Yesterday Russell Simmons wrote a piece for the Huffington Post entitled “Social Media Is the New Hip-Hop.” A sampling: “Social media is the rock and roll of the sixties, the hip-hop of the 80’s, the radical new equalizer, giving parity to new voices and leveling the access to culture, politics, and social justice.” While he lays on the Facebook love a little thick, it’s definitely worth a read. Inspired by the concept, we ask our hilarious writer friend Christopher R. Weingarten (whose 33 1⁄3 book on Public Enemy, It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back
, is on shelves now), to reimagine some of hip-hop’s biggest names as social media sites. Click through to see what he came up with, and be sure to buy his book, dammit!
Twitter = Lil Wayne You know your friend that tweets like 900 times a day about how good their lunch is and how he hates what’s on TV and how hot the girls are where he works? Now imagine those are all songs.
Tumblr = OutKast Certainly looks the best, even if it’s pretty annoying these days.
Wikipedia = Boogie Down Productions Could probably be better at citing sources, but you’ll definitely learn a lot.
Facebook = Black Eyed Peas Like my mom and my younger cousins and everyone on the planet seems to be emotionally invested in this incredibly popular thing, but it’s actually an enormous waste of everyone’s time and energy.
Friendster = Ja Rule Still exists, I guess.
LinkedIn = Ace Hood Looks kind of important but not really anything worth paying attention to.
Flickr = Drake Spoiler: Liking this shit’s gonna be really embarrassing when you hit college.
YouTube = Insane Clown Posse Because it’s mostly just people getting hit in the balls and swearing.
MySpace = Snoop Dogg You’re not 16 anymore, but somehow you keep ending up there.
UrbanDictionary = E-40 I actually think E-40 invented half the words on UrbanDictionary.
Bebo = Nipsey Hussle I don’t really know what these things are.
Photoshop magic courtesy of Lee Frank.