So, the XXL Blogs or at least some of their bloggers are no more? Not that XXL’s blogs were much to begin with, but you at least learned something from Noz and Dallas, er- Billy X. Sunday. Shed a few tears, give a moment of silence, peruse Noz’s greatest hits, keep reading CocaineBlunts and DallasPenn.com and whatever you do, don’t join XXL’s blog-replacement ‘Block Talk’.
‘Block Talk’ is a crappy magazine’s crappy website cutting corners under the illusion of Web 2.0 buzzword junk like “user-generated”. It’s your office building upping the A/C to 77 degrees because they’re “going Green” when they don’t even recycle. It’s your company putting in a vending machine and allowing you the “freedom” to check whether you want cheese or peanut-butter crackers or maybe even both! It’s SOHH’s now weekly game of summarizing the dopey arguments on their message boards and presenting is as a fucking news story, times 100 (and the less said about the involvement of “indie” rap artists like 9th Wonder in this whole fucking thing, the better…).
A dude in his twenties, white-T, fresh jeans, and too-big shades, approached me at my bookstore job and rattled off a list of hip-hop magazines he was looking for (Scratch, Mass Appeal, O-Zone, Murder Dog). I told him we didn’t carry the last two, that ‘Scratch’ had been shut-down for awhile now and ‘Mass Appeal’ was on its final issue. He maybe kinda looked like he was going to cry?
His near-teary eyes fell on the latest XXL– you know, the one with a shirtless Rick Ross poorly photo-shopped together with a bunch of other hip-hop turds—and shook his head: “Fuck a XXL man, what is this? How’m I gonna even bring this up to the register?” As we walked back to the register, I nodded in agreement and along with his change for the issue of ‘Don Diva’ he finally settled on, I gave him a brief list of URLS and keywords to search that might fill the gap. “XXL Block Talk” didn’t make my list and I don’t think the possibility of having his own personal blogging space would appeal to him much anyways- especially one that totally rips the design of MySpace. Come on XXL, really now…
Are You A Serious Comic Book Reader?
When are you going to post again? You really entertain me!
principles
19 Jun 12 at 1:41 pm