For this week's Meeting the Neighbors we head into the newly developing world of corporate blogging. As print publications struggle to find a way to attract and retain readership, they have begun seeking bloggers to bring in those who may have forgotten what it feels like to hold a piece of paper with words scrawled across it in their hands. Some papers do it well, others, not so much. The vote is still out on the blogging project from Capital Newspapers, a.k.a. Post, but there are a handful of bloggers in the fledgling project who shine for their consistency, originality, and spirit. Hastings Cameron is one such Post blogger and today we knock on the door of Emcees Without Voices.

1. Where did the name of your blog originate from, and when did the blog start?

It's a variation on a few well-worn lines by Evidence of Dilated Peoples (off "Guaranteed"). First heard that track on a Beat Junkies compilation, during a period of extreme ignorance/enthusiasm. The disc was in a listening station at Reckless Records in Chicago, and I'm pretty sure I saw it and thought "oh, they mixed Soundbombing II--but that was J Rocc and Babu, who's Melo-D?"). I could say something about hip-hop's role as a voice for disenfranchised groups (especially in re: traditional/conventional media) but I don't have an Upski-complex, and the blog's essentially a selfish enterprise: I'm a white male writing about what interests me, that's it.

crappy audio clip here

First two paragraphs of this post speak more directly to the lyric itself: "it don't matter how dope you write or look/ MCs without a voice should write a book". Wayne Marshall emailed me this, though "i mean, MCs who might 'write a book' need to have a strong voice, too. diff voice, yeah, but i'm sayin'..."

2. What inspired you to start your blog?

Basically, someone asked me to. I'd previously launched a crappy typepad blog that went about two posts deep, but didn't have a clear idea of what I wanted to do with it--the degree to which I wanted to distinguish between "personal" and "professional", how to balance blogging with trying to drum up freelance assignments, etc. My old editor @ Coreweekly, who's a smart fellow, launched an mp3 blog that he updated regularly while applying to new gigs. I won't pretend to know his exact intent, but I'm sure it was a nice calling card to combine with the clips he'd racked up. I never had much of a plan, but when someone asked if I'd be interested in blogging on Post, I figured it would be nice to have a bit of a built-in audience while I was sorting out the approach I wanted to take--even if that original audience didn't care about, say, which blogger was about to take over the web operations of a major hip-hop magazine.

To partially undermine answer #1: Whether the reasons are lack of space, interest or incentive (due to perceived demographics of readership?), no local publication provides/provokes the breadth of hip-hop coverage and discussion that I'd like to see on a daily/weekly basis--and hopefully the blog will play a small role in filling that void.

3. What is the most rewarding facet of writing on the internet?

print's dead/drooling in a nursing home--grandkids struggling to teach it how to use the internet (Editor's Note: Hastings made this comment prior to the news about Rick's Cafe). See Daily Page excerpts/plugs in Isthmus, Onion articles that direct you online for the unabridged AV Club text and encourage you to text-message headlines to friends--and every other sane publisher of weeklies/dailies/monthlies. (this doesn't really address "rewarding" but, if i continued, I'd never get to the rest of the questions. got a manifesto-strength rant addressing both #2 and #3--dwelling more on geography--that i'll be theoretically be posting relatively soon)

4. Describe the space you do your writing in.

physically: whatever happens to be the closest internet connection hooked to a proper keyboard (should lay off phone-blogging for a while). tangential observation: a lot of those Sun terminals in the UW buildings have had their ip addresses banned from the madison.com forums. This doesn't affect posting, but has forestalled the occasional comment-response.

metaphysically: a pulpy Urban Honking with midwestern roots and values (though it's possible Uncle Jimbo infiltrated a pacific northwest hipster den during his covert ops career). More seriously... there's a bit of a closed-circuit blog aggregator component, but I regard the "Emcees" blog as a distinct, autonomous entity--I set up that other "dairybar" blog as an outlet to post stuff that people checking a "hip-hop blog's" RSS feed might be less interested in. That it's on "corporate"--the horror!--servers basically means I can't recklessly post mp3s. And I have a blogger/blogspot account if I decide to get serious about tastefully curated music piracy.

There's a MySpace account I use to contact rappers who enjoy direct/immediate communication with their audience (or who can't afford publicists)--occasionally I throw links up there and technorati pretends they're "blog posts" as well.

5. What do you do for kicks when you're not posting?

Struggle to get Second Life to work on my laptop. I had to explore Talib Kweli's "Brooklyn Mansion" from the library--and haven't even had a chance to customize my avatar--pretty much destroyed this weekend. Seriously, it's for a non-blog "article". That doesn't count as "for kicks"? Ok, so I was planning to go back and post some screenshots.

Umm, read, drink, walk around listening to various tracks on loop.

6. What is the first thing that comes to mind when you think of Madison?

leases

7. Is there one thing about the city you wish was different or something the city is missing you wish it had?

cheating, but... an additional few hundred thousand music fans heading to shows on a light rail system.

8. Where do you enjoy eating the most in Madison (or Dane County)?

If the Weary Traveler had free/stable wifi that would be the answer. At present, the most satisfying meals usually involve a curry from the corner store by the Wisco, arbitrarily-selected six packs from the Cork N' Bottle, toasted pita with nutella, random dvds, and home-wifi. The procurement loop also constitutes the bulk of the week's exercise.

9. If you could replace the word "blogs" in the cultural lexicon, what would you replace it with?

splogs

10. Finally, name one person you wish kept a blog and what you think they would title it (can be living or dead).

DJ Drama was a horrible blogger (went out on a high note http://xxlmag.com/online/?p=4544) but i'd like to see what he or his lawyer would do with the platform now, if there were some way to guarantee his posts would be inadmissable in court.

No idea re: the title. "I HEART the RIAA"?