Where Are They Now: The Hip-Hop Bloggers, Part II
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.
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.