The African-American Art Shaping the 21st Century

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/03/19/arts/african-american-art-inspiration.html?action=click&module=Top%20Stories&pgtype=Homepage

Desus Nice: This rise of black social media is kind of overlooked. Before there was Black Twitter, message-board culture in 2000 was huge. That’s where we were just hanging.

When you go to a job, you have orientation and you talk to everyone and then you see the other black employee. And then y’all do the head nod, and figure out the little culture right there — that’s kind of what we were doing on the internet.

Okayplayer, the website, was one of the most influential — people are probably going to go back and look at that as one of the most influential websites on the internet for our culture.

Questlove made Okayplayer. We used to call him Poppa on it. There were so many rappers, so many poets. People were making graphics.

But Heben and Trace and a lot of people who are really popping right now, on Black Twitter, we all started there. We were babies! Just writing little posts.

And it’s not so much that website, but I think the experience of black people niching out their own little section on social media, that definitely shifted . I would even say it made black culture more singular; before everything was more regional. New Yorkers had their own slang. But now you can have a meme and every black person in the United States — or in the world — can understand it, because of social media.

It's kind of a weird piece. People were talking about all sorts of things, with widely varying levels of cultural significance. But I always like seeing Desus mention OKP. Wish I'd been more active in GD back when he was around. I was mostly an OkayActivist proto-Bernie-bro back then. But every time I exited the cave and came across one of his posts it was hilarious.

>It's kind of a weird piece. People were talking about all
>sorts of things, with widely varying levels of cultural
>significance. But I always like seeing Desus mention OKP. Wish
>I'd been more active in GD back when he was around. I was
>mostly an OkayActivist proto-Bernie-bro back then. But every
>time I exited the cave and came across one of his posts it was
>hilarious.
>

I enjoyed some of the other pieces. But some seemed to get a little off track.

I feel like only folks who were on OKP really understand the lineage from it to Black Twitter (or other black social media). We get mentioned a lot but I never really feel like anyone gets it or even really cares. But I'm like you...I like seeing this place get mentioned.

I think in a few more years, someone could write a pretty good book or do a documentary to trace how far we've all gone over time and the subtle impact that this place has had.

This was from a post were cats were like Serena was wrong for crip walking at center court Wimbledon after she won.

_____________________________________________________
miserable niggas yo
cant let nobody have nothing
"god save the queen pip pip cheerio tea time princess di" ass niggas (c)white desus

these new cats wasn't there.

..do we have any numbers of the activity the site had back then vs. the years to follow? i'd be curious too see, i know i lot of people cashed out when twitter came on the scene for whatever reason.

oh thought she was an okp, read it wrong.

Lol it was literally desus

n/m

that people don't even know about. Like, not necessarily Twitter, but just media and arts in general. You could list five Desus-style types and still miss ten RJCC and Ikire Jones types