It is at least a little funny that I was surprised a week had elapsed between posts, last time around. Now it has been nearly three weeks and I don’t remember what day the 13th even was and I yeah I could look at a calendar or just the day mentioned in the last post but you can’t tell me what to do. You’re not my real dad.

Archived Articles

Why Damon Dash Hates Mondays – Eric Konigsberg
New York Magazine, June 19, 2006

Around 2003 I stopped listening to rap music because I got really into being an indie rock kid. Around 2009 I started listening to rap music again because I was having enough trouble dealing with my own feelings that I definitely didn’t need to deal with Jeff Tweedy’s. I have spent the last decade trying to fill in the blanks but a lot of stuff that happened still doesn’t look like anything to me. So while I have long understood that Dame Dash and Jay Z broke up, I have never understood why.

Having read this piece, I still don’t, really. But I at least have a much better sense of who Dame was (is? I haven’t looked to see what’s up with him now) and how much impact he had. Also I understand Cam’s iconic “4 mil from Def Jam and I ain’t sell a record for em” line better! I feel bad that there isn’t more to say but like it’s a celebrity profile?

The bigger takeaway is just how much the way we talk about culture, especially black culture, has changed in the last decade. This is somehow the second 10+ year old New York Magazine feature I’ve read about the Roc-a-Fella multiverse. I am not sure NYMag took Damon Dash seriously, or if he was the butt of Konigsberg’s joke. But compared to Nancy Jo Sales 1999 “Hip Hop Go the Hamptons” it’s practically a hagiography. I don’t have the vocabulary or the authority to explain how disorienting and uncomfortable the whole thing feels, but I strongly encourage giving it a read to see for yourself?

How Yahoo Killed Flickr and Lost the Internet – Mat Honan
Gizmodo, May 15, 2012

I have very few opinions about Yahoo, and maybe even less about Flickr? It’s just a little memory relic from my early internet years, but I used photobucket to host all my dumb avatars and shit like that anyway. It is definitely fair to say Yahoo killed it, but part of me feels like maybe that was the best-case scenario for Flickr, anyway. Because this piece is also very much of its time. Honan goes on about the many ways Flickr had been replaced by Facebook and Instagram, and it is seen as an undeniable failure that Flickr hadn’t gotten out ahead of the whole social web thing. But if it had, if Flickr had become Facebook instead of Facebook, is there any reason for us to think that Yahoo would have been a less terrible steward of the totality of human experience?