Shout out to my NMC homies…LETS GOOOO!

There are not 100 good hip hop websites. That is all.

Editor’s Note: Mickey Factz discusses what it was like to get his first post on Nah Right and almost never get a second one.

“Where should I begin, start from the end…”

- Mickey Factz, Flyin Balloons – 1:00 A.M. and Rising Nahright Mixtape

Nahright. To me, that site was the end all, be all for an upcoming artist. It was like getting on a Clue Tape in 98 for me. I’ll never forget first hearing about the site. I was at Jive Records, talking to an A&R rep. He asked if I had ever been on that site, I said no. I then went there and felt like I should have been on that site. My second mix-tape, Flashback Vol. 1 came out in July 2007. We wanted it on the site. We sent it to Eskay, to no avail.

We proceeded to send song after song and it never got posted. I began to get frustrated. Started devising different plans. I recorded a Success freestyle with Donny Goines cause he was on Nahright so much. I was like, since I know Donny, maybe this will segue into being posted. Negative. Didn’t get posted. Then, I started hitting up every blog asking them. 2dopeboyz, DifferentKitchen, etc. Nothing. I even sent my press kit. NOPE!

I then gave up. Once you give up, thats when things begin to happen. I recorded a song that meant a lot to me. It was about Sean Bell. That shooting was horrendous and I felt as an artist I had to speak my mind. I did it not to get on any blogs. I actually never blasted the record to some people’s surprise. I sent it to Ian over at Different Kitchen and put it on my Myspace…

For some reason, Eskay got his hands on it and posted it. His reasoning for doing it because it was the appropriate to the timing of what was happening and it was “Independent’s Day.”

I remember I was on my way out of my house when my manager called me like “Yo, go to your computer screen right now.” I ran back upstairs and stayed inside for about a hour. Just reading the comments and laughing. I thought it was funny how they didn’t comment on how good the song was but how wack I was. Even Eskay joined in on the fun…

So since that happened, I was like YEEEEA! Now Eskay is gonna post allll of my stuff from here on out… NOPE!!! He continued to deny me access to Nahright. Haha. Pardon me I had to laugh at that. Out of alllllllll the things Eskay has posted regarding Mickey Factz. I realllly wish he would have posted Heaven’s Fallout which, to some people, is my best project to date.

The next post that got put up was my EPK and that was like 5 months later, lol. Again, we didn’t send that to him. He just randomly posted it. We were still sending him things and he wouldn’t put it up. I was like in the beginning stages of my leak series and this is when the term Hipster Rap was starting to become the “fad”. I had linked up with Naledge from Kidz in the Hall to record the record. We did it and it was dope. I had a line in there saying “I’m nice, so should I be classified as hipster rap? nah, right?” That line right there was like a shot at Eskay and he posted it. It was the first joint that went up. The comment section, which I absolutely love to death, bludgeoned me verbally. There was an argument about Hipster rap over that song for 2, to maybe 3, days.

The following week in my next leak, I then shouted Eskay out saying “My buzz off the internet, I got Eskay’s in a text, different kitch, every set” haha… Just showing love to him.

The moral of this story is, you can change your mind about anybody or anything once you give it a chance. I thought I would never ever be posted on that site. I saw Eskay go from making fun of me tons of times to then seeing him defend me in Posts, vigorously. I’m glad I got a chance to meet him at SXSW and just vibe with him. One of the realest people I know and I have nothing but love for him, Nation and Dre.

Mickey is prepping the release of his first single that will put up for sale. Keep up with Mickey Factz on Twitter or on his GFCny blog.

Editor’s note: This is the second part in a two-part series. Read part one here.

As I explained in yesterday’s post, the end goal with getting Weapons of Mass Distraction off the ground was to be able to hold it down at Nah Right. I had learned just about enough and built enough relationships as “nation of moderation” from wmdeez to be “qualified” for the job, but not necessarily being good at it. I would do posts left and right in the Winter/Spring of 2008 whenever eskay needed some help, but most of the time it consisted of me sitting down and listening to an episode of Juan Epstein and then posting it on the site.

One summer morning, I was at my brother’s office helping him with some shit when I noticed it was 11/12 and Nah hadn’t been updated. Not to put his business out there, but I think eskay’s Twitter said he had to be in court that day. So, I decided to stop being such a fucking pussy and try my hand at daytime posting. The thing about posting at night is that there’s almost no one around and the comments are pretty dead, which makes it less stressful to post shit… you won’t get a hundred opinions on what you’re posting. Daytime, though, is a different beast. Between my aggie comment brethren trying to get through their day at work or my fellow students trying to pass time in class… I sometimes don’t make it out alive. It’s still the best job in the world though.

So that day, I buckled down and went in like a life sentence. I started panicking a bit because my RSS reader wasn’t really up to date with the 6000 new rap blogs that had popped up since the summer before that. I had go through it like Splash does it: go to NewMusicCartel.com and scroll down the pages of each blog to find new content, and post it, and link to the site I got it from. I was on my old laptop too, anyway, I’ll spare you the excruciating details but I think I got through that day without anyone suspecting anything was out of the ordinary and that night or the next day I spoke to eskay and told him I wanted to help out regularly and that was really how it all started.

Now, yesterday’s post explained how I got here, and after a year and a half of working at Nah Right “full time,” I’ll explain how my life has changed (this is where you can change the channel.)

Summer 2008 was pretty slow for me and the site. I could put as much work as I wanted to into the site, but living so far away from NY meant that I wouldn’t necessarily see the repercussions of everyone’s hard work coming to fruition. If we’d be getting songs or pushing someone’s work during a week leading up to a project’s release or an event that promotes their project, even if the music would be cool, it almost didn’t mean anything to me at that time because I wouldn’t see the final outcome of it. I had become numb to all the footage, mixtapes, songs, videos for quite some time.

The only thing I remember vividly from 2008 is writing this post, then heading out in the cold to check out my boy’s new condo and e-mailing my man chea like yo, this is the truth. That was really a defining moment for me, and somehow it stuck. Not only was the music that I was hearing more mature, but my boy finally getting his own place (downtown at that) was the beginning of something new… we were finally moving out of our mama’s basement. Although, that night I came home to a fuckton of hate in the comments. As a matter of fact, I still get hate for it but it’s okay, it all comes with the territory.

In 2009, I started kicking it with one of my oldest friends, Bear. Every time he would ask me what I did, I would just change the subject. I was like that with everyone since the summer but it got to the point where every time he saw me he would ask me what was wrong with me (LOL.) When I finally told him, he gave me the craziest look. It’s not that he didn’t understand what a blog was, because he still doesn’t, or that he didn’t listen to any rap, because he didn’t (at the time,) but he thought that this was something I should definitely be telling people.

He’d say shit like “what do you mean you don’t tell anyone about the site.” But I was so fucking hard-headed, it just didn’t make any sense to me. He’s like: (and I quote) “dog, girls like guys who do shit with their lives, not guys who don’t do shit with their lives…” Haha, I’ll never forget that. So now, whenever I meet someone new, he’ll fucking taunt me until I break down and tell them the truth. It’s been roughly 10 months but I’d say I’m rehabilitated. If someone asks now, I’ll tell them, reluctantly though.

Like everything in life, there are pros and cons to this blogging shit. The pro is I’m forced to know all the good shit that happens in rap music at all times, which is honestly the biggest perk for me. I fucking love talking shit to people about how much more I know about music than them. The problem with being the go to source for shit is that when I finally caught my first Jay concert this past October, I was unmoved. Something that’s supposed to be a stepping stone for every rap fan was exactly the same thing as every video I had seen online, to me at least (oh hai LiveNation.) It sounds kinda obvious, but it was a let down for me. One pro is that a lot of people are willing to hear out my opinion on certain matters, but then the con there is that any time you try to talk rap with someone “my man, my man… listen to my artist, he’s nicer than all the wack shit you post daily.”

It’s as if eskay’s idea of setting out to start a website that gathers all the relevant news was specifically formatted to break any and everyone’s artist and make sure they become famous. There’s a ton of stress that comes with the job, and I feel as though the people who devote their lives to it like the big homie eskay don’t get nearly enough credit. But it’s like I told my man Dallas, I started this site so I can talk about these things, things that might pertain to Nah Right, but that wouldn’t necessarily fit as Nah Right programming.

Things haven’t been so bad though. Ever since I started to accept who this site has made me or who I’ve had to become with this site, good things have come along. There’s seriously no better feeling than meeting J. Cole (in my hometown and by sheer luck and coincidence) and attempting to tell him how big of a fan of his work I am while he blatantly cuts me off to tell me how big of a fan of the site he is.

who woulda thought a little nigga from the Ville could get a deal?

Editor’s note: This is the first of two parts. Read part two here.

People always wonder how I ended up working at Nah Right, which loosely translates into how did eskay end up hiring a fucking kid, from the great north at that, to do work for the site… when there’s probably 8 million people living in NY that may be more qualified. The answer is very simple: I have no idea. This is the best way I can explain it:

I stumbled upon Nah Right in early 2006. Cam’ron had just dissed Jay, Busta had just gotten in a heap load of shit, and Papoose was still the hottest thing coming out of NY. I spent the first night I found it trolling the archives. The more I looked, the more I found the sickest pictures of rappers, MP3s that I needed in my life or simply explanations I had never gotten before. It was apparent that it was much more than just a website. I almost never found it again (what’s a Nah Right?,) thank god for Ctrl+H.

After reading every single post, I started running through the Blog Roll. I realized NR was really the only one I needed, since the rest weren’t focused on news or shit that was happening. The earliest sites I can remember visiting via the blog roll were Crunk & Disorderly, ConcreteLoop, Dallas Penn, Oh Word, Byron Crawford, Unkut, Cocaine Blunts and Nastack.

It was truly refreshing to see people that cared about rap music. Not being from NY, I never knew this many people took things to heart. To me, it was like an underworld I could escape to where people talked rap like it was supposed to be discussed. But I just stuck to reading Nah Right because it had all I needed and, all things considered, eskay’s writing > ____.

Pretty soon it went from a discovery to a distraction hobbie. I would check the site very frequently and I had don’d the name “nation of thugacation” on the comments, because at the time I thought Pap was that dude. I started e-mailing eskay whenever I saw something wrong on the site, and after a while he started joking that he should just make me his copy-editor… lol. We’d e-mail back and forth all the time, because I was just so impressed with how he ran the site, what he brought to the game and who he represented.

After a while, eskay had taken a job at XXL (”Editor in Chief – Online,” if I’m not mistaken) and the work was taking up most of his time, making it impossible to update Nah Right. He offered me a job for the first time in the Spring of 2007, but I was about to start University and he needed me to be in New York, so it never happened.

That summer, though, I built up this little blog called “Weapons of Mass Distraction” where I was just practicing fucking around on posts and blogging at the same pace as Nah Right and ‘em. I wasn’t too serious about it, but I put in major work at times and traffic was pretty decent for something of that kind. My brother had taught me a thing or two about Wordpress and traffic optimization and before I knew it, the summer was over and I was on Kanye’s favorite blogs.

I remember that day perfectly. Eric from Recognize Real (at the time) congratulated me via e-mail, but I hadn’t even seen it yet. I told the 2-3 people who knew about wmdeez what had happened, because at the time, I hadn’t told anyone about Nah Right (to keep all the up to date rap news to myself) and I hadn’t told any of my friends I had started a blog. I don’t know, it seemed kinda corny… jumping into blogs so late in the game… lol.

That’s when I dropped the ball though. As gratifying as it was to get some recognition, I had only been making those posts for the kids on the Nah Right comments or people who read Nah Right and that I knew (my man Dallas, for example.) That’s also probably how Ye found the site, I would be putting in overtime in the comments when this whole Kanye vs. 50 Cent battle was going down, and he probably saw my site and appreciated it. But, in turn, when wmdeez died down, I was ready to step up to the plate at Nah Right. I told eskay I was ready to come on board (slowly,) and he obliged.

at the age of 18, the young god was the only governing body with two websites featured on kanYe’s favorites, back when he had 10 sites there

Everyone thought I had already been working at Nah for quite some time, because when the comments started getting moderated, I changed my name to “nation of moderation.” Truth is, a few months later when I got my password, it was to begin moderating comments but I also jumped the gun and made my first post that day. It was a Kanye x Spin Magazine post.

I started posting full time in the summer that followed. Click here for part two.