Now often I don’t have the greatest ideas on the planet. To be truthful, they’re all pretty lame at their inception. But may I offer to those of you who can stomach conceptual wanker-y a new model of musical expression and promotion.

Its actually not very new to be wholly honest. I think the first time I heard anyone coining the term bloghouse was outside of a Teenagers show. I mean I’d heard the term incessantly around Johnny Love and Chiko but I never really understood what exactly the fuck it meant or was. Which to its credit, made it all the more strange and interesting. Bloghouse simply referred to tracks being peddled out of stationary blogfronts for free download. Those tracks were then passed around from dj to dj, played through any number of MP3 vinyl transcoders available out there.

Bloghouse really to be honest had no distinctive sound to it other than being a no rules format. The people I’ve known still championing it are even incorporating bits and pieces of dubstep into the equation. Its a stark difference in ethos to other forms music who use the internet to deliver its payload. Because really at the crux what makes bloghouse fairly difference from something like Dubstep is that the medium is not the message.

Communities end up changing a music as it reaches a critical mass. For genres that are purist in nature like Dubstep, there are boundaries that are set up pretty early. You have bpm’s and production standards. You have things you can and can’t sample. And you have a barometer of existing producers in which to mold yourself to.

One of the more endearing things about bloghouse was that a blog was more of an independent fount of subjectivity and much less a community. This meant people visiting said blog were treated to a fairly unique and dare I say controversial interpretation. The blog was the component that acted as the mutagen… and not the house aspect. I mean we all know what house is supposed to sound like if you lock it in a large community chest. Its safe to say that if you called it MessageBoardHouse, you’d be hearing a very different sound… one that would be more scrutinized and less apt to take chances.

Building from that model somewhat unintentionally, I’ve found over the years that the internet and your identity on it is as powerful and damning as your public life. All of us can be searched, judged, and collected by the sum of our parts and the data we’ve left behind. Those of us who run blogs have a litany of past sins that define us over the years. Bad day rants about existentialism, foie gras, and poker players being vegan… all harvested over and over and consistently bread crumbing people back to a seemingly anonymous source.

Being an emcee, a writer, and a blogger is a strange combination. Its a collision of ideas, concepts, audio and words. Its nature is a sort of schizophrenic collusion where each identity acting separately on different populations attempts to defraud the whole. Its an act of subversion against archetypes. The rapper as purely street or the writer as purely esoteric or the blogger as purely advertisement. Using all these strengths in an experimental and chaotic lash outwards at the audience is a sort of voltron-esque attack. Clouding the ideals and the roles of what you are, what is for sale or not, and what exactly it is you are trying to do.

Are you trying to sell a record? Are you trying to write words? Are you trying to deface the internet? Are you saying anything important at all? Are you simply spray painting thoughts across a wide canvas of open highway viaducts in hopes that passersby will question one word or phrase? Are you making records, podcasts, mp3’s, or performance poetry? Are you stealing music or are you promoting it? Is this hip hop or blograp?

Its a dirty secret of mine that I spent more than a minute of my day careening through the Craigslist personals. I mean, fuck it. I’m single. It became a hopelessly fascinating part of my day, looking for some sort of validation from strangers. Fantasizing about the possibilities of meeting some socially retarded and awkward girl via the internet in a chance encounter on the street.

It in hindsight became a depressing state of mind and being for me. Because all I could ever see in these things were the same archetype that fit me somewhat but not really. Bikes, deep v’s, fixed gears, tattoos, beards, pbr, skinny jeans, seedy bars, ipod headphones, the list goes on. Its interesting to note in Matthew Fuller’s “Media Ecologies” he talks about these same very lists as notations for subcultures. Each word is a tool to create some sort of bubble wrapped substrate… a petri dish for a movement or following.

The movement became apparent to me as something with no real goal in mind other than a broad intersection of things that were apparently cool. Some of these things were already way too integrated into my own life. Though truth be told, some things in my own list were glaringly marring my own chances of fitting into a mold. They were things that I either couldn’t change, wouldn’t change, or just couldn’t stand. They were things not of me. Sure we intersected probably down somewhere in multicolor hell, but for the most part… these things were deal breakers.

Emcee’ing has always been my fucking Albatross. Its the one thing I’ve been consistently reminded of over the years that makes me something of a carwreck. And trust me… if you’ve ever sat at a bar and been attacked by people who also emcee you’d know what I mean. Just a week ago, I was introduced to someone as an emcee who just so happen to be an emcee as well. I had to sit there and endure some drunken freestyle about barbwire and fences or something or another in some weird urban drawl. I kind of smiled and nodded, hiding my head a bit in shame.

Its the thing that I carry with me that is cradled in my inherent geekiness. Its walking around in high school with a black african medallion and a cane, fasting at the lunchroom table during ramadan. Its knowing every single one of the lyrics from Lakim Shabazz’s “Black is Back” and singing them furiously at that Peanut Butter Wolf opening while people look at you and wonder “what the fuck is up with that dude?” Though admittedly it was nice to see a smile of recognition from intel in the corner. Its these gangster palsies that snap and shimmer like Parkinsons covering up my awkwardness in a even more awkward blur much like the beards grown over masses of baby faced bikers weaving to and fro brakeless.

Its how I hide from things. Its my armor and my achilles heel at the same time. I acknowledge it. I laugh at it. I’ve learned to make fun of it and laugh at it. Because self deprecation at its heart is about the most sincere form of expression that I know. Its taking the bravado from a million rap songs and realizing exactly what they were… lifesized cartoons like balloon writing from a fat cap on a highway underpass… easily copied… easily forgotten.

I spent the better half of my saturday fighting the thousand year beard war on Craigslist. I fought it for many reasons… and many of them were at their very root subversive and conceptual. Words are about the only things that I have that seem to be original these days. And for the most part, that could be argued away into an invisible haze.

But my words ultimately are breadcrumbs back to the hive. Traces of bones that have been scavenged almost cannibalisticly from the source that created it. Its a shifting mass undulating upon itself constantly feeding back ideas and reshaping. I read and respond and absorb and spit back. Acknowledging what I see and imprinting upon it. Stealing and then redistributing in a chaotic fashion… almost like a natural disaster.

Back in the confines of my own pundit soapbox, I’m busy tearing apart things and breaking stuff as quickly as possible. Speaking bitter and nonsensical words into a microphone in the only way I know how. Becoming my own cartoon really with each little composition and each searchable phrase, lyric, or tirade. Thoroughly addicted to hits, spiders, crawlers, and stats pages. Hoping someone actually gets and deciphers whatever message is curled up in the bottle sent from my Deleuzian island retreat.

Its not likely to happen and that therein is the beauty that lies in the ignorance of it. Its what keeps me sort of waiting for Godot and spitting back lyrics to myself in a sort of schizophrenic state. Because its the waiting that makes me happy… the complete ignorance to any sort of goal, destination, cubby hole, or genre.

Its what I do to amuse myself from day to day. Because I’m bored. Bored with beards. Bored with life. Bored with the same old shit. Bored with rules. Bored with social grace. Bored with trying to fit in someplace.

This, my friends, is how bag ladies are made… remnants of the thousand year beard war… wandering around the urban landscape in a constant state of post traumatic stress. Making art and crafts out of garbage and hoarding cats, in desperate need of attention.

Hopefully, my shit sculpture (read: blog rap) will at least make someone laugh a little.

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