Editor’s Note: After making you sit through that exhaustive two-parter, I thought I’d let a real writer tell you how he got here. These guest blogs will give you a glimpse into the lives of the people that I’ve had the pleasure of meeting along the way, whether it be bloggers that have made you know their name, or people you might have never heard of before. In either case, it’ll be someone that I feel that you should know more about.

I came across Meka’s HipHopDX column in late 2007, and I later stumbled upon a blog that he had just started, with then-fellow HipHopDXer Shake, from which I borrowed this picture for a wmdeez post. Shake e-mailed me not too long afterwards, introducing himself and Meka, and the rest is history really. I’ve had the chance to speak to both of them on a regular basis for the past year and a half, via NMC e-mail threads and other channels of communication, and they are both extremely interesting, hardworking and under-appreciated individuals. I could tell you about Meka, or I can let him explain it himself better than anyone ever could. Below you’ll find part one (of three parts) of his guest blog. UPDATE: Part two is up now and so is part three.

To know about the present, one must learn about the past…

Have the visitors of the site tell you, and I’m just nothing more than a shit-talking, arrogant asshole. Have those closely involved in my circle tell you, I’m a conflicted individual who – despite having a deep disdain for the field of work I’m involved in – continue to do it out of the sheer love of music.

But we’re not asking them.

Ever since that cocoon of fantasy known as college shattered once I graduated nearly six years ago and was suddenly thrust into the “real” bullshit world like a premature baby being forced out of his mother’s womb, this middling lie life of mine has seen more twists and turns than Dale Earnhardt’s #3 car after it careened headfirst into Turn 4 on the final lap of the Daytona 500 in 2001, and it’s currently got me stationed in a cramped, windowless room in an office based in some nondescript part of Harlem, where my neighbors are a methadone clinic and a slaughterhouse that reeks of blood, feces and despair each time I walk past it while heading to work. Not exactly what I had in mind when what I do keeps Russell in that skyscraper, but such is life.

But I’m getting ahead of myself.

My foray into this music shit began in December 2004, when – while on my third job as a Macy’s bed, bath and kitchen clerk – on a whim I emailed the then-Editor-In-Chief of HipHopDX, Albert “Mac” McCluster, asking to write for the website, as it was essentially the only place I went to for all things music. To my surprise Mac responded, agreeing to let a person who hadn’t had any published work since his high school newspaper write for a burgeoning website. Essentially I landed another gig at a local ‘zine called Urban Network, and was eventually made the Music Editor.

What happened next over the course of six months, however, would drastically change the fiber of my very being, as I simply was not ready for the fuckery that truly is the music industry. During my tenure at Urban Network, I was essentially forced into writing good reviews for horrible artists, as their labels were the one paying for ad space and by extension my bills. Writing for DX was an event unto itself as well, as many of my works were constantly edited and torn apart by my higher-ups.

The defining moment, however, happened one breezy afternoon in April, as I took my then-girlfriend with me to interview the recently-bounced-from-DTP Chingy for DX. There, the mush-mouthed wannabe washout of a shitbag rapper spent more time ducking my questions and hitting on my girlfriend in front of my face. Returning home to write the piece, I had a writer’s block – stemming from the stress, poor health issues from essentially living out of a suitcase in my mother’s dank basement and who knows what else – that was so severe I could even draw up a single sentence.

That writer’s block lasted for another 18 months.

I essentially went into hiding, never answering emails and phone calls from my two editors, while trying to piece together the remnants of my young life. Three months later I landed a job at an entertainment commercial production company, who was responsible for the likes of Kanye West’s “All Falls Down” and Jay-Z’s “Show Me What You Got.” Although now having a semblance of stability (I moved out of my mother’s basement and into a one-room shack in Inglewood), I was still jaded by the music industry. Remember that now-infamous tangent 2Pac went on at the end of “Hit ‘Em Up?” His vitriolic venom is the best way I can describe how I was feeling at the time.

My first foray into the world of cyber-writing happened accidentally, as I somehow came across XXL Magazine’s website and was surprised to see that the shit evolved from a shitty, two-bit splash page to a well-developed online magazine with a variety of different sections, including this upstart section with the likes of Byron Crawford, Crunk & Disorderly’s Fresh, Billy X. Sunday, Tara Henley and more. I was surprised to see that there was a weird, geeky cyber-society that existed with cats whose thought processes mirrored that of my own. Eventually I began commenting under the handle “Meka Soul,” playing off a nickname I got in college when everybody kept stumbling over my full name and an old Pete Rock & CL Smooth song. It was in those c-sections where I was freely able to express the years of pent up rage, frustration and disdain I had for all things music, and to my surprise my comments eventually landed me a few mentions in Tara Henley and Byron Crawford’s respective XXL segments.

Eventually Tara had inexplicably found my MySpace page, and when she asked who I was – apparently I was more well-versed than the usual assortment of asshats that flood c-sections across the nation – I explained to her my background and past history. She then suggested that I should start writing myself, and pointed me in the direction of this “eskay” guy who was the Online Editor of XXL and also ran a website with the doofy name Nah Right.

Put a pin in that for a moment…

Meanwhile, although I had long stopped writing for DX, I still received email blasts from a writer who had replaced Mac as the Editor-In-Chief, Andreas Hale. One day in January of 2007 I received an email blast from Dre looking for anybody on the writing staff to do tribute pieces on The Notorious B.I.G, Big Pun and Big L. When I noticed nobody had answered, I responded, “I’ll do it.”

“Which ones?” he replied.

“All three, if I can,” I told him.

What I didn’t know at the time (Andreas told me this later on) was that during my first stint at DX, I was regarded as one of their better writers, and had I not became a recluse I may have been one of the editors myself. Needless to say, Dre was somewhat happy I had resurfaced, and I responded with three features on the deceased legends that I received a lot of acclaim for.

During this time, I had gotten to speak to eskay a few times virtually, and he suggested I should be a guest writer for XXL for a week, and if successful make the transition over to mainstay. Unfortunately, due to his duties over at XXL, the shit never happened. However, due to my pieces at HipHopDX I got offered a spot there, to which I happily agreed to do. I ultimately named my spot “Slap-Boxing With Jesus” for two reasons: I was listening to the Ghostface Killah song at the time I was thinking of a title for my spot, and it was a metaphor for essentially every repressed, possibly offensive thought I was going to spit out.

“Slap-Boxing” debuted April 9th, 2007, and to be honest I was petrified. I wasn’t sure what the response was going to be now that I was “on the other side,” and its sluggish reception had me questioning if I was doing the right thing at all. But I continued on, unleashing the two years of repressed anger and dismay at the rap game I had stored in my chest into daily, 500-word posts, taking shots at everything from Snoop’s hypocritical stance on Don Imus’ use of the term “nappy-headed hoe” when most of his shitty albums were nothing more than misogynistic dedications, to why I thought a good chunk of the female rappers out at the time should have stayed in the kitchen behind a stove and not in a booth behind the microphone.

About three weeks into “Slap-Boxing” I wrote a piece titled “Lil Wayne = G.O.A.T. (Garbage On A Tape).” Not thinking too much of it, I posted the piece and continued on making coffee and preparing lunch for my bosses at the commercial production company. When I returned 45 minutes later I saw that the number of comments had totaled somewhere in the hundreds, which I found strange since at the time the most I had gotten in a post was about 25. It turns out that Dre had like the post so much he featured it on the front page of DX for all of its visitors to view.

Meka Soul had finally arrived.

Read part two of his guest blog here, along with part three here.