Leaving Denver this morning was a harrowing fucking experience. Twelve hours and a pound of pad thai later, I find myself in Flagstaff, AZ, and with hardly enough energy to post. Peep the roundup:

Both Miss Info and eskay quip on Prodigy of Mobb Deep's 30 more days of freedom. Though P hasn't done much for me lately, his recent piece in XXL was something else: dude spoke from a hospital bed while being treated for sickle cell, and it was real talk indeed. Now if only I could find a fucking link to that one.

I love AZ, and with last year's brilliant album, The Format, I'm counting the days until his new disc drops. In the meantime, Nah Right has a preview of what AZ is offering up.

From Crate Kings, links to an 8 part panel discussion on the future of the music industry. I don't have enough free time to dig into this right now, but feel free to waste your own workday on it.

I love race-passing. And class-passing. And really any kind of passing. Because I think that whatever actions or choices "passing" entails by definition help nullify the divisive, ugly classifications of ethnicity, class, gender, etc., that pre-date the passing in question.

Race passing makes me especially happy because, as a one-time anthropology minor, I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt that race does not exist outside of abstract conception. There is no biological basis for race and our continued use of it as a species is not only ignorant, prejudiced, detrimental, and corrosive, it's just inaccurate, just wrong. And since all I want is for everyone I know to be right all the time, I thought you should know.

Obviously this isn't just a hip hop thing. Take Ernst Lubitsch films for class, take Sascha Baron Cohen for culture, race, ethnicity, and sexuality; take pretty much any celebrity with a reality show for class; take Cate Blanchet as Bob Dylan for gender. But okay, in hip hop take DJ Drama, Juelz Santana, DJ Kahled, Fat Joe, the list goes on.

So I'll be doing Without Wednesday (in keeping with the alliterative segment theme) to broaden your horizons. Because people think hip hop is a race thing, a social thing, a class thing and the current state of hip hop (hello congress!) leads me to believe that people are forgetting that art is always all of those things and a whole lot more. Whether or not the art is avant guarde, underground, commercially successful, high brow, low brow, or critically hailed.

Here's how it's gonna go down: 1) I start with someone you've maybe never heard of and show you a picture and give you some great mp3s. Then I'll 2) follow up with a person or people who I think was actually greatly influenced by the first person even though everyone on the planet's heard of the second person and not the first (and give you some mp3s to mount my argument). 3,4, 5 and beyond) and finish with a person or people relevant to a discussion of contemporary hip hop that should be obvious enough by the time I'm done that I don't even have to give you mp3s (but I prolly will because we're all about cooperation here at Whatever).

Hopefully the W/oWs will feed off of each other as I do more and more of them. My hope is that they'll build a larger, more expansive, bush-like web of musical evolution through history by intersecting the narrower linear progressions we continue to seek out. I just hope you're prepared to get your shit educated and your mind blown. I'll give you till Wednesday to ready yourselves. Get into some clean underwear while you're at it.

As I sit here typing this entry I wonder if there shouldn't be some kind of actual launch party to go along with this launch post. In any case, Whatever's Good, our collaborative hip-hop blog, has, well, launched.

Though We The Author's have yet to formulate a true mission statement, our goals are far reaching: we will be bringing the heat with new music, videos, interviews, gossip and hip-hop et cetera, posted every day. We're working to build a community. We're striving for discussion. We live and breathe this stuff and want to share.

So here's to 2008 and Whatever's Good. Let's hope that this year turns out well.

(As an aside, I'll be in Oklahoma City for the holiday, at a decidedly non-hip-hop event: the Flaming Lips. ...If only Weezy was doing a show in the midwest, ah, dreams.)