Results tagged “jaysmooth”

Jay Smooth, "Please stop calling everyone and their mother 'The First Rapper'":

U-Roy may be one of rap's predecessors, and among the influences that laid the foundation for rap, but he did not invent it...any more than Jocko Henderson, Gil Scott Heron, Lord Buckley or the West African Griots invented it. All of them may be forefathers, but none are the inventors. And muddling their places in music history with his sort of specious, sloppy revisionism does hip-hop AND its forefathers a disservice.

Scott Rosenberg talks about The First Blogger, as part of his promotion for his upcoming book "Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters":

It's interesting to contrast these points because all of blogging is hip hop.

Update: If you enjoyed Scott's video, you might enjoy the series of interviews and profiles of pioneers I did for blogging's tenth anniversary, including Dave Winer, Leslie Harpold, Michael Sippey, and Harold Check.

Today's Blog of the Year Pick: Ill Doctrine.

Put simply, Jay Smooth's Ill Doctrine is the best video blog on the web. (At least the best one that's in English.) As you'd expect from the founder of hiphopmusic.com, Ill Doc starts from a base of reporting on hip hop music and culture. But from that starting point, Jay branches into ruminations on celebrity, culture, politics, and art with real feeling. I don't think anybody else could make me both roll my eyes at and empathize with Amy Winehouse in the space of just a few minutes, let alone turn "Chocolate Rain" into a non-ironic jam. And for casual viewers, nobody does a better job of breaking down complex topics like the bust of DJ Drama by the RIAA than Ill Doctrine.

The editing's tight, the videos frequently feature original music and interviews, and there's a bracing honesty to much of the conversation that really connected for me.
Pick of the Posts:

• Amy Winehouse and the Ethics of Clowning People
• Machine Guns and Stupid Choices
• Black Coach
• And Introducing the Ill Doctrine, the best place to start.

If you like this, try: Catching up on Ze Frank's archives for The Show. I wasn't kidding when I said he was our I Love Lucy.

This is one in a series of posts about Blogs of the Year for 2007. They're my subjective picks about blogs that inspired or influenced me this year, and you can check out my introductory post to find more.

Mike at Techdirt (that's the popular tech news blog which actually deserves its popularity) mentions that Sony is now rewriting history, trying to take credit for the success and popularity of the DVD format.

I almost admire the chutzpah -- when people ask what I do for a living, I sometimes say that I look for a parade of bloggers, and then try to get in front of the parade and pretend I was leading it. I keed! I keed!

Meanwhile, Clay Shirky was teliing the truth, too. His point may have been too subtle, buried as it was in plain English at the top of his post:

Mark Cuban doesn’t understand television. He holds a belief, common to connoisseurs the world over, that quality trumps everything else. The current object of his faith in Qualität Über Alles is HDTV.

Hmm, quality (in terms of resolution) isn't always that important. See also "I like the crappy videos" and, somewhat more broadly, Jay's long-running skepticism about freestyling being "superior" to written rhymes.