Blogging Is Hip Hop

Background

I'm hosting a roundtable conversation on the similarities between blogging and hip hop, the two most interesting new creative media to arise in the past few decades. As you are someone I consider an expert, I'd like you to participate, but first I'd like to explain a bit about why I'm doing this.

What I've Discovered

There are a few common threads between blogging and hip hop that I've discovered, which I think form a useful starting point for a roundtable discussion. Here's a quick summary:

• Links are like beats: Both the fundamental foundations of blogs and hip hop are based on the idea of sampling as a starting point for establishing a context and building up one's own expression on top of it.
• Rip, Mix and Burn: Apple's old slogan does an excellent job of capturing the fact that collage, contrafact and juxtaposition are key elements of making modern media. Blogs and hip hop were both born to do this.
• Music stores sell more turntables than guitars these days: Today's generation of young people have grown up in a world where media is something you create, not just something you consume. So the natural reaction to hearing something great is to think "I have something to add to that".
• "That's not music": Both art forms were initially greeted with not just derision but outright dismissal by legacy media. But hip hop wasn't born as a "reaction" to rock music, and blogging wasn't born as a "reaction" to traditional media. They were born because they were the most natural way for a new community to form and express itself. They just happened to revolutionize the media that came before them.
• The Law Is Against Us: The forces of intellectual property law are trying to render all current media sterile so that we can't use our blogs or our turntables to make new media out of them. The record labels went after Biz Markie in the same way the Associated Press goes after today's bloggers — denying them the right to create new art on the pretense of legal limits, but because of the reality that their works are considered illegitimate.
• Expressing one's identity is fundamental: From tagging trains to picking a Twitter name, shouting out one's identity, even in a format as fundamental as your name, is intrinsic to the medium. Outsiders think it's arrogance or braggadocio but we know it's just a simple ritual of declaration within the community.
• We're judged at our worst: If one rapper has a violent lyric, a misogynist song, or legal troubles, all rappers are tainted with that image. If one blogger is obnoxious or hateful towards a public person, or publishes an ill-considered essay, all bloggers are tarred with that brush. Old media loves to claim our worst is typical of our whole community.
• We want to be free: Rappers were among the earliest, and so far are the best, at becoming independent in the distribution, marketing, and cross-promotion of their art as commercial work. Similarly, bloggers have invented an entire alternate distribution mechanism to help their ideas reach very broad audiences with or without the permission or assistance of traditional media.

I need your help.

I'm asking experts that I respect to talk about the connection between blogging and hip hop. People who are artists, writers, executives or just fans, whom I've met in my 10 years of being a blogger and my past life of working in the world of music.

I'm presenting a few concepts that are key to both blogging and hip hop, and then asking you to respond. If you're interested, all you have to do is answer one or more of the three questions below.