EDITOR’S NOTE: It’s been said that when it comes to this here rap game, rap blogs are the new streets, breaking music and news faster than a bootlegger getting an edge up at the local barbershop. But if that’s the case, then who’s running these here new streets? To find out, VIBE hit what the old heads used to call the digital superhighway and scooped up the 50 best rap blogs in the land. Then we ranked ’em according to power, influence, and straight up dopeness. To find out who’s running the game, pick up our The Real Rap Issue (June/July 2009) on newsstands May 19, or keep coming back to VIBE.com, where we’ll drop the top 50 in descending order, 10 by 10, until we unveil the Web’s No. 1 rap blog on Friday, May 8. We’ll also be interviewing five of the hottest bloggers in the game to find out what it takes to put a pot in play and get it bubbling to the top. As the headline says: THIS IS WHAT IT LINKS LIKE!
Maurice Garland, 28, may not have the biggest Southern rap blog on the Net, or the most well-known, but he just might have the most connected one-man operation operating in the ATL. Since launching Mauricegarland.com (formerlyTherezidue.com) in the summer of 2007, Garland has used the connections he’s collected while freelancing for such outlets as VIBE, Giant, Upscale, and Ozone, to push his way to the forefront of the Atlanta scene. Within the last year alone, Garland broke Big Boi’s “Royal Flush,” featuring Raekwon and a renewed Andre 3000, collaborated with rapper Killer Mike for a weekly freestyle series called “Sunday Morning Massacre,” and witnessed firsthand Big Boi and Killer Mike’s reconciliation, a meeting Garland caught on video and then shared with the world. Not a bad track record for a dude doing it for, and by, self.
My Name and Age: Maurice Garland, 28
My Site:Mauricegarland.com
My City: Atlanta, GA…Decatur to be exact
My First Post: July 3, 2007.
My Inspiration:Smokingsection.net, KonsoleKingz.com, Ozonemag.com, Cocaineblunts.com
My Soundtrack:
Grip Plyaz: He’s like an underground legend down here. I’ve been jamming to him.
Black Spade: He’s a dude from St. Louis. He got a little bit of burn about a month or so ago ’cause he had gotten into it with Charles Hamilton, like they were saying Hamilton had stole one of his beats or something like that.
Playboy Tre: I’m not just saying that because I know the guy.
Pill: He’s an affiliate of Killer Mike. He’s got a mixtape doing its thing out there.
Yelawolf: I know Asher Roth got that white hip hop guy thing on smash right now but Wolf is the truth. Wolf is dope.
My Start: Like around ’05, around the same time that MySpace was blowing up and they would set up your own blog for you if you had a page—that’s where I started. It was called “Looking Through A Scratched Lense.” People always said I had crazy stories to tell, so I just started telling some of the stories on the MySpace blog.
My Motivation: To present what was going on in my city the correct way. I noticed nobody’s really in the streets like that, because I would see so many things out here that nobody was covering. So I started off just taking pictures, introducing people, linking back to folks’ MySpace pages. That was the original goal, just to show another side to what was going on back in my city. The main goal right now is to build my own brand.
My Hustle: I haven’t made money off the blog itself, but when people see the photos that I take where I go to different concerts, I might get hired for a shoot.
My Moment: [When] Bun B told me he checked out Mauricegarland.com, which at the time was the blog I wasn’t even checking out my damn self. It started off being an online portfolio. I was just going to scan a whole bunch of articles I had written for magazines and stuff, and just post those up and I kind of got distracted from it. I was too tired or too busy to keep up with it, but I always kept it on the back burner.
My Dilemma: There were times when I first started blogging where I let a couple of days go past [without updating]. So dudes are like, “Dang, man, what’s up with the blog? You ain’t updated it today. You ain’t do this, you ain’t do that.” I’m talking about people coming up on me like in the club.
My Goal: I just want to be right. I don’t want to necessarily be the first to say something all the time. I want to get a story right, because I pretty much approach [my blog] the same way that I approach my writing in journalism. I just want to be as factual as possible.
My Craziest Comment: I don’t even know if I can count it as a comment. It was so crazy I didn’t really pay attention. I had a guy that would come and leave these long, long, long, comments about sinning, damnation and hell. He did that for like a couple of months. I thought dude was like staying around the corner from me.
My Advice: Find out what you want to name it and just buy the domain name. It’s like you can find one for like $10 a year. Just buy the domain name, even if you don’t know what you want to blog about yet.
Click on page two to see the full list of 50-41.
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