In Defense of D. Dot

I remember the first song that brought me into the depths of the hip-hop Internet, down the rabbit hole and into the forums — well, actually, it wasn’t a song, but a snippet of the still legendary Timbaland and Pharrell collaboration, “Big White Spaceship.” As a kid, I clung to the one minute and thirty seconds that existed online, and to this day, I still hear the ghosts of Clinton Sparks’s “Get familiar!” tag in the full version. And shiiieet, when that full version came out, it was the best day of my life.

So I’m beyond surprised at the reaction to D. Dot’s amateur recordings of the Watch the Throne listening session that he posted to his blog. Just because snippets are out of style, and CDQs emerge within hours of Funkmaster Flex’s bombed-out version, doesn’t mean that we should be proclaiming R.I.P. D. Dot.

Bloggers are the most hardcore fans, though they do everything to hide it, and with that Stanism comes this dissonance: a love for the music and a love for the person. There are special people who have the power to illusively combine these two loves into a bizarre form of adulation via something called hegemony. I’m not gonna get too deep into that concept, but my theory of D. Dot’s misfortune has everything to do with Kanye and Jay-Z’s enormous fortune. Ye and Jay have effectively led the blogosphere into fear, into an adulation that requires complete and total submission to the “rules of the house,” as Combat Jack put it. That means no Tweeting, no recording.

This is what is ironic; a critic’s job is to remove himself from those rules, to resist the planetary hypnosis and form an honest opinion of a piece of music.

If you are mad at D. Dot because he ‘disrespected’ Kanye and Jay-Z by ignoring their rules, get over it, and separate the human from his music. D. Dot clearly adores Watch the Throne, and if Kanye was offended by his sneakiness, that’s not your problem.
If you are mad at D. Dot because he ‘disrespected’ Kanye and Jay-Z by leaking their music before it was meant to come out, consider the absolute zero effect that this will have on sales; consider that the snippets were so shitty that they’re almost useless besides to create even more hype; consider that you are not by any means obligated to click on their HulkShare links.
If you are mad at D. Dot because he ‘disrespected’ his fellow bloggers by making them look bad, then you are insensitive to why someone would blog in the first place.
If you are mad at D. Dot because he wore a Source fitted, then fine.

I’m not necessarily defending D. Dot’s actions, I’m just trying to express how nuts it is that the Internet would blow up at a dude that was trying to serve his hip-hop constituents. So I guess I am defending D. Dot. Shit, I didn’t get an invite to the listening session, and I always love a good snippet. Only clicked one, though.