ready, set, go…

Internets. Yes, you of the interconnected networks. Aren’t you tired of someone thinking that you live in your mom’s basement? I always laugh at that because that is where my internet writing career blossomed. I was constantly on the Comedy Central message boards sonning all the bigots that rolled thru.

I say bigots as opposed to racists. They weren’t racists to me because racists don’t leave comments on a message board. Racists are too busy doing real racist shit. Bigots and the regular white is what leaves comments on the internets. It’s easy to yell at a crowd of people when you are online. You just do it by typing the truth. If the moderators aren’t scared to death then your truth can be seen and read. And that truth can be the equivalent of yelling to a crowd.

I’ve been writing my truth for a while now. Apparently I’ve been writing my truth forever. Momdukes pulled out some old 2nd grade shit that she had been keeping from like forever. It was a little child’s story but when I saw it I was transported back to the public school named after Louis Armstrong in the neighborhood that I grew up in – Corona, Queens. I wanted you to feel my shit [ll] even back then. So how do I come from there to here on your computer monitor? Oh and kill yourself if you read Its The Calm from an iPad or PDA device. That’s ghey. You need to go to a laptop or a desktop that has a printer and print out every single page of Its The Calm and then use a 3-hole punch to put holes in those printouts and then put those printouts in several binders arranged chronologically or categorically (because I’m not gonna tell you how to file your shit).

My journey thru NY life up to this point has been way more missteps than I can remember but I have taken a few giant steps (yes Coltrane) and that is what has me here with you today. A total loser wouldn’t get a guest blog opportunity over here. You can trust that N8 knows who’s nice with theirs and I’m nice like Sean Price. Aka Ruck aka Scraggbite. Hail Megatron! What’s the flavor?! D4L bitch (damn, pardon me for that flashback).

Weblogs were on some sucker shit, or so I thought before I got turned on to this page called Notes From A Different Kitchen, from there I found Unkut.com which led me to ByronCrawford and from there I caught a link to NahRight which blew my mind. Weblogs were hardbody all of a sudden. There was homages to the greatest music ever, and drops featuring the new music that wasn’t getting any commercial radio play. Even the best gossip pages were sucker free like Crunk & Disorderly. All of these pages were speaking to me like I talk to my homies. The filters were off and the language was funny and sometimes raw. This was where I could fit in.

I had been trying to become a published writer ever since I was in school for architecture. Even then I didn’t mind taking the unpopular opinion. A dozen or so people were killed at the college I attended because of a stampede that occurred at a celebrity basketball game. I blamed the victims and the attendees as opposed to the organizers. The truth is that people are so fucking selfish and greedy that they would stomp and trample one another just to be on the scene of a basketball game. City College’s school paper wasn’t feeling my Op-Ed too tough but I used several Xerox machines throughout the school to print my article and hand them out. That gave me the idea that I could start my own magazine. That shit was hard as hell though so I thought that maybe I could write for an existing magazine. One of my little homegirls in the music business who I would send my writing to told me as a matter of fact that I would never make it into a magazine because my writing style was too abrasive and unpolished. Plus magazines really liked dickriders more than anything else.

I wasn’t dismayed and I thought I would find my outlet at some point. I kept up my writing in a number of ways. My dude Ambush went to prison for almost twelve years for being part of a botched bank heist. Dudes actually got away from Virginia but ended up getting nabbed on the NJ Turnpike for speeding. Ambush was the driver and followed the G-code while his accomplices folded up faster than cheap lawn chairs. During his internment I sent him a steady stream of kites detailing the goings ons in our old neighborhood. Who was getting shot killed and who was getting pregnant. I felt like a news reporter and the what not. Ambush’s stint in prison also helped me sharpen my own mind politically and economically. He gave me the looking glass tour of the prison industrial complex but without bitterness. Between all the capers we had gotten into while we were teenagers it was like he was the one putting it all on his shoulders. The third musketeer Kenny had died back in the summer of ‘91. So now it was only me and Ambush left and I was the one who got to eat, shit and shower on his own schedule.

I thought I had another chance to crack into the mag biz. Another one of my peoples had a friend who was doing some editing for a basketball magazine. I tried to holler at the editrix to see if I could work under her (chea – puns always intended) and give her the secret perspective of a man that she could use in her group meetings. Sports means something totally different for men and women especially as a socialization dynamic. You have never heard of anyone putting down a girl because she “throws like a boy”. Whereas the inverse is a major insult. Shorty didn’t understand my proposition or possibly she just didn’t fux with me like that but that put the kibosh on any hopes I had for getting a magazine byline. Still I kept writing and I kept living my lifestyle. With friends in the music business as well as advertising gigs I remained in the periphery of the entertainment industry, more or less the 6th ring but still slick enough to come up on craft services and free alcohol.

The local rap and bullshit radio station had an awesomely popular morning show who’s host were known for their take no prisoners on the edge style. I had tuned into them this morning instead of Howard Stern which I alternated between the two. There was a commercial they played in which they said they were looking for writers for a startup magazine. An open tryout is exactly what I thought I needed to show off my work. I e-mailed samples of my previously drafted stories and I created several articles of the current events that were hot news items. I received a reply e-mail that I was going to be used as a feature writer for this new magazine. Back then I used a pseudonym for my byline. Don’t ask me why I choose the name William H. Sunday either, but it was a popular thing in rap circles so I fell right in line. That pen name was good for seven years of work from that bootleg magazine, to behind the scenes in radio to my own website.

It wasn’t until I made a trip to Atlanta to check up on my mother that I realized I was giving away my words to a fictitious character who may have been a white supremacist. Google Billy Sunday. Fake names are good for rappers and for other folks who attach purposefully subliminal messages to their writing, but I don’t aspire to be that person. I wanted folks to know that I said what I said and I meant what I meant. So from that point forward I would only use my name on whatever I produced. I remember having a G-chat with NahRight N8 back in the WMDeez days and sonn didn’t realize that I was actually all the writers over at DallasPenn dot com. That made me feel good that I could fool one of the super sleuths on the internets.

My purpose on the web isn’t really to fool people tho’ despite the fact that I am a trickster griot. I found a place on the web where I could tell the history of the city I lived in from the ground I walked on. I was always eye level, street level and next level. There was nothing that True York didn’t experience for the past 40 years that I didn’t reflect. I wasn’t in the boardrooms making political decisions but I was on the sidewalk seeing the ramifications of those power moves and how they washed over the people. Here I am now in the heart of Brooklyn where me and my dudes used to ride the Franklin Ave Shuttle smoking White Owl blunts and drinking 40’s and there is nary a Black face on this shuttle today. NYC has changed for the better(or the worse depending on what your stake is). The hardscrabble city that served as a backdrop for the ghetto rhythms that escaped from its lungs is now America’s top tourist destination aside from Orlando.

No wonder Rick Ross is so popular here in NY, this city has become North Miami. All around me I see architecture that would befit a strip on South Beach better than a block in Brooklyn. Condominiums with all glass facades are the new norm. The poverty that was a part of the city is being pushed out to the suburbs. You have to be incredibly rich now just to be poor in New York City. In any other city in the U.S. other than maybe D.C. people would feed you grapes and wave fans over you if you made 60K. In New York you are going to be shopping at the bodega on that salary. This is why our rap music has also fallen by the wayside. Rich kid rap generally sucks ass, except for Drake (natch). I could prA’li give you a thousand reasons why rap music from New York has been in a decline but that isn’t why I came here to Its The Calm. I came thru because N8 offered me a place to talk to some folks since I no longer have a website.

DallasPenn dot com owes a lot to the NahRight family for constantly linking to the page and allowing it to share readers with a site that already had a thriving community. I’m pretty sure that Rafi Kam from OhWord.com found my page from NR. Rafi is the dude who suggested we take a drop from DP and make it into a web video. That video would be the genesis of the Internets Celebrities – Ghetto Big Mac. I’ve come to see that the majority of the internets would rather watch a post than read one. Whoever has gotten to this point in this drop is a fuckin’ dinosaur, kill yourself for reading all of this shit. Video content is how the future of information will be disseminated. Some talking head ass motherfucker is gonna tell what you think you need to know. I feel like its all bullshit, but I want to be in the crest of this bullshit wave. If someone that was here and still cares isn’t telling the story of New York City then it will be someone who wasn’t here and doesn’t care a rat’s ass. So I’m still here and I’m not going anywhere (sadly, literally).

But if you made it all the way to this last paragraph then let me just tell you that people don’t know shit and everyone who I have tried to push my message to who has given me negative feedback is a fuckin’ loser. I became part of a larger community on the internets who thinks the same way as I do, has the same personal values as I do and believes in the same shit as I do. The so-called industry can burn in hell. The new industry is the community and this is who I will put my trust in. Don’t allow anyone the right or the currency to validate your shit. That is for you to do on your own so that you retain your power and your independence.

What were we talking about again?

Editor’s Note: Dallas mentions speaking to me during the wmdeez days, I doubt he knows I used to e-mail him from my gov’t name e-mail and he would treat me with the same exact respect that he does today. Thank you Dallas.

Last week…

Seldom does a clean, on sync, rip of this song from MTV Unplugged surface on Youtube.

Let’s enjoy this moment.

Story of Bear’s life.

Not Suitable for 56K.

Editor’s Note: NCB is the Editor-In-Chief of COMPLEX. If you had never heard of him before the interviews he did for the magazine, you probably didn’t know about his rap sheet either. When asked to write about his story, he opted to take the humble route and talk about the people who gave him his start in the game, instead of talking about how he, as quiet as kept, was one of the first people to co-sign 50 Cent in 1999 – all the way to co-writing 50’s autobiography 50×50 with the man himself in 2007. He decided to make sure everyone on his team got a shout out, instead of explaining his long history with Kanye, which I’ve heard from credible people is quite extensive – up until how his name ended up in Yeezy’s latest blog entry. But the fact that you’ll never hear any of this from him is truly a testament to the kind of person that he is. These are all stories I’m dying to hear, but it might have to wait for another guest blog.

All right, so I promised nation that I’d write something for this site a long-ass time ago. How could I say no? He’s a good dude and at this point I pretty much owe it to the universe to give back to the next generation of independent publishers. See, I’ve been blessed over the years with contributions to my indie endeavors by lots of people waaaaay more talented than me and it’s only right that I return the favor. So, after months of dicking around, I’ve finally hit the tipping point where my guilt has exceeded my busy-ness and my laziness (Plus I’m trapped on a flight with no TVs in the headrests, so what else am I gonna do). However, when pressed to write “my story”, I dunno, it just seems kinda self-aggrandizing (which I know is the whole point of the Internet, but hey, I’m still a fake-humble print guy at heart). So what I figure is, the most interesting thing I could do is leave some jewels on your dresser (pause), and try to impart some of the knowledge I’ve accrued along the way.

Before I go in, though, I should qualify the below statements. Who I am, what I’ve done, and what I’ve yet to do, should inform how much stock you put in my thoughts.

I grew up in Manhattan, read a lot of comics, and listened to a lot of rap. I also read a lot of magazines. Mostly about comics and rap. This was back in the ’90s. You know, the olden days—when suits were shiny, videos had million dollar budgets. Anyhow, halfway through my senior year of high school in ‘97, I got an internship at ego trip magazine. Basically my will to annoy exceeded their will to ignore. I called their office and left messages everyday for three weeks. Eventually they got tired of it and called me back. There Sacha Jenkins, Elliott Wilson, Gabriel Alvarez, Chairman Mao, and Brent Rollins taught me how to write, think, and listen (Ted Bawno taught me a lot, too, but I signed an NDA so I can’t speak on that). Those ego trip dudes are all lunatic geniuses in very different ways, and their balance of bile and brilliance made for some of the funniest, most thoughtful and probably under-appreciated magazines ever made. I’m forever grateful for the opportunity to be their sixth man off the bench.

That experience was the foundation for everything that followed. Starting with… Six months later when Sacha landed me a gig in the research department of VIBE, where he was the associate editor, working for another really smart dude, Dave Bry. Things went well, I fell into some writing opportunities for the book, and after a couple months managing editor Jesse Washington offered me an editorial position on the launch team of BLAZE, VIBE’s short-lived rap mag spin-off, for the next summer. Without getting into detail about all the hijinx and fuckery that went down at BLAZE (’cause there was a lot of it), lemme just say, That shit was nuts! Fun, though, too.

Shortly before the bosses pulled the plug on BLAZE in 2000 I got a call from Dante Ross (who’d apparently read my stuff), offering me a gig as an A&R at his label, Stimulated Records. Growing up a Native Tongue Stan, getting a look from the dude behind De La, Brand Nubian, LONS, Latifah, and K.M.D. was surreal to say the least. Psyched, I did that for a couple years. Exactly long enough to realize it wasn’t for me. I like making stuff more than I like managing people who make stuff (or at least managing people that make the same things I make). If you can’t write a rap or make a beat, it’s hard to say anything credible to someone who does (picture Diamond D walking over to my 19-year-old ass and asking what I think of the mix on “X-Man”…”Um, I like it?”). That said, thanks to Ross I did get to oversee the creation and mixes of a couple records and I can’t overstate how valuable that experience was in informing the rest of my writing. Also, I met Dart Parker. That guy’s the shit. Anyhow, out the blue I get a call from some guy at MTV looking for hip-hop writers, I think Mimi from BLAZE had referred him. So I went over there and wrote some shows. I hated it. Just hated it. Nice people and all, but for me, it sucked elephant sperm through a crazy straw.

Thankfully a about a year later I got opportunity to jump back into magazine making, via the ego trip massive. Sacha had been talking to the Mass Appeal guys, Pat & Adrian, about taking over the editorial vision from ALIFE, so they hit me during the summer of 2002 and asked me to be Editor-In-Chief there. When I got there I assembled a rag-tag group of friends and armed them up (think Chopper in jail). They became fucking great and I work with them to this day (starting with Mary, Justin, Jack and then later Brendan, Tosh, and D.Scott). Our first issue was a split cover with Nas & Large Professor on one, and 50 Cent’s gun collection on the other. People liked it. 13 months later Emil Wilbekin offered me the Senior Editor gig at VIBE. That was cool. Me and Ben and Tosh made some really funny pages together and I got the opportunity to write some kinda memorable stories.

That said, two years later I was kinda itching for a new challenge, and Donnie, who had been at VIBE during both of my tenures and then expatriated to Complex, hit me to gauge my interest in coming aboard Marc’s baby. Seemed like a great opportunity, plus he and my dude ‘Drew Simon were there, so I jumped ship and joined them. A year later I was promoted to the top spot, slowly filled out their already extremely talented roster with my folks, and we made some magazines and then a website. Apparently some people like those, too. *Phew!*

So that’s pretty much it.

POW!

A bunch of crazy funny shit–and some painful fuck ups, too–got nestled in the cracks between the above highlights, but those are stories for another day. Without further ado, here’s 20 pretty important things I learned, usually the hard way due to my own trespasses, along the road to the riches:

20) People love lists. They’re the simplest and most immediate way to organize information and there’s nothing people enjoy more than having their tastes confirmed, disputed, and broadened.

19) You should consider everything you create to be an argument to the world as to why the people they consider ‘your peers’ are not really your peers. Don’t just accept the comparison.

18) A really good Q&A can deliver as much analysis as a well-written narrative feature—but about 10 times more people will read it.

17) If you agree to interview a rapper, you’re also agreeing to accept the possibility that, due to the circumstances of said interview and the ensuing reaction it evokes, you may never want to listen that rapper’s music again. I’ve never covered Q-Tip. He may be a nice guy and it could go great, but I have certain sentimental attachments to the music of ATCQ that I’m not willing to forsake.

16) Apprenticeship has been the key to whatever level of success I’ve achieved.

15) You can’t stand on the shoulders of those who came before you if you tear them down on your way to the top. Be gracious.

14) Honor your commitments to the people that put you on, even if it postpones new opportunities momentarily. You wouldn’t even be entertaining the opportunity if it wasn’t for those that put you in that position in the first place.

13) You’re only privy to 40% of your boss’s job, so keep that in mind when you Monday morning quarterback his or her decisions. It’s never as easy as you think, and you’ll only ever know the breadth and depth of the pressure until you have to do it yourself.

12) Compensation follows success; which follows excelling at what you do; which follows doing what you enjoy; which follows doing what you have a natural talent for.

11) There’s always a vocal minority that thinks you suck. One of them is probably going to comment on this post. Somehow I’ll soldier on.

10) Invest time mentoring the next generation. If you do a good job, one day they may cut you a check. Or at the very least, in the shortterm, they’ll explain the Internet to you (Lookin’ at you @bfred and @jlapuma).

9) If you surround yourself with the smartest people you can find, people will think you’re a lot smarter than you are. Only insecure people think this works the other way.

8) Don’t hoard the credit, there’s always enough to go around.

7) I get a lot of compliments on certain stories I’ve written, and that’s cool, but honestly, if you can’t get a good interview out of 50 Cent or Kanye West it’s time to assess your career ambitions.

6) People who are friends with everyone say the same nice things to the people whose work you don’t respect.

5) The internet is far more permanent than print. And anyone with a writer’s ego should appreciate that.

4) If you’re gonna shit on someone’s rhyme, you should try, at least once, to sit down and write a 16. It’s hard. Don’t get me wrong, everyone is entitled to their opinion as a listener and consumer, but a little respect for the difficulty of the process may inform how you express your dissatisfaction.

3) Generally speaking, those who are the most critical of you are your biggest fans. Just ask my mom.

2) When I was 12 my dad told me that I’d enjoy life a lot more if I acquired a taste for inexpensive coffee, wine, whiskey, and women. I didn’t listen to him, but that doesn’t mean he was wrong.

1) When you’re on a packed flight, never change your seat at the gate. The dude in front of me has been growing yeast in socks. At least that’s what it smells like.

We’ll be in Boston for the weekend.

Some crazy shit happened today too, which left us slightly more inspired.

In the meantime, browse The Calm Part 2.

Meka kinda went in on yesterday’s show so I thought I’d post it up here. A nice Kanye set followed by some DJ Premier, which is quite serendipitous since we were reminiscing on wmdeez in the NR comments earlier today.

Listen: (2)Dope Radio

Also, since there’s not enough hours in the day to post every song I think about, I’ve resolved to only touch on shit that comes to me organically. Either what pops up on shuffle or things that I have to explain to Bear… which seems to be a lot since I’m working with a blank canvas over here. But it’s all good, everyone can benefit from what he can begin to learn about rap (and blogging.)

On the low, one of my favorite songs on The College Dropout is like 10 seconds long and is hidden behind a skit, so no one knows about it when you mention it.

She wants me to get a Good Ass Job, just like everybody

I would let this play out when I rocked the album on my Sony MiniDisc (remember those?) but I recently revisited it when Kanye started dabbling in auto-tune, again. Say word that’s John Legend singing on there.

I didn’t even know that Evidence co-produced Last Call. I’m a hot mess…

I didn’t know till I was drunk though.

I was just telling NR’s ex-resident Nas stan 911 that he’ll like this site a bit more now because there’ll be less Nasir hate this go round. I actually like listening to the little homie’s music now.