Brown Girl Excursions on Tumblr

dominickbrady:

I love the concept of this, of course. This is cool.  It has potential snares but I like the idea of it.

​Today, Slate posts “an all-access, totally non-exclusive interview with the would-be king of hip-hop,” Kanye West. The conceit is as follows: though the rapper stopped giving many interviews in the aftermath of his mother’s death, in 2007, he’s lately been on “a new-media-heavy promo offensive, in which his words go straight from his mouth to the public record.” The writer, SOTC pal Jonah Weiner, doesn’t “get to ask any questions,” but he does get “a constantly updating record of West’s thoughts, whereabouts, cravings, jokes, meals, flirtations, bon mots, and on and on.” This unprecedented arrangement is the result of the fact that Weiner and West have never met. Instead, to write his story, Weiner raided West’s Twitter account, his Ustream, YouTube, radio interviews, and other accounts of West’s life in the public domain, then used the tricks and rhythms he honed as a Blender reporter to approximate an old-fashioned magazine profile. And thus, as Maura Johnston put it earlier this morning, “the writearound enters the social-media age.”

tumblinerb:

This blog post is more interesting and thoughtful than its shock tactic headline would have you think.