(ah HA! Like parallel universes colliding via a frozen donkey wheel, these 2 doppelgangers Bun B and Eskay meet on “the Island.”….and by “the Island” I mean, on the island of Manhattan, lol. This was taken at Drake’s SOBs show. Ok, for the record, No. I am not trying to lick Eskay’s sweatshirt. I’m just really awkward in photos and sometimes try to offset my awkwardness by being goofy. Also, my eyebrows look too thin here. Anyhoo…)

Robbie Ettelson and folks at UnKut did a fantastic 2-part Q&A with Nahright’s big tuna Eskay…I think that, along with the interesting backstory on Eskay’s life (Yonkers, his graff days, his early career, and his time at XXL.com), what’s most interesting to see Eskay’s personality in print. Because it helps explain why the Nahright aesthetic is what it is…a no-nonsense, telling-not-selling, music-first, pandering-last, catch-all for hip hop culture.

Make sure you read the Unkut feature part 1 and part 2, but here are some excerpts:

(On “crabs in the barrel” blog beefing….)

What can you do? When you reach a certain point or level of success I think that just comes with the territory. I think a lot of that shit is misguided though….I’m definitely not one of these bloggers who feels he needs to talk shit – miscellaneous shit – and call people out for no reason to get attention or get traffic. I’m not with that ’shock blogging’ shit. I may say something crazy that you may take as a ’shock blogging’ tactic, but it’s really not. I really mean it.

(On the focus of Nahright as a place for the critical music fan…)

There’s something to be said for just giving people music and letting them form their own opinion about it….

Continuted after the jump….

…I may download an mp3 and listen to it, but I don’t really have anything to say about it. Like, ‘OK, this is the new Blaq Poet joint produced by Premier’. OK, it’s a nice beat, but I may not have anything in-depth to write about it, so I may just throw the song up and let you listen to it and let you remark on it in the comments, or take it and upload on your website and write whatever you have to say about it. During that point where I was at XXL the site kinda turned more into an aggregation site than a traditional blog, but when I left XXL and I started doing it full-time, I kinda kept the aggregation part of it, because I still feel like there’s something to be said for that type of site. Plus I was one of the first sites doing that type of thing – now you have a thousand blogs that do the same thing – but just remember who was first.

(On his early experiences working at a publishing house, first in the mailroom, and then at the company’s IT department help desk…)

At that point, the extent of my computer knowledge was basically fucking around with my dad’s AOL account. Going into chat rooms, trying to talk to girls…this was ’97, so back then you wouldn’t even get an mp3. You’d get a Windows Media file or a Real Audio file back then…so I didn’t really know shit about computers, but when I got that job I just buckled down and really started studying on my own. The company paid for some classes and stuff, so I did that for the next seven years or so. I eventually rose from a lowly call center guy to pretty much supervisor of my department. If I had never gotten that job I probably wouldn’t be a blogger today, so it’s kinda ill how that shit played out.

(On the topic of doing Nah Right interviews….)

For the most part, I don’t think it’s really worth it for me to sit there and do interviews because I feel like that shit is so saturated right now. It’s just so wack. It’s like – artist has an album, artist is doing a press run, artist talks to 20 bloggers. All 20 bloggers ask him the same questions, artist gives the same answer. Then the interviews go up – one goes up today, one goes up tomorrow, one goes up the next day, and it’s all the same shit. It’s just really not worth it to me, there are very few artists that I feel that I could speak to.

I’m not trying to stick my flip-cam in your face and ask you questions – there’s too much of that shit as there is. I don’t need to add to that noise. That being said, I’m definitely gonna start to ‘blog’ more, like when I first started the site, and do a little bit more opinion pieces and commentary.

(On the infamous Nah Right comments community…)

Shout-out to the Nah Right comments – we have the best comment section on the internet, hands down. Whenever my comments section comes up, all I hear is that, ‘The comments are not about the post, it doesn’t make sense!’ But people gotta understand that it’s a community. A lot of those people you see in the comments have been commenting there since 2005 when I started the site, and we’ve been meeting on Nah Right for the last four years.