MC Hammer Survives TechCrunch40, DanceJam Soon?

I'd heard that there was quite a bit of negative response to the initial news that MC Hammer would join the TechCrunch40 Conference that happened on Monday and Tuesday in San Francisco so I was surprised to see that the initial post with the announcement has numerous supporters in the comments who actually seem full of clues.

If you haven't spent much time on tech blogs you probably haven't seen just how clueless, negative and even racist the response can be when hip hop and tech cross paths.  There's something about a room dominated by white boys that just seems to lead in that direction.

In Hammer's case the criticisms seemed to be more that he was known for U Can't Touch This long ago and went bankrupt so how could he have any relevance to a tech conference though some did address what little they knew of his actual background since Hammer Time.

Happily I guess the opportunity to make Hammer Pants jokes and assume that because tech people haven't heard about Hammer that he couldn't be doing anything relevant to understanding markets of which they are not a part relieved the necessity of more typically racist-tinged responses.

At the conference itself MC Hammer did just fine given that posts about the conference present a rush of brief presentations and panel one-liners.  There may have been more in-depth response going on at the event but the TechCrunch posts give one the sense that pedigrees were really important since there seemed to be little context in which to judge off-the-cuff claims other than reputation within the Silicon Valley oriented tech crowd.

As it turns out, MC Hammer has a new online project called DanceJam and Michael Arrington, the big boss behind the TechCrunch empire, is an investor.  Hammer announced back in August that DanceJam will launch September 18th [still to come at this point] but apparently the news that Arrington was an investor is new and got folks all riled up yesterday.

Don Dodge describes the demo Hammer, "one of the original rap artists" [ha ha, good times!], gave him:
DanceJam can best be described as YouTube mashed up with American Idol. Users can contribute their own dance videos to the site for others to see and vote on. The DanceJam people set up "Dance Offs" where they put two dance videos up against each other and have the user community vote for a winner. After several rounds of voting they declare a champion.

Actually this sounds like a great idea given the incredible conjunction of dance tracks with readymade dances, kids making their own dance videos and official YouTube dance contests.  This dance-centered activity is in a growth phase with huge potential.

I'm sure the tech community will sort out whether or not Michael Arrington did not properly disclose his relationship with MC Hammer and DanceJam and then will remind us constantly in the comments section of TechCrunch for years to come.

MC Hammer will just keep doing his thing.

Official Site:
Dance Jam

Related ProHipHop Coverage:
MC Hammer Blogs With Heart