The Hard Sell, or How To Help Keep HHID Sustainable

Yep, I'm bringing this back.

If you're reading these words, then you're likely familiar with what I've done with Hip Hop Isn't Dead over the past, oh, thirteen years now? Wait, shit, is that right? My ongoing project has taken thirteen years and counting? Damn it, I'm never going to finish at this rate. But I digress.

Said ongoing project, in which I take a look at an artist's discography, their complete body of work, as a way to measure trends, follow narrative threads, and generally determine at which point their output shifted, both for better and for worse (TL;DR - finding out if certain hip hop albums have stood the test of time, if the so-called "classics" are deserving of that, um, classification), has taken up a lot of real estate on the site, and as you can imagine, it consumes a lot of time to locate an album, listen to it, take copious notes about it, and then publish those thoughts in a public forum, so I've been on a quest for ways that the two readers can keep HHID sustainable.

Here are a bunch of ways you can assist me and help keep this thing of ours alive and kicking. And if this is somehow your very first visit to HHID, welcome! Take a look around, click through the links in the sidebar, and, should you feel so inclined to help, pop on back over here for my suggestions.

INVOLVING MONEY:

- The Hip Hop Is Done Patreon page. Quite honestly the number one way to show your support of both myself and my ongoing writing larks, the Patreon, which is one year old as of August 1, houses articles of varying lengths, among other surprises, that just wouldn't fit into the narrative over here, as I've doubled my efforts on trying to get this project closer to the finish line. What that means is this: reviews of newer artists/albums? More likely to end up over there, unless they're coming from someone already established on my list. (This is why I ran a review for Drake's Views, which is a part of the current plan, while the Conway and Alchemist collaboration LULU wound up on the Patreon.)

$3.00 per month (less than a decent cup of coffee) unlocks over eighty additional posts that will help add to the hip hop discourse, or, at the very least, could make you laugh while you're trying to get through your workday or your commute. My plan is to spin the paid content into directions that this feed simply won't allow, so join me on the ground floor, won't you? To entice you, here are some sample posts, in addition to some I've unlocked for the time being.

Dan the Automator Presents 2K7
Kool Keith - KEITH
The DJ Khaled Chronicles S01E13 (featuring Freeway and the Clipse)
Wu-Block - Hidden Gems (a bonus from the 12 Days of Wu-Mas 2019)
Foxy Brown - Ill Na Na (Drink Coaster Revisited) (locked, exclusive to subscribers) 
Al' Tariq - God Connections (locked, exclusive to subscribers)
Remixed For Your Pleasure: Gang Starr - "Bad Name" (locked, exclusive to subscribers)
Freddie Gibbs x The Alchemist - Alfredo (locked, exclusive to subscribers)

- The Amazon links. You've likely noticed that the write-ups here are still littered with links to purchase the various products on Amazon. That's still a thing that exists here, and even if you don't give a shit about, say, let's bring back Drake's Views, you can still use the links to pick up stuff you actually want. Simply click through to Amazon using the links on my page, or the search box in the sidebar, and then start looking for your treasure once you hit Amazon - that way a small (incredibly small, but every bit helps) percentage of your purchase helps maintain the sites and keeps me going. 

INVOLVING INTERACTION/ENGAGEMENT:

- The Twitter feed. I'm still at (at) hhid_Max, so follow me, convince your friends to follow me, retweet, feel free to ask me questions, talk shit about my critiques, and/or enjoy the occasional drunken ramblings, which, admittedly, may not happen quite as often as long as this pandemic is going on, but god damn it, they will be back.

- The Facebook page. While I'm not the biggest fan of Facebook (it's fucking evil), I still find myself on the HHID page ever since I restarted it last year. Follow me on Facebook and share the articles and mixes I post - a wider audience is always a good thing for a niche site like mine.

- The RandoMax Radio Mixcloud page. This one's a biggie, since my little podcast-slash-mix show side project is still fun for me to put together more than twenty episodes in. Follow the feed to receive notification of when new mixes are uploaded (this can happen before I ever mention them on this site), and please share the mixes and leave comments. Sharing music that I enjoy is legitimately one of my favorite things, and I'm willing to bet you're right there with me - if you didn't like music, you wouldn't be reading these words, right? So sign up now to be the first to enjoy wherever my whims take me.

- The RandoMax Radio Spotify page. This one's relatively new, so I'm still working out what to put there, but I have some fun ideas. Right now it houses a few older "episodes" of RandoMax Radio, but in a playlist form, along with both versions of that Wu-Tang Forever reconstruction that I ran with a few months ago. There's more of that coming soon, along with some other ideas for playlists that I plan on soliciting your input for, so why not give this Interweb Muppet a follow and jump on this bandwagon early?

Aside from this, the best possible way for you to show your support is to leave comments, ideas, shit-talk, any kind of engagement, really. I get that not everyone's going to want to write a comment every time, but it helps if I know that I'm headed in the right direction. Share the write-ups with like-minded friends and family, too, especially if they don't mind italics, incessant cursing, and multiple pop-cultural asides in their musical critique.

Thanks for reading!

-Max