The Blog Era: Episode 10
Thank You For Not Unsubscribing: Nardwuar still hasn't! (6/14/2023)
So we’ve come to the end of the road.
(Funny enough, we released our full video with Slaughterhouse, where we imagined them as a boy band, 14 years ago tomorrow.)
In August of 2020, with the world and our professional lives falling apart, we bought a 6 foot x 4 foot bulletin board from Staples and tried to organize as best we could the 100+ conversations we were recording back to back to back to back. Most of the phone calls were hours long. But somehow - after thousands of pages of transcription, through many long walks that started on the Upper West Side and went all over the city - we came out of this thing with a story that could feel enormous but also personal.
We are immensely proud of the story we’ve rolled out.
Funny thing: we had our launch party the night before the first episode was published. The absolute last thing I saw before I fell asleep was a new tweet that said, “This might be a long day for y'all 😭.” There were many ways that this could’ve gone very wrong, that our decisions wouldn’t have been received well — and I’m very glad they have been. That we put our foot (feet?) down when threatened with inauthentic ideas. That we stayed true to the story as we imagined it.
The Blog Era didn’t end on one day. More like Miami, slowly sinking even while beachfront property becomes more and more lucrative. Like, even after OnSmash and DaJaz1’s sites were seized by ICE in 2010, many places’ traffic only grew — sorta crazy — as people got more and more comfortable with the internet and joined the clicking masses. Blogs couldn’t keep up: exclusives once had to be sent to them, but now bloggers were forced to chase down whatever scraps they could find artists posting themselves on Twitter, Tumblr and Soundcloud. Newer stars didn’t need them and the ones they’d platformed in the olden days saw limited returns before abandoning them. Once gate keepers, now aggregate-keepers. They were Moses in the Red Sea, once the waters decided to stop parting.
And that’s why we thought the story of Illroots was necessary to tell. Started by Mike Waxx in 2008 while in high school and joined by Mike Carson a couple of years later, these two sub-20-year-olds living in Chicago never wanted to be just bloggers. They were younger, hipper, more adventurous and ready to evolve from what their teenage years had been. They were art students and working at the RSVP Gallery under Virgil; they dreamed of shooting music videos, throwing concerts, selling t-shirts, not sitting behind computers and coding. Here’s XV, holding up my all-time favorite merch item of theirs:
What Illroots is most known for - more than their work with Big Sean or Mac Miller or Casey Veggies or whoever else - is their long-running party at SXSW, The Illmore (2011 - 2016). Here’s footage of the first one, which was a low-key house party in Austin. There was a cake-cutting birthday for Bun B; TDE showed up, as did LE$, Wiz Khalifa and Andy Milonakis. This is the house where Kendrick grabbed a bottle of red wine and splashed the walls with it:
But by the next year, as Bun says in this episode, it was like Illroots had gone from 5’10 to 6’4 in one summer. This experience was way more in line with the 2012 movie Project X, a security deposit’s nightmare. This is the outside on night two, where the only billed artists were Prodigy, Slaughterhouse, Chiddy Bang, Chip Tha Ripper, Sir Michael Rocks and “special guests.”
“Special guests” included all of Taylor Gang (with Juicy J absolutely demolishing shit), MGK, ASAP Mob, Mac Miller, Chase N Cashe, Meek Mill, Travis Porter, Kendrick Lamar, Chance the Rapper, A-Trak, Diplo, Bun B, Berner, Chevy Woods, Smoke DZA and Big Sean:
Here’s Steve Aoki and Lil Jon, who I only just realized were also unlisted on the flyer:
And this is what we describe in the opening scene, when Allesha Coleman - who was hired to help out Claire and Sascha of ScoreMore - was thrown on a raft, scared out of her mind:
A party that could never be topped…until the following year, when Kendrick broke the floor.
By 2013, the idea that a chosen group could dictate the collective soundtrack - an understanding we’d had for our entire lives - had been rejected.
And that’s what I think is a nuanced point that needs to be made: it was not the years, platform or format that made The Blog Era what it was. It was the people. Our taste was curated and formed by the first group of totally new gatekeepers that also became our last. That’s why The Blog Era can’t be bottled, sold or repeated. When we moved on from that way of thinking, we removed that collective experience. We now click into different channels, with different timelines and different algorithms feeding us different information. We need to do better in searching for platforms that meet those needs, that restore the feeling. We need to connect.
Sorry that the series has to end. Our mom - who has been a loyal listener, and not just because her sons worked on it - called two times now, to say how upset she is that there wouldn’t be any more episodes. We know many of you feel the same way.
When we started work on this project, we thought it would take two months and it’d just be a special episode of our long-running-but-pandemic-interrupted podcast, A Waste of Time. But I’m glad we were able to put in the proper time and effort. It’s a lot of responsibility to try and represent an entire generation, to decide what the story is. I’m proud that we were able to include a lot of different voices and perspectives: big artists, along with a few names we could introduce to new listeners. Bloggers, big and small, many of whose voices had never been heard on record. Dot-connectors who made the world move, and some unheralded heroes who made the trains run on time. Those who worked in the establishment and those who tried to burn it all down. Street, backpack, hipster and aggressively different. Commenters, lawyers, video directors, writers and DJs. East, West, Midwest and from the sixth-biggest city in Mississippi. Young and — well, at this point, we’re all old. And some of the voices who were online way before anyone else.
When we started shopping it around, numerous talks broke down because they said we’d spoken to too many people — that no one could keep track of all the characters. And like, 150 names is just a drop in the bucket of who we could’ve talked to, of whose perspectives also mattered. We felt it was important to include as many people as possible: the whole point of this time period was that it was inclusive, that everyone felt they had a role.
While there was never a chance we’d be able to do justice to everyone’s story, I’m glad we were able to evoke that time period: the work that people put in, and the community that we were all a part of. The things that made it work, the things that could’ve been improved and the business that changed its possibilities, for good and bad.
I’m also glad that we kept it honest. There’s a lot of warm and fuzzy feelings that come up when we think about the past, but there’s a lot of ugliness, too — not exclusive to the Blog Era. How the anonymity of the internet breeds contempt of facts and kindness; how women were treated and made to feel small. How the system of capitalism absorbs independent creators and snuffs many of them out. We wanted to litigate our own nostalgia: was the Blog Era special, or was it only worth paying attention to because it was our heyday? Did Gen-Z and Gen Alpha really “have to be there?”
We want to thank everyone who helped us work on this, including:
Scott Vener, the co-founder of OTHERtone, who met us for breakfast on some friend shit, heard about everything we’d been working on and immediately saw an opportunity to work together. Thank you for having our back in all of this, and giving us the platform.
Pharrell Williams, the other co-founder of OTHERtone. Without him taking chances in fashion and music, the Blog Era itself would’ve been an extremely different time.
Moses Solooya, President of OTHERtone, and who has been in the trenches with us: clearing instrumentals, setting up a War Room when needed and - crucially - suggesting to us how the first episode should end.
Steve Carless, our manager, who always knows where to draw the line — someone we need in our corner, as over-thinking Jews.
Timmhotep Aku, our trusted story editor, who kicked the tires on all of our ideas, red-lined our detours and told us when we were going in the right direction. Thank you also for, on our first phone call, not being scared off when we said we were psychopaths — thank you for putting up with our crazy. And finally, thank god we didn’t end up doing anything the previous guy had suggested.
Brandon Callender, our tireless fact-checker, who spent more time on archive.org than anyone should ever have to.
Greg Mayo, our lifelong best friend and fourth brother, who really put his foot in this project. Fucking killed it. The music cues that people love…Greg took time out of working as a touring musician and full-time dad to twins to make Eric’s A&R visions come to be. His deeper-than-obsessive knowledge of movies and script structure also helped us craft the series to be as impactful as possible. There’s no title that would do Greg justice on this.
Everyone on social media who has interacted with us (or without!) and kept the conversation as broad as possible: talking about the streetwear labels, artists, concerts, sites, forums, parties, collectives, Karmaloop codes and everything else that never could’ve fit in the podcast but which - individually and cumulatively - all mattered.
Thank you for giving us your 10.5 hours. We’re going to go on vacation and we’ll see you afterwards.
Eric and Jeff from ItsTheReal
