Chats From Underground

by Colin McGowan

Welcome to The Lost Internet, a month-long series in which the members of Flaming Hydra revisit internet marvels of the past. 

I grew up in a small town, in a development abutting a golf course. My dad watched CBS cop shows and my mom read Sue Grafton. The boys in the neighborhood, sons of nuke plant engineers and chain store franchisees, were targeting a kind of postwar, Life magazine–inflected success (AP calc classes, pilot licenses) or else ferally pissing away their privilege (drunk driving home from parties staged in sagging brown lakehouses). I was too dumb for the first thing and only dabbled in the latter, and anyway, neither appealed to me as a model for living. I held myself in the immense but vacant esteem of a teenager who had read exactly three difficult books. This was nothing like a worldview, a personality, or a plan. I just knew I wanted something other than what was right in front of me.

Out in the paved Vegas desert, across the street from UNLV’s campus, there used to be a record store called HipHopSite, the brick-and-mortar outpost of a mostly online retail operation. It sold and shipped rap CDs, tapes, and records nationwide, specializing in “underground hip-hop.“ That is to say, loquacious art schoolers testing the load-bearing capacity of squirrelly jazz loops, nouveau traditionalists billing themselves as descendants of Big Daddy Kane and A Tribe Called Quest, rappers from Tribe and Kane’s era lingering like benevolent uncles at a kegger, neckbearded white guys doing white lines off The Anarchist Cookbook. Most of this music doesn’t hold up, but at the time it struck me as infinitely more interesting than what was on MTV, and what other kids listened to.

HipHopSite had a blog with news and reviews, which I read every day. It also had an active forum community into which I disappeared for a few years, because nobody I knew in real life was aware that—[tightens backpack straps]—Murs from Living Legends and Slug from Atmosphere had collaborated on an album called Felt, or that Felt 2 had a July 2005 release date. The discourse on the HHS forums was unremarkable. A lot of hyperbole and backlash about new releases. A lot of tortured ranking of rappers by way of false metrics: lyricality: 4.5/5, flow: 4/5, mic presence: 4/5.