Where Are They Now: The Hip-Hop Bloggers
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 algor...
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!
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!