One afternoon in June, Chane Morrow, the rapper known as Epiphany, invited journalists up to a two-story suite at the Peabody Little Rock hotel.
Standing before the pleats of a theatrical red curtain, Epiphany, a mechanical engineer by training but, as head of the label Conduit Entertainment, a philosophical artist-entrepreneur by vocation, moved through a demonstration of a new product that he had, in fact, engineered.
That product was “I Am The Life,” a Web destination that would blend music files, video of performances, casual conversation and Web logs, all from Conduit-affiliated rappers and singers scattered around Little Rock and through the Arkansas Delta. In other words, the site, which formally debuted last month, would apply the familiarizing panoptic view to which modern entertainers expose themselves when they take their “brands” online.
A roll call of influences for I Am The Life (www. iamthelife. net ) turned up the usual models. MySpace, clearly, was one: The site’s template is a refined version of the social-networking site’s sloppy handwriting, but the baseline blacktop superimposed with thumbnail photographs, banner-size notices and streaming-file status bars, those little blue buttons that caterpillar along as a song or video plays, is the same. Epiphany also cited All HipHop. com, which aggregates rap-industry news and gossip in addition to offering music and video, and claims a page-view count of 15 million per month.
Then Epiphany credited inspirations that, before a more subjective audience, might have elicited groans. He acknowledged that in the years since The Source, once a leading old-media way of following the lives of hip-hop stars, filed for bankruptcy, reality television had stepped in to fill the magazine void. In going home with its artists and shining a light on their struggles, I Am The Life would, he said, also draw from shows like VH 1 ’s Flavor of Love, in which Flavor Flav, formerly of Public Enemy, auditioned potential girlfriends from a pool of women who pulled hair and spat on one another to get ahead, and E ! ’s Father Hood, which examined the parenting technique of Snoop Dogg.
“I’m not sure if that’s a good thing or a bad thing,” Epiphany admitted of the impact of that genre of television show.
But begrudgement might be futile: The New York Times recently reported that during the first full week in August, 38. 5 hours’ worth of VH 1 programming — nearly a quarter of its airtime for the period — was given over to airings and re-airings of reality shows featuring rappers and / or the rapper-adjacent. This estimable block of time was constructed from I Want to Work for Diddy, in which Sean “P. Diddy” Combs searches for a flunky; New York Goes to Hollywood, in which Tiffany Pollard, who already is a flunkee (from Flavor of Love ), attempts to break into acting; and Luke’s Parental Advisory, in which Luther Campbell, formerly of raunch-rap pioneers 2 LiveCrew, can be seen guiding his children, preparing for his wedding and casting dancers for his erotic Web site. “Now the viewer wants to see the artist behind the scenes, how they interact with their family on the regular,” Epiphany noted.
CONTENT IS KING To that end, I Am The Life will upload personal videos featuring its artists for a serialized storyline that promises less revelation than a reality show but more than a MySpace mood-indicating emoticon. But the stuff of I Am The Life’s reality — the site’s slogan is “For those who know we’re deeper than just music” — will stay far from debasing dating pageants or the comedy of outrageous personalities confronting domesticity.
In another key way, for those who can untangle the site’s output from the novelty of its digital-age packaging, the confessional element of the site represents not a step into uncharted waters for musicians but actually a step back — to a narrative impulse that predates not only Wi-Fi but television and even paper. “Content,” after all, can mean more than a digital manifest. It can also mean story.
The themes of the personal storyline aspect of the Web site, selected by the artists themselves and declared up front, stay true to the evidentiary burdens to which rappers tend to subject themselves. On the one hand there is the Sisyphean image of the artist constantly at toil — making a mix tape, drumming up interest in a show, laying foundations for a clothing line. (Two of the artists represented on I Am The Life, the Pine Bluff rapper Goines and the Little Rock R&B singer Sean West, are collaborating on a menswear collection called Poindexter. ) On the other is the need to show the spoils of having gotten over the hill.
In arriving at the dramatic premises for their role in the site’s reality TV-inspired narrative, most of the artists tended toward the more measurable, lower-stakes former, inviting fans to watch as they struggle to put out a long-gestating mixtape or make good on a national distribution deal.
But one, Adrian Tillman, better known as 607, has selected a focus predicated on his making a splashy gesture of his own success, but with a degree of intimacy that has nothing to do with picking a potential mate on camera. He has promised that his quest will depict him working toward a goal of buying his mother a house.
Reality show producers tend to push subjects’ emotional buttons with the subtlety of a game of Whack-a-Mole. A cynical view would be that 607 is acting subject and producer; he chose his storyline because it’s good material, better than following along while someone tries to hit a spreadsheet’s sales projections. (The rapper’s misadventures in real estate were a compelling nuance of his recent profile by CNN, part of its miniseries Black in America. A camera crew followed him as he mentored teens at an after-school program in the midst of being evicted from his apartment. )
“It ain’t never calculated,” 607 says of his pledge. “I never say things like I want to sell 30 million copies and I want to go to the Grammys and sit next to so-and-so. Everything I do is real goals.” The rapper determined the goal of setting his mother up in a house of her own back in 2006, he says. When Epiphany quizzed him on a pledge he’d like to showcase on I Am The Life, he didn’t have to contrive one. “In a family, having a headquarters is important, and we don’t have a headquarters,” he reasons. “My thing is, how can I be living in a place that looks better than my mama’s place ? To me, that don’t sound right. That’s just hustling backwards.” He had no qualms about publicizing such a personal odyssey, he says. “I don’t mind stuff like that at all. It ain’t household problems. Anything positive, we don’t mind putting out there. “ If anything,” he adds, “hopefully it’ll inspire people to do other stuff.” CLARITY AND TATER TOTS The phenomena of artists ’ personal Web disclosures speaks a language all its own. At I Am The Life, overarching storylines — 607 ’s self-imposed family obligations, the struggles of Stuttgart’s DK and Soulja T to rise above what are euphemistically referred to as “law situations” — are known as The Pledge. Obstacles to these — dramatic conflicts that might impede the way — are The Real.
Kanye West’s UniverseCity (www. kanyeuniversecity. com ), also something of a model for I Am The Life in its portraitof-the-artist-as-a-second-language approach, includes among its unfiltered rants and enthusiasms for Japanese animation and avant-garde furniture something called the Clarity Post. West uses these, he writes, “2 de-spell all false rumors... short & sweet !” The Pledges, Reals and Clarity Posts are actually the second generation of cyber-serialization lexicon. In version 1. 0, they were “Webisodes,” or Web episodes — you know, what John Edwards was filming for the purposes of online image-crafting back when he turned toward the loving lens of cinematographer Rielle Hunter and declared, “I’ve come to the personal conclusion that I actually want the country to see who I am, who I really am, but I don’t know what the result of that will be.” Well, he knows now. But not all who go online to humanize themselves, for better or worse, wind up laid so bare on the national stage. For one thing, lower profiles and lesser revelations mean fewer online eyeballs. Rap artists, especially independents, are accustomed to speaking to a niche audience, so I Am The Life, its creator maintains, isn’t trying to apply paparazzi levels of scrutiny to create a veneer of stardom where there isn’t one, yet.
Rather, “in layman’s terms, we want to entertain people who actually care,” he counters.
Online soul-baring before a niche-audience of fans can create strange bedfellows. More than even West, the artists of I Am The Life might do well to look to the Web-borne reality of another crew of Arkansas semicelebrities to arrive at the perfect exhibitionist formula. Their fans know them as the Duggars.
The site www. duggarfamily. com supplements Duggar family content available elsewhere, as if the Springdale clan were reality-show stars. In a way, they are. Discovery Health has featured them in almost as many documentary specials as Jim Bob and Michelle — Big Brother would call them heads of household — have children.
Unlike rappers, the Duggars don’t have anything to sell. (They are licensed real-estate agents. ) But Discovery Health does: The family’s personal Web site links to the cable channel’s page where a ballot to choose the name of the 18 th J-monogrammed Duggar child, due in January, is sponsored by Sun Chips and a nonsurgical face-lift procedure. (I Am The Life also sells banner advertising but as of yet hasn’t placed any. )
The gospel of cybersharing according to the Duggars follows the three C’s: Be cute, be confessional and, when warranted, be contentious. When supper is Tater Tot Casserole, three 2-pound bags of tater tots — 6 pounds of tots — go into the pan: That’s cute. When Michelle shares that lunch for everyone is prepared by 17-year-old Jill, dinner by 18-year-old Jana and that each child is responsible for cleaning an area of the home known as his “jurisdiction,” it has the ring of confession.
And the couple use their Web site to rebut a popular notion about their family planning. “We do not consider ourselves ‘ Professional Parents, ’” they write.
Kanye would call that a Clarity Post.
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