Vibe Magazine once had the front page splash “Mariah Carey hits the beach in heels”, and considered Prancehall to be the world’s 47th best rap blog. And yet it somehow closed down. Queue all manner of handwringing and gnashing of teeth regarding how “rap print journalism is dead”. Who cares? Let it go. The internet has changed all of this, has any piece of written rap criticism this past half-decade come close to the thrill of that first hour you spent following B:Real on Twitter, being helpfully informed that it was “ONLY 3 HOURS TO 420”? Does any printed press byline stir the soul as much as that CollarMe.com lookin’ picture Combat Jack used to use for his profile? No. We celebrate the death of the printed rap press here, and for one welcome our new online overlords. Welcome to the first in a series of pieces detailing the future of rap journalism, those cats holding it down on YouTube. These guys understand rap.

One of the key texts in the “New Journalism” school of writing was Gay Telese’s 1966 piece “Frank Sinatra Has A Cold” (CLICK HERE), a convention-defying pen portrait published in Esquire Magazine that, despite running to 15,000 words, was written without a single interview being conducted between Telese and the original King of New York. Many credit the article’s success to the fact that Telese wasn’t a celebrity profiler, or a music hack: he was a straight-up newsman, and his distance from the subject allowed him to take a new eye on it.

Most of the great journalists have written their finest works outside of their normal beat: Norman Mailer on boxing, Gore Vidal on 19th century warfare, Tanya Gold on dressing up as a fairy at Glastonbury (CLICK HERE). And it’s from this tradition that Ms Ashlee So Flyy comes from. Ashlee usually talks about topics such as “can i get an L-OH-L”, a satire of Myspace politics, or “stop tricking us tila” (CLICK HERE), a paean to that busted-ass Vietnamese broad with the MTV reality show. But “TECH N9NE?” is just a great piece of art. Never mind the fact she looks like Chris Crocker decided to bulk up at the gym, or never mind the fact that when she says “TECH N9NE” repeatedly she’s vocally reminiscent of the racist caricature scientist from Short Circuit, how can you not appreciate true emotional honesty when she says “All hail to the Nine”, sounding to all the world like a supporting character from Animaniacs? She then goes on to buy a cellphone. That’s pink.

I mean, we could talk on this for ages, but the comment box has it all:

SabuSexGod (55 minutes ago)
God, I would love to suck your dick.

Zeffa1234 (1 day ago)
u should be in one of those pornos where the guy(s) slaps the chick around lol

clickeduptexas (1 week ago)
im against hitting females
but i will punch you
right in the fucking mouth

And really, all great rap critics should aspire to that level of haterdom.