Connecting Songs with Tweets
Connecting Songs with Tweets
A look back at the most celebrated Micro-Chop threads.
My wife and I were on the verge of buying our first house one year ago. I was also in the process of finalizing a very long and ambitious article on Memphis rap tapes for Reverb. The article included a 114-track YouTube playlist I compiled as a companion for my piece.
When I wrapped the story during our last days of packing I was exhausted and mentally fried. I wanted a way to stay connected to my audience as we finalized packing, the move, and our first days at our new home. But I didn’t have the energy to write.
At the time I was heavy into exploring the now defunct Blogspot blog titled Sexy Buy Deadly, a site that cataloged rap albums by women. I decided to make a thread of rap songs by women, including many I discovered through the site. I still add to the thread from time to time and it currently sits at 139 tweets in length.
Though the response wasn’t overwhelming, people seemed to enjoy the thread and the engagement was strong. I decided to make more. I made a thread of Large Professor production on my 38th birthday and the positive feedback was significant. A short time later I started turning all of my threads into YouTube playlists.
These threads provided me with a different way to engage with my audience. I had turned my articles into threads and created reading lists as threads before, but I hadn’t focused exclusively on music threads that combined album cover art, song links, and a YouTube playlist - all with a specific focus on one artist, genre, producer, or theme.
One day I stumbled on The Fascinations 1967 b-side “I Can’t Stay Away From You” while I snooped around the Soulhawk YouTube channel. This is a place you need to visit if you haven’t yet. I was devastated by the beauty of the track and I knew I needed to share it with my audience. When I realized Curtis Mayfield produced the song I made a thread of his production. It quickly became the most popular Micro-Chop thread. The YouTube playlist is also closing in on 1,000 views.
This reigned as the best received thread for quite some time. Then in March I revisited a bunch of songs that were either by Gangsta Boo and La Chat or featured them as guest MCs. Much of the Three 6 Mafia and Three 6 affiliate catalog makes significant use of horror movie samples, so I decided to see if I could find enough of their songs with horror samples to make a thread. What followed is the most successful Micro-Chop thread to date.
There was a time where I tried to create a new Micro-Chop thread every day but that pace proved unsustainable. Though I won’t be able to make them at that pace, I plan of using threads as a way to share music with my audience for a long time to come.
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