A year on the road with The Roots has left me with a multitude of ideas about reshaping the current state of the music industry, a slew of great stories, an amazing appreciation for hard work, a bucket full of foreign currency yet to be exchanged, an uncanny ability to over pack, and a severe loss of hearing. Working hand-in-hand with Goodtimegirl to road manage The Roots was an incredible experience, and now I’ve wound up here at Okayplayer, the ultimate playground of ideas and possibilities…

So, we’ve been kicking around ideas about how to improve Okayplayer.com. Basically, I want to reach out to you for ideas.

Historically okayplayer.com has been a meeting place for those who harbor a love of genuinely great hip-hop, left-of-center thinking, and those artists who defy the norms and challenge hip-hop in the most creative of ways. Sometimes, it’s been a place for those who hate genuinely great hip-hop too, but most importantly it’s a space that enables open dialogue and encourages discussion. As the Point gets Tipped (ummm…?) we hope to facilitate a forum for progressive minded individuals that spans broadly into the creative universe, extending it’s reach beyond hip-hop alone: A cultural hub of sorts. This is certainly not to say that hip-hop won’t remain the foundation, the very building block of okayplayer.com. However, we hope to include the many other interests and passions that we have watched surface on board conversations throughout the years (though I haven’t managed to sell them on okayporn quite yet…). We’re talking about music that won’t fit into your mama’s cabinet of neatly arranged plastic figurines from the 99 cent store, the ish that makes you wake up in cold sweats like “what the eff did I just hear?!?” without any named category to place it in. I’m speaking of a range of sounds from electro-rock-R-n-B to Negroclash (a term coined by Cool Magazine #1) to hip-pop to neo-whatever. I’m talking about that band you might’ve heard down on the Lower East Side blazing electric guitars over samples made by their thirteen year old cousin on his hacked-out Nintendo Gameboy. The possibilities are endless. And they stretch beyond music. We are thinking writing, fiction, art, photography, film. Okayplayer.com should be a location to discuss the extra-ordinariness and the vulgarities of the world (not just my potty mouth) through expression, and the particular way it touches the hip-hop community. A few weeks back, as I sat in the Decon offices listening to thousands of home-made hip-hop tapes (told you I keep it retro) I was awed (and sometimes horrified) at the creative spirit that had touched so many. We envision a creative outlet that pushes the boundaries… perhaps there are just as many fiction writers harboring fresh ideas out there as there are innovative beat-makers and rappers. Why limit ourselves?

So, what would you like to see? What could you imagine as a visual improvement to okayplayer.com? How should it look? What design functions could be improved? What could make it easier to navigate and more interesting to look at? In a minute- Gingerlynn