Hip Hop Blogs

New Hip-hop Bloggers

Lots and lots of new hip-hop blogers have appeared in the last 2 months. Peep all of them in the sidebar of the front page of this site. Some of them are from oversees, some are journalists, others are just heads with something to say.

Based on MyBlogLog stats it seems like more than a few of you use the sidebar list as your own link list of hip-hop blogs. Cool. That has stopped me from editing who's on there. Anyone who writes about hip-hop and has a webfeed makes it.

Hip Hop Blogs Chat

OK, this is a test. If it works the way I want it, then the chat may become a more instant version of of the hiphopblogger email group. Blogcritics, the site where I steal all my ideas from, use chat to schedule debates on current issues. I would love for it to get there, as well as doing instant interviews.

If it doesn't work then I'll cancel it.

So here we go:

join the Hip Hop Blogs Chat Room

Ask questions, share tips, chill, politic, whatever. Let's see what happens.

Introducing Lunchtable Sessions

Lunchtable Sessions is a blog about hip-hop bloggers. It's the evolution of an idea started by Eric Nord to aggregate posts from hip-hop bloggers to make it easier for readers to keep track of. Cuz let's face it, most people just aren't going to use bloglines or kinja.

If you have a hip-hop blog of your own, here's how to use Lunchtable Sessions:

1. Each month think of a post interesting enough to have listed on Lunchtable Sessions
2. Send a trackback from that post to the post in Lunchtable Sessions for that month
3. If you don't understand trackback, just go back to your post, add the phrase "Lunchtable Session," plus the month, and your post be be automatically added to the site. Cool, no? (It takes a few weeks if you do it this way, though)

And why the name Lunchtable Sessions? Well, back in high school I would sit around the cafeteria lunchtable with friends playing spades and talking about hip-hop. But the cafeteria was noisy and the lunch period short, so our conversation was always limited to only the hottest happenings in the music culture we lived and loved.

And that's what this new website is for. Instead of readers wading through 20+ posts a month on each of our sites, they can feel comfortable skipping a week or two, then checking out Lunchtable Tables for what was going on during the time they were sleeping.

Got all of that? Good!

Peep the posts for January and February and get going.

Oh yeah, the site is still a work in progress, but I want to get it started now, or else it won't launch until June!

Join the HipHopBloggers group list

If you have blog, why not join the Yahoo! group for hip-hop bloggers? It's where all the cool kids hang out.

Group highlights:

1. How to post music and video on your blog
2. Where's the black hip-hop bloggers?
3. Strange trend in blog comments
4. R.I.P. Uppity Negro
5. How to pitch a story to a magazine
6. Blog alerts through IM, email, and text message
7. The last free meal in hip-hop
8. What tools do you use
9. The best solution for comment spam (the "nofollow" attribute)

Note: you must have a blog to join the group (though it doesn't have to be about hip-hop). Leave your url in the comment section of the sign up form.

And for all you voyeurs, you can keep up with the group through its webfeed.

Updated Blogroll

Because I'm lazy and forgetful I decided to list all of the hip-hop bloggers I read using bloglines.com. Dag, there are a lot of you! A year ago it was maybe 10 people. 18 months ago it was only 4 dudes. Now there's over 40 with at least 30 being active every week. Evey hour when I refresh bloglines I see a handful of new posts about hip-hop.

It makes me think- if we ever wanted to get together and do something big- like make sure Peedi Crakk's career never gets started- we could use our collective power to make it happen! Or maybe not.

Fresh to Death, boy!

It's been an exciting jump off 2 weeks for Fresh to Death, our new blog about hip-hop style. We schooled you on how to hustle, defined crazy slang like "eat your food," and explained why the New Balance 574's are the sleeper champs of hip-hop footwear.

Along the way, Colin aka Colskee, Milo, and Laron got down for the ride. If you know better than to rock boot-cuts with low top Air Force 1's then why don't you get down with us too? Just email me at [email protected].

Welcome Fresh to Death!

Friends, family, and aging hip-hop journalists who operate with sensationalism and a lack of ethics, welcome the newest extension of the Hip Hop Blogs army- FRESH TO DEATH!

100 Posts and Runnin!

We did it, ma! 100 posts about hip-hop!

We brung Mase back and stopped TLC from replacing Left Eye! We archived the history of rap radio and taught Stefan how to use adverbs! We settled the freestlye vs writtens debate and caused Talib's album to flop!

All the while we managed to start up these fine services and blogs:

• Hip Hop Bloggers email group- where cats like Jeff Chang, Lynne d Johnson, and Jay Smooth discuss our hip-hop powered ying-yang
• HHB Fantasy Basketball League- where Bol's Chink Slappers beat my #1 Stunnas last week, 5-3
• Mixtapes Etc.- where we give the mixtape game its first real taste of criticism
• November Third- where we keep the political conversation in hip-hop alive the day and days after the election when everyone else stops noticing
• Powered by...- where we I share the tools that gets used in publishing online

What a cool six months. Propers to all my co-d's who write on these blogs or use these services. I've learned so much about this music culture over this last half year. It's been fun tossing my own ideas into the mix and getting dissed, praised, or ignored.

In the coming weeks this site will turn into less of it's own blog and more into a starting point for the growing number of side projects I have. There's no master plan to this. I'm just creating blogs about topics I would like to read about, and starting services I would like to use. I can't front though- the Gothamist empire inspires how I want to move forward with this Hip Hop Blogs thing. They've spawned 11 group blogs about focused topics in New York or a whole other city. I wouldn't mind seeing hip-hop getting the same treatment.

If things go right the next launches will be "Fresh to Death" about hip-hop style, and "Industry Rule #4080," which will be a promo blog. Holla if you have any ideas you want to collab with me on.

Until the next 100...

Mixtape News, Reviews, and Yada Yada

Our new blog, Mixtapes Etc. starts tommorrow (I sure love those generic website names, don't I?). Read and enjoy.

UPDATE: Our first review is up!

New Domain- www.hiphop-blogs.com

As of now this site has a new url- www.hiphop-blogs.com. I know...it's not that much different from the old one. Actually, all you have to do is change the the dot from the old url and make it a dash.

So if you've linked to our site from yours, PLEASE do us this solid and change over to the new url. And no Virginia, your old links to our individual pages will not be broken, thanks to the magic of Typapad's domain mapping.

I wanted to make the new url straight up one word like hiphopblogs.com but a sucka MC named Leo Larkpor registered it before me. I'm not mad, I just wish he would actually do something with the site. We don't mind competion.