This week TBTMTU we take a look at Oh Word a hip hop blog for purists. Claiming that the bloggosphere is saturated with music bloggers all writing about breaking music news, so they chose to focus on hip hop roots. Oh Word does this by reviewing and featuring music from the genre’s formative years.
Oh Word is broken into features and reviews, a main blog and a gallery that includes their hip hop comic strip, “Cartoon Capers.” While the main blog page of Oh Word focuses on random hip hop tid-bits, it also provides information on the latest goings on of “Internets Celebrities” - a project of Oh Word founders, Dallas Penn and Rafi Kam.
The features and reviews are indeed the best reading on the site, with a wide range of pieces, by a variety of authors, with disparate stylistic preferences. I found Oh Word’s system of archiving reviews by release year of the album of great use for those looking for a resource on hip hop history. My favorite feature by far, was “Line-by-Line” in which the author would analyze a song line for line, and sometimes even word for word.
Unfortunately the features and reviews - the best part of the website - have not been updated since 2006. It would also be nice to see some more recent hip hop releases included to provide a cross-section of hip hop past and present. While Oh Word boasts it is a blog for hip hop purists, it’s lacking content from any current hip hop artists implies that the authors are simply nostalgic for hip hop’s past instead of embracing it’s evolution (granted that’s kinda what purists do).
If you want a constant and daily dose of news, you definitely won’t find that on Oh Word. If, however, you are interested in reading reminiscent articles on the love of hip hop and reading reviews and deeply analytical features about some of hip hop’s greatest albums ever, Oh Word may be the blog for you.
Read more TBTMTU features from Listen In.
Cross-posted to Listen In on Newsvine.
© Kimberlee Morrison 2008. Some rights reserved.
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