Fresh For 2011-12
I’m about a month late on the site’s 1-year anniversary and re-design, but if you’ve been following at all, you know that I really don’t care (I should get “CPT” tatted across the belly*). The new design isn’t too drastically different from the previous. It doesn’t look awesome but I’m hoping this will prevent friends from having to come up with nice ways of saying “Shit’s ugly, son” to me. From a usability standpoint, the only things to really take note of are the widened blog column, which will allow for larger videos, and the Facebook Like Box for SDRaps.com’s FB Page (in the sidebar), which actually exists. I might throw in a box for the Twitter account at some point, too.
The last, but probably most important, thing to note is the re-written About page. I was just reading the original copy before and I almost cringed at the pretension and self-seriousness of it all. The new copy is significantly toned down, which reflects a sort of philosophical shift that has already happened in this site.
I had originally had high hopes for the SDRaps.com experiment. The intent of this site was to 1. find good music from local artists; and 2. increase coverage of those artists making that good music. But after 13 months and 230 posts, what has changed?
Truthfully, I’m not really sure. When I caused a storm and called out the SDMA’s and local media last year for their lack of connection with the hip-hop community, I thought I might be the one to fill the void in the media. But since then, I’ve managed to publish all of three articles about the local scene in CityBeat. Of those, only two are actually about local artists (Blame One and Black Mikey). I’ve also only published six local album reviews and two live show reviews involving the local scene/artists in The Reader. It’s a start, I guess, but it’s hardly the sort of revolution that I had been hoping for. Ideally, there would be feature articles and/or CD reviews for Orko, Dannu, Treali Duce, Ecay Uno, Circle Empire, Infinity Gauntlet, Sergio Hernandez, and the overlooked latin rap scene in those same publications. And without that coverage, I fear that the 2011 SDMA’s will be just as unrepresentative as last year’s.
Then there’s this site itself which has been less than comprehensive and people have not hesitated to let me know. This was originally intended to be a group blog so that different writers can cover different areas and we could balance out each other’s biases. But finding adept writers who are passionate enough about local music to want to write about it for free has been pretty rough (shouts to Wes, by the way, who has been producing the site’s best articles in the last few months). And trying to cover music myself that I don’t personally enjoy and doing it for free is just coding for failblog.com/FML-status. This blog would not last long.
So what does this mean for the next year of SDRaps.com? For starters, take this as another call for someone/anyone to recommend a writer who would want to blog about local rap/hip-hop, preferably not the same stuff that we already cover (email me!). Second, it means that I’m gonna not just leave the heavy lifting to Wes and start interviewing artists again. Expect more feature content with a renewed emphasis on local rap history that we were able to nerd out on last year. Hopefully, I’ll also be able to spin these into articles for those same publications mentioned previously and there will be better visibility for the music. Basically, just expect better. But in baby-steps.
Now that I’ve had my fun with the rant, let’s get back to some music.
*And by that I mean Colored People Time. You ever notice how every single ethnicity except whites think their ethnicity is notorious for being late? Really, I think we’re all on-time and white people just need to chill and shit.
Reading be fun though:
