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Artist Homepages: Good, Bad, and Ugly: Obsessed Fans or Cool Res

© Steve Juon

One of today's trendiest options for hip-hop fans wishing to flex their web design muscle is to create unofficial homepages for their favorite artists. A lot of times, the official record label has neglected, ignored, or dismissed the artist's need for a homepage; or the label itself may not even have a WWW presence. For a way to have some fun and sharpen ya skillz, this is a definite thumbs up -- and in some cases the unofficial pages turn out to be better than the actual record label resource. Sometimes though, the line can be crossed as to whether a web site is a cool resource or a Selena-stalker in the making.

A good example of a web site worth looking into is the De La Soul homepage done by Hurrican at "http://www.clarkson.edu/~currieat/dela/". As Tommy Boy has no official homepage on the WWW, this is an excellent resource for the millions of De La fans worldwide. It includes a very complete discography, a lyrics archive, De La Soul news and links. This is a site that is laid out simply and effectively, without unnecessary bells and whistles.

A slightly lesser example of a site to check out is the Hieroglyphics homepage at "http://hieroglyphics.com". Don't be fooled by the name, this is a webcom account run by one man, a guy who likes to be known as StinkE. It's basically good, except that bios could be filed into one section and the front page itself is lengthy and takes a while to download. This could all be taken with a pinch of salt, were it not for the fact that the operator himself has a swollen ego and considers himself to BE a member of the Hieroglyphics. Do yourself a favor and avoid the bulletin board, because they beat down any Hiero criticism (constructive or otherwise) with a passion. Going from semi-decent to the could-use-work category is the Eric B. and Rakim homepage at "http://www.prism.gatech.edu/~gt5763a/rak...". I don't want to talk bad about the page too much, since he was nice enough to link to my personal Rakim lyrics (though the link needs to be updated) but still it's fairly lacking. All the information available is crammed onto one page, and not fairly cohesively organized. Album track listings could have each been put on a seperate page, under a discography category. There's only one photo of the group (scanned from an album cover) and no updates on their respective solo status now in the industry. This one basically gets a thumbs down, other than being the only Rakim page I could find -- which is still better than nothing.

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