounts being deployed, and whether the agency has relationships with real curators and influencers in addition to the manufactured activity. The clip farm infrastructure itself - the accounts, the content creation, the posting volume - is labor-intensive to build and maintain, which is reflected in the cost.
A more modest clip-farming operation, if you were running it yourself or using a smaller boutique service, could theoretically be done for less. Services that specialize in TikTok sound placement, getting your track into the background of lifestyle content, run $500 to $2,000 for a defined campaign. Playlist pitching through services like SubmitHub or Groover is $100 to $500 per campaign. None of this is "trend simulation" in the Chaotic Good sense, but it's the accessible end of the same spectrum: using money to put your music in front of people who didn't seek it out.
The honest number for an independent hip-hop artist with a real shot at the Chaotic Good experience is somewhere north of $5,000 per release cycle, and probably closer to $10,000 to $15,000 if you want something with actual teeth. For most independent artists working without a label, much less a kid recording tracks in his bedroom closet studio, it's probably not money they have.
What You Can Do With No Budget
The thing Chaotic Good is actually selling is volume, consistency, and pattern recognition. Their insight is that TikTok's algorithm responds to signals of momentum: lots of accounts posting content using the same audio, consistent engagement in a short window, the appearance of a thing that is already trending. The algorithm, like any pattern-matching system, can be gamed if you know what patterns it's matching.
The tools to do a version of this yourself exist, and some of them are free.
Content creation at volume. The bottleneck for most independent artists running their own social media is time and creative bandwidth. You can only make so many videos, write so many captions, and respond to so many comments before the whole operation collapses into an anxiety spiral. AI tools - Claude, Copilot, ChatGPT - remove some of that bottleneck. You can use them to generate caption variations, draft hooks for videos, repurpose interview quotes into short-form content, brainstorm video concepts for a specific song, and batch-produce a week's worth of social copy in a single sitting. This is not trend simulation, but it does solve the volume problem on the content side without requiring you to be a full-time content creator.
What this looks like in practice: you drop a new single, and instead of one TikTok and hoping for the best, you use Claude to help you build out fifteen different content concepts around the release: a clip framing the story behind the song, a text-over-video with a lyric that hits, a "this song is for people who..." format, a behind-the-scenes of the recording, a reaction to a reaction. You post them staggered over two weeks. You've created the appearance of ongoing momentum because there is ongoing momentum, even if the algorithm hasn't caught yet.
The burner account question. This is where independent artists have to make a decision about what they're comfortable with. Chaotic Good's approach involves accounts that aren't the artist's, third-party accounts posting content about the artist to simulate organic discovery. An independent artist could, in theory, do a version of this with help from their actual community: ask twenty friends to each post one TikTok using the new single this week, targeting a specific sound or format. This is not fake, these are real people who know you, but it is coordinated, and the result looks to the algorithm like the kind of distributed organic content that suggests a trend is forming. But as many of you have discovered yourselves, even getting your friends to take the split second to just thumbs up your clips is near impossible as it is.
Platform-specific strategy without paying for it. TikTok, Instagram Reels, and YouTube Shorts all respond to different content patterns. A tool like Claude can help you analyze what's actually working in your genre right now not by giving you proprietary data, but by helping you think through what formats and hooks are resonating, and then drafting scripts or outlines that put your music in that context. The creative research that an agency charges for ("what kind of content performs for this genre right now") is a conversation you can have with an AI assistant for free. It won't have real-time data, but it will help you think more systematically than you otherwise would.
The honest ceiling. What Chaotic Good does works (when it works) because of scale that an individual artist can't replicate. Thousands of accounts, posting constantly, flooding an algorithm until it tips: that requires infrastructure. The DIY version of this is closer to what LaRussell, the independent Vallejo rapper, has been doing: consistent content building slowly over time. LaRussell has millions of views because he posted constantly and built a community around the idea that the process itself was the content. That's a different philosophy than trend simulation, and it takes longer, but it's sustainable and it's real. It's just near impossible to do if you have a full time job or, god forbid!, a family to look after.
The Actual Question
For an independent hip-hop artist working in 2026, the takeaway from the Geese situation probably isn't "this is unfair," though it is unfair, or "Chaotic Good is evil" though they're at minimum morally complicated. The takeaway is that the algorithm is a system, systems can be understood and gamed, and understanding them is free. You can't outspend Travis Scott's marketing budget. You can learn to think like the people spending it, and do a smaller version of it with what you have.
The music still has to be there. That part was always true, and Chaotic Good can't fix it when it isn't. But assuming the music is real the system for getting it heard is more transparent than it's ever been. Use that.
Zilla Rocca's IG post told me I'm a real one if Zuck's algo was showing me his latest song "Fifties and Hundreds" off of his album Fast Eddie. It did, I am, and here we are.
The production on this one is from Disco Vietnam who has been Zilla's primary production partner on the most recent run, and the "Fifties and Hundreds" beat would probably sound good under any emcee but in this case we got West Philly rap royalty with Reef the Lost Cauze making an appearance along with Defcee. It all comes together into a legitimate head nodder.
Fast Eddie is available on Bandcamp at 5oclockshadowboxers.bandcamp.com, go get it!
As a side note, it's possible my rapidly declining hearing is only capable of detecting music from the 90's these days but I could swear I hear the horns from Bucktown on this beat.
Before Spotify made every album available to everyone on the planet at midnight, before Twitter made every rapper their own press release, and before "the algorithm" became the most overused phrase in music discourse, there was a window - let's say 2002-2007 - when a handful of people with a DSL connection and genuinely good taste (or at least a loud enough voice) could change the trajectory of hip-hop. They were the bloggers, and if you were the type of kid hitting refresh on certain sites at midnight hoping a new Clipse leak had dropped, this one's for you.
A lot of them have scattered. Some went corporate. Some went academic. Some just went quiet. Hitting a bit of a milestone today with 1500 posts made me a bit nostalgic, so here's a check-in on just some of the people who shaped the way a generation of hip-hop heads heard music (and since it feels weird these days not to have a video with the post, I've included the Clipse's We Got It For Cheap Vol.2 above, arguably the most blogged about mixtape of all time).
Nah Right / eskay
Ahsmi "eskay" Rawlins launched the site in 2005 out of Yonkers while working tech support, and within a few years it was pulling 600,000 unique visitors a month, landing on Rolling Stone's Best of Rock list and XXL's 100 Best Hip-Hop Websites. Eskay parlayed the blog into a brief run at XXL before returning to NahRight, eventually moving the site under the Complex Media umbrella. These days he's pretty low-profile, though he does have an instagram page that posts every now and then.
Oh Word / Rafi Kam
Rafi Kam started it and became one half of The Internets Celebrities alongside Dallas Penn, a video series that took deep-dive looks at culture and politics through a hip-hop lens before anyone was calling that kind of thing "content." OhWord itself was a blog that was more literary-minded than most, and Rafi often offered up the platform to other less well-known bloggers (like myself). He also is pretty low-profile online, but from the looks of his instagram page he seems to be living a pretty good life.
Cocaine Blunts & Hip-Hop Tapes / Noz
Andrew "Noz" Nosnitsky founded Cocaine Blunts, and it's where you went when you wanted someone who genuinely understood the regional nuances and historical weight of rap to tell you why the new Gucci Mane tape mattered as much as the new DOOM record, and actually make the case convincingly. Noz transitioned cleanly into professional journalism, writing for the Washington Post, NPR, Complex, and the Washington City Paper. At one point he helped open Park Blvd, a record store in Oakland focused on overlooked rap tapes, though it appears that has since shut down.
2DopeBoyz / Meka and Shake
Meka Udoh and Joel "Shake" Zela launched 2DopeBoyz in 2007 after Meka got laid off, and what started as a hobby about West Coast hip-hop grew into a million-visitors-a-month operation that helped break Kendrick Lamar, among others. The site was at the center of a beef with when Tyler, the Creator who bought fake ads on the site in 2011 that redirected to a page that just said "Fuck 2DopeBoyz." As of 2025 the site is down, with Shake posting weekly playlists on Instagram under the "Weekly Dope" series. Meka has leaned into consulting, A&R advisory work, and creating LinkedIn content.
MissInfo.tv / Miss Info
Minya Oh was already a fixture at Hot 97 and had written the famous five-mic Illmatic review for The Source as an intern years before she ever launched her own blog. She left Hot 97 in 2015 after a decade to focus on the site and other ventures. Since then she's hosted the Food Grails video series for Complex, co-hosted the "In Real Life" podcast with Angie Martinez, served as style director at Stadium Goods, and co-hosted a podcast with Nas on hip-hop history. She's still one of the more active voices from that era, doing it across multiple lanes.
Rap Radar / Elliott Wilson
Elliott Wilson launched Rap Radar after being the editor-in-chief of XXL from 1999 to 2008. Wilson took that brand into a podcast with Brian "B.Dot" Miller that became the standard-bearer for long-form hip-hop interviews. After stints at TIDAL and elsewhere, he was named editorial director of UPROXX, HipHopDX, and Dime in 2024.
Fake Shore Drive / Andrew Barber
Andrew Barber launched Fake Shore Drive in 2007 out of a frustration that Chicago hip-hop wasn't getting covered, and what he built ended up being instrumental in introducing the world to Chance the Rapper, Chief Keef, Vic Mensa, and a roster of artists who went on to reshape mainstream rap. Chance actually shouted him out after winning his first Grammy. Barber eventually left his advertising job to run the blog full time, landed a weekly show on Eminem's Shade 45 channel on SiriusXM, became a Grammy board governor for the Chicago chapter, and was featured as a character in CNN's Chicagoland documentary series. He's still active and the site is still running.
Ill Doctrine / Jay Smooth
Jay Smooth was doing hip-hop media before the blog era even started -- his radio show, The Underground Railroad on WBAI, launched in 1991 and became the longest-running hip-hop radio show in New York City. HipHopMusic.com predated most of what we now think of as hip-hop blogging. Ill Doctrine, his video blog, launched around 2007 and became something genuinely different from everything else: a thoughtful video essayist using hip-hop as an entry point into conversations about race, politics, and culture at large. His 2008 video on how to talk to people about racism went viral years before that was a standard unit of cultural circulation, and led to a TED Talk. He left WBAI in 2018, produced the Think Twice: Michael Jackson podcast that the New Yorker named one of the best podcasts of 2023, and as of 2024 was bringing his radio show back via Patreon and Substack in a new format.
Byron Crawford / ByronCrawford.com
Byron "Bol" Crawford was the Howard Stern of hip-hop blogging, a clearly brilliant writer who often took it a step too far when trolling both his readers and the subjects he was covering. Operating out of St. Louis with an outsider perspective on a culture headquartered in New York, he wrote a daily column for XXL for five years, got into public internet beefs with Bun B, Lupe Fiasco, Joe Budden, and Kanye West, and managed to fit legitimate music criticism in with his trollery. He's published several (e-?)books including The Mindset of a Champion and was still writing the occasional newsletter as recently as a couple of years ago. From what I can tell of his Instagram page, he primarily is focused on running marathons these days.
Dallas Penn
Dallas Penn was the Renaissance man of the blog era: blogger, videographer, sneakerhead, Lo-Life affiliate, podcaster, Queens native, and construction project manager for the NYC Department of Design and Construction. He and Rafi Kam co-founded Internets Celebrities, a video series that documented bodegas, hood economics, and New York street culture. He went on to co-host the Combat Jack Show on Complex TV and kept making content across YouTube and social media right up until he passed away on April 30, 2024, at 53.
As a side note, Dallas helped connect me with several other bloggers and musicians fairly early on in the life of this site completely unsolicited. We often disagreed about the merits of ATCQ's later albums (he always said I was too young to appreciate the production on the Love Movement, which got me heated!), but he helped me out in a way that he probably never realized. RIP.
Karen Civil / KarenCivil.com
Karen Civil launched her blog in 2008 and shortly thereafter began running Lil Wayne's WeezyThankYou website while he was incarcerated at Rikers in 2010, publishing his letters to fans and building anticipation for Tha Carter IV in real time. She went from that to digital marketing manager at Beats by Dre, then to building her own marketing agency Always Civil, then to writing a book, and in 2022 was named General Manager and Executive Vice President of Young Money Records.
Passion of the Weiss / Jeff Weiss
Jeff Weiss started Passion of the Weiss in Los Angeles in 2005. He spent years as a columnist at LA Weekly, wrote for the Washington Post, LA Times, Pitchfork, and The FADER, and became the definitive chronicler of Drakeo the Ruler's case and murder. In 2025 he published Waiting for Britney Spears through Macmillan, a gonzo memoir about his early-2000s stint chasing celebrities for tabloids. Passion of the Weiss is still running (now rebranded as POW Magazine).
Still Listenin' to Gangsta Music / JJ
Still Listenin' to Gangsta Music was a Blogspot operation run by JJ, and last posted in 2007. His contact email is dead, the Myspace is gone, and JJ never seems to have had the kind of public profile that left a searchable footprint. I include him in this list because his site was featured on one of the very first news features about mp3 blogs, with Kurt Loder and MTV News mentioning his site by name and including a screenshot of his front page. I once tried to help him convert his blogspot page over to wordpress, and I think the frustrations of doing that may have helped nudge him toward retirement!
Soul Sides / O-Dub -- Oliver Wang was one of the earliest bloggers doing serious critical work at the intersection of hip-hop and soul music -- Soul Sides launched in 2003 and predated most of what came after. Wang has continued doing exactly what he's always done: he's a sociology professor at Cal State Long Beach, writes for NPR, and keeps doing the podcast and DJ work that has always defined his approach. The academic and the fan never separated for him, which is maybe why his work has aged better than most.
There are a ton of other blogs that I didn't cover here. A lot of folks that had perhaps a smaller footprint but were closer to 33jones than some of the above (Floodwatch, Slushygutter, KizzMyAzzPlz to name a few...), I may get around to some of them in a part 2. In the meantime if there are any names I didn't cover that you remember, drop them in the comments below!