A couple of years ago, Robbie Ettelson considered the idea of starting a site covering hip-hop groups that hadn’t gotten the exposure they deserved, often because they were around before there was much media coverage of rap music outside of a handful of magazines. His primary motivation was to put the many years of his wasted youth – spent learning useless rap trivia – to some kind of practical use. After starting to design something in Dreamweaver, he pretty much lost interest until he discovered Blogger, which was an easy way publish articles without having to mess with much code. He soon discovered that blogs, and “hip-hop” blogs in particular, are often self-indulgent garbage created by deluded white hipsters, or as Homer would say: “angry loners and the unemployable”.

Unkut.com – A Tribute To Ignorance [Remix] is the combination of two blogs. The original Tribute To Ignorance was started in February 2004, but didn’t really get going until August of that same year. Steady Bootleggin’ fired-up at the start of January 2005, until it merged with the Tribute at the start of June, when Robbie finally got some real hosting and ditched Blogger like an ’80s coke habit. WordPress has been under the hood ever since. Keir Johnson was added as a regular contributor to Unkut.com in April, and has managed to track down and interview some elusive underground artists in his travels.

Mr. Ettelson also heads a side-project called A Salute To Weed Carriers, which has been brought back by popular demand with a new squad, as a tribute to the hard-working men and women who carry bags of ‘dro for their more successful peers. Robbie was also a contributor to Byron Crawford‘s excellent Ban Kanye From The Grammys project, which provided some entertaining hate-mail.

A note about audio:

If you’re wondering why the MP3s on here are sometimes at “encoded at different bit rates” (i.e. sometimes don’t sound that great), it’s simple. All the Steady Bootleggin’ posts are at 192 kps (near-CD quality), since you can’t buy a lot of that shit anymore, while songs featured in reviews are 64 kps (since it’s just to preview the track). Also, unlike most audio blogs, instead of deleting the song after a couple of months, all the old posts are replaced with 32 kps versions of the songs (which is just a bit better than Real Audio), so that if you just found the site you can still hear what I’m talking about.