Online Fame | A 'blog written by Chris Rhee

Songs where rappers count are stupid. That is all. Carry on…

A project I was helping with just went live: the QN5 Blog. It’s written by the artists of QN5 Music, an independent hip-hop record label (of which I’m a big fan, so it was great to be able to hook them up with a site and design). Tell your good ol’ pals all about it!

On My Mean Girl (one of my other blogs), I wrote an extensive post listing seven songs I’d been listening to recently. Here are the seven songs that made my list:

• Substantial – “The Starving Artist”
• Tonedeff, Mecca, Session, PackFM – “Fear”
• Barenaked Ladies – “Box Set”
• PackFM – “Free-Esta”
• Dido – “Do You Have A Little Time”
• Nelly Furtado – “Maneater”
• Tonedeff – “Pervert”

The post on my other blog is more detailed, containing lyric excerpts and my own notes about each of the songs. Go check it out!

For the CunninLynguists fans that aren’t checking their official site or forums every now and then: Their next CD, A Piece Of Strange is now up for pre-order. This is their limited advance release — their worldwide release will be January 24th, 2006.

The album features guest appearances by Cee-Lo Green, Immortal Technique and Tonedeff and is completely produced by (one of the best producers in the game) Kno. Definitely not something you’ll want to miss. The track, “Caved In” from the CD is available for download on their website, so go take a listen if you haven’t heard of them, yet.

If none of that makes you want to visit their official site, then go check it to see the design I did.

The Bad Seed, a rapper from Brooklyn, NY went head to head with MySpace.com for the first time yesterday. Someone told him it was a more user friendly community site than some others that he was already a part of and a good way to feature some of his music, so he decided to give it a shot:

Bad Seed: yo the shit wont let me sign up….it keeps saying that nobody under 16 can join…im screaming at my pc like…”im fucking 30 years old homie…!!!”

Whenever you sign up, you automatically get the founder of MySpace (Tom) added to your Friends list. I was wondering why this guy was showing up on so many people’s friends list.

mma productions: how come seed didn’t automatically get Tom as a friend?
Bad Seed: i did…i deleted his ass…

Turns out that Bad Seed didn’t sign up for a MySpace Music account, which is what he needs, if he wants to be able to post his tracks up on his MySpace page. Unfortunately, you have to navigate to the Music section and then click “Artist Signup” (so that big, orange sign-up button on the homepage is a bit misleading if you’re trying to get a Music account).

It would probably be better to have one sign up form for the site with an option to choose whether it’s a regular account or a music account. I don’t really understand this because other than the fact that you can post a music player on your site, the overall look and function of the website is exactly the same as a regular account.

I’ll try not to go into too much of a design discussion — apparently, the website is purposely “ghetto simplistic”.

Anyway, Bad Seed is forced to sign up again with a different username in the Music section. Now Tom is back on his new account’s Friends list.

Baby_girl: TOM IS YOUR ONLY FRIEND RIGHT NOW!!!! AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
Bad Seed: i just deaded that nigga again…

I definitely need to work in some “real life quotes” to my company website re-design… Reason #1303 for why you should step your website’s usability game up:

Bad Seed: can someone tell me how i can send a friend request….my space aint that user friendly…boy wait til i see tom man…..

Now with all that said… Check out The Bad Seed’s MySpace page and check out his tracks. Cause The Bad Seed is in the building — SU-PER!