Sup fam, as many of you already know, CTR was on hiatus for the last few days as we had a redirect to our new forums at www.5vemics.com. With 5 Mics we’re trying to bring indie heads a community on the scale of some larger hip-hop forums, but this time with a focus on the underdogs. This will allow heads to connect with each other and introduce you all to more music than we could ever imagine dropping on CTR alone. This, however; does not mean CTR is going to be closed now or anytime on the horizon, but we do plan on making some minor changes to CTR. Within the next week CheckTheRhime will be accessible via the urls www.checktherhime.com and www.5vemics.com where a new and improved version of CTR will be serving as the 5 mics homepage (under the name CheckTheRhime @ 5 Mics). We will still be wordpress based, all of our posts & comments will still be here. The shoutbox and other plugins will remain intact and the only major changes will be a few feeds from different sections of the blogs on the sidebar and under categorized tabs (one being a link to the 5 Mics forums). Aside from those minor changes CTR will still be run and updated by the same crew and content will still be delivered in the same style/manner, so please stick with us as we try to take this thing to the next level. Check back here for updates and peep 5 Mics for the love of hip-hop. We’re already nearing 400 users with over 3,000 posts and near 800 threads.

What’s In My Backpack Vol. 2: The Best of 2008 coming soon.

BTW… Did I mention we’ve surpassed 300k hits since we started in April? Not bad, eh?

Aight, aight so for most of us the holidays are almost officially over, but there’s still a bit of time left to celebrate with ‘09 on the horizon. I promised you all a gift or 2 (or 3). So, here’s 1 and 1/2 of the first 3 (now that I think about it the number might be 4) gifts we’re serving up for you here at CTR. First off, I’m sure a lot of you were wondering what exactly would we choose for the theme of the next installment of WIMBP since we had two themes tied at 73 votes, but instead of flipping a coin the decision was made to drop both. Vol 1.5 aka I Love The 90s is a relatively short work of a few overlooked 90s gems from some well and lesser known names. Juggaknots to Common (Sense), Natural Resource (Jean Grae’s old group) to Black Star, there’s something for every 90s head.

This next announcement (the .5 of your gift) is the most important IMO. I think a lot of cats who visit CTR may have found our links posted on hip-hop forums– hip-hop forums which generally have a single thread (rarely even a sub-forum) dedicated to UGHH (underground hip-hop) which is shame since with the many blogs floating around there’s obviously a demand for the music. Maybe I’m greatly mistaken, but there just doesn’t seem to be any forums out there specifically for sharing UGHH, which is why we’re bringing a new UGHH sharing community to you all seven days from now. In seven days we’ll make the link to the forums public, but until then we’re asking anybody interested in helping moderate any of our many sections or just posting material in general (we don’t care if it’s been previously upped or whatever) to contact us at checktherhimeblog@gmail.com. We’d also greatly appreciate help from other bloggers with promoting this site (we have ad space which we want to promote well put together ughh blogs on, at no cost of course). Anybody experienced in using Vbulletin is also welcome to drop us a line (we could use a bit of technical help).  It’s about time we got our own, isn’t it? Stay tuned for more “gifts” in the next week or so.

More info after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »