So why does Plug One exist?
Good question. It’s one I’ve obsessed over for months, especially during the past few days. It haunts me as I write this, causing me to neglect my (slightly overdue) paid writing assignments.
It wasn’t meant to turn out this way. Plug One started back in September 2006. I intended it as a magazine-style website, with friends who would contribute features, reviews and the like. I wanted to celebrate progressive hip-hop — hence, the name Plug One (props to Posdnous). But the site was crippled by several early mistakes, including using Joomla as a CMS platform (even though I didn’t have any programming or design experience), relying too heavily on my friends for content (even though they weren’t being paid) and, yes, wasting too much time on “news” posts.
Ah, the news posts. It seems quaint now, but back in 2006 there was little news available online for indie-rap artists. It was during a time when “indie” was used as an epithet designating “backpack” rappers as less than. However, by early 2008, the blog scene rapidly changed. No longer dominated by super-opinionated types like Byron Crawford and OhWord.com obsessing over Lupe Fiasco’s Christ-like pose on Food & Liquor, the new kings were mega-post sites like NahRight.com and 2dopeboyz.com that chucked up news, MP3s, videos, and anything else they can get their hands on. They proved to be very good at it, sometimes generating up to 50 posts a day. And with fresh jolts of energy brought by the Cool Kids, Blu, Kid Cudi and Tanya Morgan, to name a few, fan fervor was finally returning to the indie-rap scene.
So you could say that Plug One missed its moment. The problem is, I never intended the site to be a commons area, a Drudge-like collection of search engine-baiting links. It was supposed to be a magazine, with the news posts serving as front-of-the-book style content. So why was I writing so many goddamn news posts?
It’s the reason why I woke up this morning and wanted to delete the whole damn thing. Rip it up and start over again.
