Hip-hop star dies before launching MTV series
LEE O’DENAT, who went by the name “Q,” started WorldStarHipHop as a place to sell mix tapes. It evolved into an aggregating powerhouse with its reputation tied to the shocking videos of fights that it shared with a huge audience of young viewers.
Just days before WorldStarHipHop was set to launch a new MTV series, TMZ reported that O’Denat had died at 43. WorldStarHipHop later released a statement confirming the news.
“Q was a brilliant businessman who championed urban culture, ultimately creating the largest hiphop website in the world,” the statement reads. “But more than that, he was a devoted father and one of the nicest, most generous persons to ever grace this planet.”
According to TMZ, he died overnight on Monday in his sleep in San Diego.
WorldStarHipHop became a site that elevated real-world moments of O’Denat’s vision of hip-hop culture, good and bad and in between. “Hip-Hop is for the sex, the drugs, the violence, the beefs, the culture,” O’Denat told the New York Times in 2015. “That’s the competitiveness of hip-hop, so I felt like the site needed to be R-rated.”
Years before Facebook started coaxing its users to create live broadcasts of their personal lives, people were chanting “World Star!” as they filmed a fight between friends. In 2012, WorldStarHipHop became a media story about kids’ exposure to violence online. O’Denat defended his work then by arguing that a site like his simply reflected a slice of the real world.
“Everyone has a cellphone camera, videotaping what’s going on. Everyone’s a news reporter going out and saying what’s happening in the world,” O’Denat said to ABC News. “Times have changed from 20 to 30 years ago. Most people don’t understand this is what’s going on outside.”
For better or worse, aspects of what makes WorldStarHipHop work have filtered into the wider world of viral video content, from social platforms like YouTube and Instagram to more traditional media. The trending topics on Tuesday for World-Star were a mix of things you’d only find there, and videos that had attracted more mainstream coverage: “YouTuber ‘Lena the Plug’ Says She’ll Drop a Sex Tape if She Hits One Million Subscribers!”; “Soulja Boy & Some Crips Say They’re Gonna Jump Chris Brown!” “White Nationalist ‘Richard Spencer’ Get Punched In The Face During DC Protest!”
In 2015, O’Denat said that his ultimate ambition was to expand the slice of the recognition and growth that WorldStarHipHop got for the content it had long peddled, the very same sorts of videos that greatly benefited platforms like Facebook and YouTube. WorldStarHipHop said that it would continue to operate “in its various endeavors” going forward. – Washington Post