Find out who really runs the music industry

Twice a week, on Tuesday and Friday afternoons, Life in a Shanty Town offers humorous, insightful takes on hip-hop and various tangentially related topics. The Friday edition is free. Tuesday's Members Only™ edition costs $5 a month or $50 a year.

Having been around since April 2014, first at TinyLetter, then at Revue, before coming to Substack, it's one of the longest-running publications of its type, predating Substack. You could say that I invented Substack, in much the same way that black people, collectively, are sometimes credited with having invented Twitter.

I started blogging in October of 2001, before a lot of people knew what a blog was. Many have suggested that I pioneered some of the less fortunate behaviors sometimes associated with the online hip-hop community and also invented many of the slang terms.

From April of 2006 to March of 2011, when I was controversially fired, I was an online columnist for XXL, the rap magazine, which may or may not still be published.

Beginning in 2012, I've written nine books, on topics ranging from controversies in online music journalism to Kanye West's career to Dr. Dre's numerous alleged incidents of domestic violence.

I launched Life in a Shanty Town in 2014 to promote my book Kanye West Superstar. The title is both a rough backronym of the word list, as in email list, and a reference to something Peter Rosenberg once allegedly said about Haitian people during his beef with Combat Jack—the same beef in which he threatened to slap the late podcaster in front of his kids.