It says a lot that one of the top-rated users of RapSpace.tv is a 44-year-old married man from Hartford, Connecticut. With almost 300 fans regularly "bombing" his webcam-shot freestyles (which sometimes include the odd cameo appearance by his rapping daughter), emerging hip-hop MC Al Boog stands out amongst the registered 40,000 users of this popular underground hip-hop social network site as everything the typical mainstream hip-hop artist isn't: real, approachable and yes, just like one of us.
Representative of the new wave of niche-driven social utilities, the almost two-year-old RapSpace.tv is MySpace and YouTube, freshened up with a pair of shell toes. It's yet another by-product of the trademarked McLean Mashingaidze-Greaves cross-platform media mandate - to empower marginalized communities online and filter their previously undistributed quality content to the masses.
Simultaneously heralded a "web hero" and "media mogul" by The Village Voice, the new media entrepreneur has long been involved in harnessing user-generated content with video-based media.
Currently the CEO of The NIMBLE Company, Mashingaidze-Greaves has been involved in the field one way or the other for the past 15 years as executive producer of the innovative interactive CBC TV series ZeD and founder of the influential urban dot-com company, Virtual Melanin. It should be noted that former clientele for the latter include Spike Lee, Diddy and Time Warner.
His desire to create Black-focused online content came from being raised in a predominantly white small town in British Columbia.
"When you grow up in an environment like that, you have a longing and romanticized [version] of [black] identity," Mashingaidze-Greaves explains. "You see all these people that look like yourself, but are surrounded by people who don't look like you."
'Web connections', Summer 2008. (Business profile on McLean Greaves.)
