Logging in to tomorrow in 'Webisode' form

By The Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

One afternoon in June, Chane Morrow, the rapper known as Epiphany, invited journalists up to a two-story suite at the Peabody Little Rock hotel, as Kyle Brazzel reports in Thursday's Style section.

Standing before the pleats of a theatrical red curtain, Epiphany, a mechanical engineer by training but, as head of the label Conduit Entertainment, a philosophical artist-entrepreneur by vocation, moved through a demonstration of a new product that he had, in fact, engineered.

That product was "I Am The Life," a Web destination that would blend music files, video of performances, casual conversation and Web logs.

A roll call of influences for I Am The Life (www.iamthelife.net) turned up the usual models. MySpace, clearly, was one: The site's template is a refined version of the social-networking site's sloppy handwriting, but the baseline blacktop superimposed with thumbnail photographs, banner-size notices and streaming-file status bars, those little blue buttons that caterpillar along as a song or video plays, is the same.

Epiphany also cited AllHipHop.com, which aggregates rap-industry news and gossip in addition to offering music and video, and claims a page-view count of 15 million per month.

The New York Times recently reported that during the first full week in August, 38.5 hours' worth of VH1 programming - nearly a quarter of its airtime for the period - was given over to airings and re-airings of reality shows featuring rappers and/or the rapper-adjacent.

Read tomorrow's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.

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