As some might have noticed in a recent linkthink, “Ghetto Revivalist”® John Brown (aka, the King of da Burbz) — idiot-savvy hypeman extraordinaire — is promoting a new mixtape with a spoof commercial for a cereal product called “Ghetto Revive-Os” —

Despite being at the center of a number of truly cringe-worthy moments in the White Rapper Show (highlights for sure), I have to confess that I find dude’s grind pretty winning. Indeed, as I argued way back when, if the EgoTrip guys “were more cynical and if they wanted to talk about where hip-hop really is right now, they would have picked John Brown” to win the competition, or the game, to put it (more?) precisely. Indeed, not only does dude continue to call for a “Ghetto Revival” even after getting straight-up dissed by Lord Jamar for taking an ironic approach to “poverty and pain,” dude’s grind is such that he found my email (via this blog) and, despite my own criticisms, still sends me promo emails for something like the above.

At any rate, his timing is good since I recently obtained a pdf of the full conversation that we had about the White Rapper Show back in Boston last spring. It’s been published in the Journal for Popular Music Studies, and in addition to my own comments, it includes the words of such esteemed ethnomusicological colleagues as Joe Schloss, Kyra Gaunt, Cheryl Keyes, Timothy Mangin, and Miles White — none of whom, far as I can tell, agreed that John Brown deserved to win.