Friday, February 25
Word to your mother
And I quote: Rappers and bloggers—they're the same!
Essentially, blogging is sampling plus a new riff. Political bloggers take a story in the news, rip out a few chunks, and type out a few comments. Rap songs use the same recipe: Dig through a crate of records, slice out a high hat and a bass line, and lay a new vocal track on top. Of course, the molecular structure of dead-tree journalism and classic rock is filthy with other people's research and other people's chord progressions. But in newspaper writing and rock music, the end goal is the appearance of originality—to make the product look seamless by hiding your many small thefts.
For rappers and bloggers, each theft is worth celebrating, another loose item to slap onto the collage. Rap music and blogging are populist, low-cost-of-entry communication forms that reward self-obsessed types who love writing in first person. Maybe that's why both won so many converts so quickly.
That, of course, assumes you're blogging in the collage style, which the Edge of Nowhere is not doing. The Edge of Nowhere is not doing much these days, as is clear. Just livin la vida suburban.
