MC Hammer Blogs

[WesSyde]

anyone check out this album yet??

[Turntable]

I did. Its terrible to me. Simple as that. And I`m for shure no hater.

[bigted]

Well I only checked the 3 tracks on his myspace page: http://profile.myspace.com/index.cfm?fusea...iendid=27933337

You could only buy the album on ITunes right now, it'll be hitting the stores in a couple of months according to this article I found, it explains how Hammer's using the internet as his main source of promotion:

http://www.usatoday.com/tech/columnist/kev...mc-hammer_x.htm

'90s star MC Hammer taps Net's social networks to promote new album

Posted 7/4/2006 9:15 PM ET E-mail | Save | Print | Subscribe to stories like this

MC Hammer is making a go with online marketing.

Can't touch this!

There's really not much going on in technology news this week.

Which is why it's so good to hear from MC Hammer — he of the parachute pants, infamous bankruptcy and hilarious self-parody in the recent Nationwide Insurance commercial. Hammer just released a new album, Look3X, and he has some interesting ideas about how to market music in the Internet era.

Hammer shot me an e-mail a couple of weeks ago: "How are things? It's time to chat."

This is not the kind of e-mail I normally get. Maybe a ping comes in from a tech industry CEO once in a while, but my inbox isn't filled with notes from circa-1990 music stars. Nothing from Sinead O'Connor. Not a word from Billy Idol. The whole of Wilson Phillips completely ignores me.

The connection with Hammer, 44, isn't totally random. He grew up Stanley Kirk Burrell in Oakland and still lives there. He's made a lot of friends in nearby Silicon Valley — used to prowl Silicon Graphics when it was pioneering computer animation and would visit Apple Computer when it was developing QuickTime video. He's friends with Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff. On YouTube, you can find a video of Hammer visiting YouTube's headquarters.

A couple of years ago, John Buckman, an Oakland resident who started online music label Magnatune, introduced me to Hammer via e-mail. Hammer, though, informed me then that he wasn't ready to talk about his big plans.

But now he's pushing the new album. Hammer followed up by calling from his car. He was on the way, he said, to meetings with Google and Skype. "I want to build social networks within the concept of an album," he told me. "Nobody's ever done anything like this."

Keep in mind that this is a guy whose biggest hit, U Can't Touch This, included lyrics such as: "Every time you see me, that Hammer's just so hype/ I'm dope on the floor and I'm magic on the mike." Humility doesn't seem to be one of Hammer's chief characteristics.

Like a lot of artists, Hammer has put up a page on MySpace, and he's on social site Orkut. He's blogging on Blogspot. He's working on a website that should be up in a couple of weeks.

On Orkut — owned by Google — Hammer is going a step further than most artists. He's set up a section that he calls Club Look, where he encourages fans to make videos of themselves doing dances such as Krump'n and Going Dumb to songs from the album. He tells the fans to post the videos on sites such as Revver and YouTube, and then post the links in Club Look. This way, Hammer's site will aggregate links to amateur videos of his songs.

This is interesting, too, because the major labels recently launched a campaign to quash exactly that kind of thing. Teens have been making videos of themselves lip-synching or dancing to popular songs and uploading the videos to the Internet. The music industry, once again looking like a bully, says it has to protect its copyrights. Hammer is looking at the same practice and calling it marketing.

"If some kid is taking my song and dancing to it and uploading the video, he's saying that's part of his life," says Hammer, who is not signed to a record label and owns all the rights to his new songs. "How can that not be good?"

On another part of Hammer's Orkut site, he has set up Look University, tied to a handful of his new songs that are about social issues. This is where Skype and its Skypecasts, which can let a user host 100 other Skype users in a giant conference call, come in. Hammer plans to host Skypecasts about issues such as inner-city murder rates, using the songs as an entry point.

Hammer says he's trying to build an audience before physical CDs are ever released. The Look3X album was released on iTunes Tuesday. In 60 days, CDs will go into stores — "And then we can go in with real data, without wasting time and resources to know if we've got a record (that will sell)," Hammer says.

Hammer, in fact, might be a test case for fallen superstars. He's been about as fallen as you can get. Hammer was so big in the early '90s, there were MC Hammer lunchboxes, action figures and a Saturday morning cartoon called Hammerman. He had a mansion and a 20-member entourage. By the mid-1990s, gangsta rap tossed nice-guy Hammer aside, and his career went down like the Hindenburg. He eventually filed for personal bankruptcy. For the past decade, major record labels wouldn't go near him.

Loads of artists have similar boom-to-bust stories — Don McLean, Duran Duran, Sinead O'Connor — and can't get on mainstream radio or land a major record deal. But most still have fans scattered around the world. And many would gladly make and release new music.

If Hammer can use the Internet to come back from being a punch line in TV commercials and piece together a viable music career, every supposedly washed-up artist ought to pay attention. They'd actually be better off owning their own music so they could try new models the record companies would never consider.

Roger McGuinn, the legendary Byrds guitarist, has done a version of this with his Folk Den online project. Todd Rundgren has played with online models for years.

We'll see if Hammer leads a new wave, and if the Internet can be a path to cultural redemption.

E-mail kmaney@usatoday.com

[The Definition]

ive listened to some of the new album atm....and ive got to say some of the tracks are really deep, and im likin the album so far...ill get back to ya once ive listened to all of it