Race at the Interface: Rendering Blackness on WorldStarHipHop.com

WorldStarHipHop.com (WSHH) is an online video aggregating website that describes itself as “the premiere online hip hop destination” and a home for “urban media.” Yet, browsing through the site provides little clarity on what constitutes a hip-hop video or urban Internet space because of the disparate video content, the actual racial diversity of the performers, and the website’s generic design. As a result, WSHH’s taglines make a strange claim about the current state of the black musical tradition. Through close readings of the site, this article considers the architecture of this space of interracial exchange and identifies the interface as an example of Modernist architectural simplicity. I argue WSHH’s modular design is flexible enough to include non-black bodies, while remaining a black “urban” space. Thus, the site’s straightforward architecture paradoxically becomes the scaffolding of a much more complex, de-corporealized, and “shareable” blackness.