The banner that ran across the top of jamglue.com/contests/hopsin, recovered from the still-live static.jamglue.com bucket.
The Hopsin “Pans in the Kitchen” Remix Contest
In September 2009 Jamglue and Ruthless Records opened up “Pans in the Kitchen” by Hopsin. It was a small contest by Jamglue's standards: three stems, a $47.98 grand prize, 235 entries. It is also the only one of these pages where the artist bio was not a press release. Hopsin wrote his own, in the first person, and Jamglue ran it under the heading “Hopsin In His Own Words.”
Entries ran from about 10:00 p.m. Pacific on September 10, 2009 to 11:59 p.m. Pacific on October 25; voting closed November 6. Hopsin picked the grand prize winner himself, and the five runners-up came off the vote count.
No audio from this contest survives. The stems and the entries sat behind a Jamglue sign-in, so no crawler ever reached the files. What follows is the page itself: the words, the rules, the names, and the art.
About the Contest
“Jamglue is excited to bring you a remix contest featuring ‘Pans in the Kitchen’ by Hopsin.” Four steps followed, quoted as they read on September 24, 2009:
Enter the contest by creating your own version of the official contest mix. The easiest way to do this is to click the “Start Mixing Now!” button and then “SAVE A COPY” in the Mixer.
Remix the song by adding new sounds, rearranging the clips, etc. using the Jamglue Mixer. You can even add your own voice using the Jamglue Recorder in the Mixer. Be creative, and don't forget to publish your mix when you're done so that people can vote for it!
Promote your mix: embed it in your MySpace and email a link to all of your friends. When someone marks your mix as a Favorite, that counts as a vote, so break out your address book and encourage your friends to vote for yours!
Win great prizes!
The Materials
“Here's what you have to work with.” Three stems and the contest mix, the leanest kit of any Jamglue contest on this site. Each still has an archived page; none still has audio.
Licensing. As on the other Jamglue-drafted contests, section 5 of the rules put the stems under the
Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 2.5 license, with all remaining rights reserved by the artist, and required the attribution line “Remix using elements from Hopsin” without implying endorsement.
The Prizes
“The Grand Prize winning remix will be chosen by Hopsin himself. The winner gets their remix featured on Hopsin's MySpace, an opportunity to produce another track for Hopsin, and a T-shirt and mixtape.”
“Five Popular Vote winners will be chosen by the Jamglue community. Each winner gets an autographed Hopsin mixtape and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”
The rules name the mixtape as Haywire and value the grand prize at $47.98 and each runner-up prize at $64.98. The runners-up were therefore worth more, on paper, than the grand prize; the thing that made the grand prize worth winning, a chance to produce a track for Hopsin, was priced at nothing.
The Deadlines
| Sep 10, 2009 | The entry period opens at about 10:00 p.m. Pacific. |
| Sep 24, 2009 | The only archived capture of the live page: 76 entries created so far. |
| Oct 25, 2009 | Entry deadline, 11:59 p.m. Pacific. |
| Nov 6, 2009 | Voting closes. |
| By Mar 2010 | The page has been rewritten with the winners. The last capture, April 3, 2010, reads 235 entries created. |
The Wayback Machine caught this page live exactly once, two weeks into a six-week entry period. Everything between that day and the results is missing.
Winners
“The results are in, and our winners have been chosen!” Every name below is taken verbatim from the
April 3, 2010 capture of the contest page, the last one taken before Jamglue shut down. Titles are taken from the full title text carried in the capture’s markup.
Grand Prize Winner
N-Jin - Pans in the Kitchen Remix by marknesium
“This was Hopsin's favorite! The winner marknesium gets their remix featured on Hopsin's MySpace, an opportunity to produce another track for Hopsin, and a T-shirt and mixtape.”
Popular Vote
“These were the mixes with the most votes by Jamglue users. Each winner gets an autographed Hopsin mixtape and a Jamglue prize pack with a T-shirt and stickers.”
What survives: six usernames, six titles, and a mix page for two of the six. No audio. Creativ, first on this list, had also taken a popular vote prize on the Mams Taylor contest, whose voting closed a few weeks before this one's, and JoseJFB also appears on the one mid-contest leaderboard that survives, from Mams Taylor: the same handful of people were entering and winning across contests.
Hopsin In His Own Words
Where every other contest page carried a label bio, this one carried two paragraphs from the artist. They are reproduced here exactly as the page had them, spelling included:
“I didn't really start getting into hip hop (fully) until year 2001. That's when I started listening to Dr. Dre, Eminem, Crooked I, Outkast and so on. I was in special ed classes though junior high school and high school. I was never the popular kid at all. I always strived to be coo but never was. I was always known as that wierd black kid who skateboarded. Being funny was my only way to make people notice me. I went through all of my school years without ever having solid friends I could hang around with.”
“I always had a fear that I wasn't thug enough if I acted like myself when I was rapping. I didn't have no style, no image or personality on the mic. So I started studying rappers who made it and started to notice why they made it EXACTLY. That's when I started building HOPSIN. That's when it came to me, I didn't have to be a thug for people to like my music, I could just be myself. I made sure I had the lyrical skill of every MC. I made sure my music was still appealing to large crowds, and I made sure that people would never forget me if they saw me (the contacts). Once I had all those things down I got signed.”
The page linked out to myspace.com/hopsin and nowhere else.
The Official Rules
Headed “JAMGLUE AND RUTHLESS RECORDS,” these are Jamglue's own template rather than a label's: eleven short numbered sections instead of the seven long ones on the Sony contests. Section 1 names the two sponsors, Jamglue Inc. at 1919 Biltmore St. NW in Washington, DC and Ruthless Records in Woodland Hills, California. Section 10 splits the judging: “Hopsin will listen to the entries and personally choose one (1) Grand Prize winner. The Five (5) Runners Up will be the five (5) Remixes with the most votes.” The
September 24, 2009 capture has them in full.
The Skin
Each contest got its own stylesheet. The Hopsin skin took the whole page to black, #000, and centered this backdrop behind the 760px content column.
hopsin_bg.jpg, the page backdrop.
Sources
The one capture of the live page: the description, the deadlines, the three stems, the prizes, “Hopsin In His Own Words” and the full Official Rules.
The same URL after judging, with the grand prize winner and the five popular vote winners.
The last capture of this URL before the site went dark, and the source for the final count of 235 entries created.
static.jamglue.com
The contest banner, the page backdrop and the skin stylesheet, mirrored from Jamglue's original S3 bucket, which is still serving.
