Many mornings, shaving with one hand and removing hearts and horseshoes from my Lucky Charms with the other, I look to my bathroom fan and wonder why I chose Blogspot as my blogging platform. Reality stings: I make poor decisions and my sensibilities are hopelessly stuck in 2008.
But when I hit the Next Blog>> button on the Blogspot navbar, a new world blooms. Suddenly those are no longer digital tumbleweeds rolling soundlessly through the void - they're like-minded flâneurs gathering at a hip Parisian salon! And while FrankieThaLuckyDog is Blogspot's most prolific content producer, Bigga Rankin is Don Blogspot for the sheer scope of his enterprises.
Bigga Rankin should be a familiar name to anyone who has listened to mixtapes in the past five years. Who among us can forget his hosting duties on Eldorado Red's White Power? But there's more to Rankin than mixtapes. He is also the proprietor of around 60 dummy promotional pages on Blogspot, each with its own logo and branding. There's Mixx Universe for hoodlums weened on '90s imagery and Upscale Media for the blue bloods; where Hunnid Proof mines generic trap aesthetics, Leggo My Mixtape cribs Pop art moves. But despite this careful demographic outreach, every page has the same content. This begs a question: Does Rankin have a team of minions doing his Blogspot bidding, or does he simply grasp the mystery of RSS in ways I never will?
Bigga Rankin won't be given the same leeway as Lil B, whose legion of MySpaces was seen as performance art rather than self-promotion. Upski, patron saint of angry know-it-all whiteboys on the Rap Internet, once said, "Politics and philanthropy are artforms, just like music or dance or writing...Too many artists are using the same old mediums, and so we leave the most powerful mediums or art to the assholes." In his own way, Don Blogspot adds business to the list.
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