January 28th, 2011
Is Quora Ready for Pop Music?
I am not a word, I am not a line
I am not a girl that can ever be defined
-Nicki Minaj
I drank the Quora kool-aid early and now that I’ve been on the site for about a year I have decided to test its limits.
If the site is really meant to be a repository for “that which is not Googleable” it will need to satisfy more broad intellectual curiosity beyond just the down-to-the-last-detail history of the Facebook “Like” Button.
So I decided to do some tests with the ultimate in inexplicable phenomenons: pop music. I was the most loyal of loyal z100 listeners as a kid, but have since lost interest in the minutae of Top 40 hits. That said, the rise to hyper-popularity of certain pop stars in recent years, especially given the complete and utter fragmentation of distribution channels, is fascinating.
One such star is Nicki Minaj, the newest it-girl pop rapper. Minaj is a bit of a contradiction – a rapper who sports pink hair and lacks the “street” background that one assumes is a pre-requisite for a successful rap career. And yet, she is arguably the most successful female rapper in the past year (or 5 years?). So what is it about Minaj that makes her so successful?
Figured it was the perfect question for Quora. Very non-Googleable, and the type of question that is subjective and filled with subtleties. There’s also been some interesting controversy stemming from a comment that one producer made about Minaj, declaring she was just as talented as Lauryn Hill.
The answers on Quora were interesting and thoughtful, and not only that, but they came from people who I would classify as informed and influential in the world of pop music. The accusation that Quora is simply a “Silicon Valley Playground” is, I believe, not entirely true. But could it be that the tech world so insular that we have made the naive assumption that every industry is as narcissistic and analytical as ours?
That said, other verticals outside of tech still have a long way to go in terms of the depth and insight in answers. I was sort of hoping for someone to detail for me the entire history of women in rap music (including the very significant mid-1990s throw-down between Lil Kim and Foxy Brown) and the conditions that specifically led to Minaj’s ability to rise so quickly.
It’s an interesting time to be a female rapper. “Bieberism” and generally bubble-gum style pop has reached fever pitch, and it would seem that the next great wave of hip-hop might be grittier in response, and yet the opposite has happened.
While Minaj may not be the next Lauryn Hill the best part about her is that she doesn’t want to be. She’s received some criticism for not doing her own stuff, though perhaps that has allowed her to leverage the existing fan bases of giants like Kanye West and Eminem to cultivate her own.
I wonder if because this sort of information has no clear answer, no answer will ever be completely satisfying. Perhaps that will ultimately be the downfall of Quora (though I believe that not at all and relish the highly speculative musings that are posted on the site).
It’s surprising to me that people don’t “get” the Quora hype or don’t “buy” the excitement and value of the service. This, to me, makes no sense. Through what other medium can you access this type of expertise? Sure, I could go read a bunch of articles in pop mags and blogs, but they generally tend to avoid pontificating in favor of actual reporting.
And good for them – but I think there’s this whole other kind of information that has yet to be catalogued in any sort of organized fashion. If you have a site that does metric conversions, you’ve probably missed the boat on that, as that information easily translates to a digital medium and was the first type of information to go digital in the early days of the web. Quora is about subtlety and gray areas, and this phase of information categorization is just beginning.
Maybe Quora’s not ready for pop music quite yet, but when they do get there I’ll be waiting.