Bomb Garden

by LUKE BAUMGARTEN & r & & r & Is This Legit? & r & & r & I hope you weren't dying for more acronym-laden music industry wonkery, cuz, uh, I just ran across dancejam.com. What's that, you ask? I reply: What isn't it?





It's not a lot of things, actually, so that was a bad retort. It's really only one thing, though a certain puff-panted rapper is treating it like his be-all and end-all.





Picture this: a rumor got around a few weeks ago that MC Hammer (aka just Hammer) had died. Various news agencies -- no doubt asking each other, "Wait, he's been alive all this time?" -- jump to cover the story. Every single one of them comes back with a variation on the same sound bite. Not only is Hammer still alive, he's resuscitating his career by becoming the "Chief Strategy Officer" of www.dancejam.com, a site that asks people to upload videos of themselves dancing. Like YouTube, then, and MySpace videos? Yeah, but Hammer really just wants it to be dancing. No vitriolic rants or animated retellings of the story of Sodom and Gomorrah. His reps call it "an online club culture that's entertaining, informational and a new format for networking." Sound a little flimsy? Yeah.





Hammer, though, as always, has a hook: He's totally going to rate your dancing for you.





What's the possibility this is a real thing? Decent, pollstar.com reports metal band Hell Yeah have signed some kind of promotion deal. What's the possibility it'll last? Rumors have 50 Cent "already getting involved," at least according to Wired. Fiddy is a terrible rapper, but if his Vitamin Water earnings are an indicator of future investment success, dude knows how to get in on the ground floor.





Hoax or not, it underscores how willing people are to get all giddy over anything calling itself a networking site. And it makes me think that everything good that's going to come out of Web 2.0 (even for people who just love their own dancing and want it to be evaluated) has already largely happened. So what's 3.0?