The title “Blogger” sounds so primitive. I envision a Blogger as someone who stamps his keyboard with rocks in his hands and fetches food by inserting a twig in an ant hill and eating whatever surfaces. But, alas, I am a blogger, and we are the first breed of e-Thugs — separated from punishment by the electro-glow of a computer screen. The blogging e-Thug has the most responsibility in the online community and abuses his power most often. Indeed, most blogs are top-of-the-noodle blather — for goodness sake, I’ve written about cereal – but any professional writer who posts online subscribes to the same practices they use in print (i.e. notes, quotes, research, fact checking, editing, etc.) But when your office is your home, your cubical is your laptop and any half-wit can own a domain name, anonymity and comfort are at a premium conducive for blogs to become places of haphazard zings and burns.

Second of the e-Thugs is the commenter. This is the e-Bully with the most anonymity and the least responsibility who can say whatever the eff he wants to any Tom, Dick or Harry. I’ve personally been called an “insufferable faggot” and a “self-important pinhead” for “tactlessly debating something so mundane” as The Wire. But you know, fuck’m. I’m okay with criticism, especially because I am sort of a self-important pinhead. The cyber bully behind the Click.Type.Send comment box rarely thinks about how his comment affects a person, so I won’t hold it against him. But not everyone is as strong minded; lest we forget, a girl committed suicide over this buffoonery when it escalated out of control.

Now, we get into the third breed of e-Thug: the celebrity. This e-Irritant can fall under the umbrella of both the Blogger and the Commenter. The celebrity who makes himself known in the e-world puts on the air of manning up, when in reality he still cowers behind a sheath of protective computer screen armor to minimize liability and maximize self-promotion. Kanye swore off Entertainment Weekly over a not perfect review of his show, only to retract his statement. So let us turn now to our most recent installment of online hi-jinx and e-Thuggery, via the celebrity. We begin with an article printed in New York Magazine. The author, Will Leitch, interviewed Q-Tip at a New York Knicks game where Tip performed for an allegedly underwhelmed crowd…

A Tribe Called Quest’s influence is difficult to overstate. For those turned off by the supposed “gangsta” rap of the early and mid-nineties, the hip-hop pioneers were a soothing alternative: smart, funny, and socially conscious… Q-Tip’s flow on his new disc remains mellow, freewheeling, and vaguely inspirational. But it doesn’t feel relevant…

Q-Tip is friends with [Kanye] West—he credits him with turning rap around after a decade when everything “started to sound the same”… West, for his part, name-drops Tribe and Q-Tip at every opportunity. “It’s encouraging to see the respect that people like Kanye have for what we did before,” says Q-Tip… Still, it’s West who’s winning Grammys and endorsing soft drinks, while Q-Tip is trying to warm up a hostile Knicks crowd.

Some nice sentiments in there by Leitch, as well as some biting commentary. Nothing out of the ordinary for a reviewer. But this article found its way online and into the eyeballs of Mr. ATCQ himself. Tip responded — as is becoming an unfortunate trend in a lack of self-censorship among rappers — in the comments section of the above article…

damn mr. leitch!! why are u shitting on me and dick riding kanye. seems like its an assignment you didnt want to do so why do it? you should have done a DL4 assignment or better yet a ‘whatever happened to fallout shelters in a Mc Carthy era new york?’ piece!!! i’m good… you??? JADED!! yes this is qtip.

And then again one minute later…

oh i forgot… ASSHOLE.

What I fail to see is how…

A) Leitch is an asshole for this piece, especially an all-caps ASSHOLE
B) Leitch is considered a Kanye dick-rider for stating Ye’s proven salt
C) A battle-tested man like Q-Tip doesn’t have an ounce of self-restraint against a simple print piece read by a tiny fraction of his prospective demographic… until he drew attention to it by commenting.

Pic by STSU

This was a real breathe-and-count-to-10 scenario for Q-Tip, wherein he instead started clickity-clacking and ended up looking awfully childish for a man damn near 40. The fuck does he care? He knows he’s talented. He knows his impact. Why be upset? The answer is simple: Click. Type. Send. It’s just too easy.

As Gotty™ said in response to all this: “I mean did the web fuck things up? Did Miles take 3 mins to write letters to the editor every time they dissed one of his projects?” Yes, our access is now too immediate and instantly gratifying with the evolution of the innernuts — things we would only say to our friends around us before the online world existed now becomes the stuff of fodder for the world. And no, artists of yesteryear didn’t respond to every negative review with hostility, because, quite frankly, they were too busy creating art.

Sure, Leitch probably went in a little strong on Tip, but he’s a journalist who took time to report, write and edit what he said. He wasn’t falsifying information, he wasn’t e-Thuggin’. Tip, on the other hand, just became a willy nilly, commenting celebrity who lessened his credibility with online ether when he could’ve come out from behind his computer screen and made a human connection. So if you’re reading this, Q-Tip, I encourage you to put down the damn keyboard and instead stick to what you do best — create art like the greats are supposed to. Leave the e-Thuggin’ to the e-Thugs — you only validate them by becoming one of them.

“The Ballad of Q-Tip” [NYM] | Q-Tip Responds [NYM]