ABU Is 10 Years Old!

Today - 20th April 2018 - marks ten years since the Ageing B-Boys Unite! blog came into existence. Nope, I can't believe it either (I actually thought is was 11 years...).

Why did I start it?
Well, at the time there were a fair few hip-hop blogs around and after a few months of reading them I thought it was time to do one from a UK perspective. Also I had let my creative writing passion continue its' long-term hiatus ever since the days of Juice Fanzine in the 90s.
After seeing the banner written on an early Fat Lace Magazine which stated, "the magazine for ageing b-boys..." I reckoned I could use that. Well, c'mon, hip-hop is built on biting!

The links to every music file I ever uploaded are most likely all dead - mostly because I used the once-great file-sharing platform, Rapidshare which sadly became defunct in 2012. Many of the blogs I used to visit also relied on Rapidshare, too, which meant that all their content went the same way.

What's the future?
Who knows? Anyone who's been a regular over the years will know how quiet ABU! has been of late. Last year I even thought it was all over but, like the great Pete Tong says, we continue. We're not quite done and we limp awkwardly around here in 2018 not quite knowing what we're doing like a senile uncle. If it's okay with you we'll just put our collective feet up on this stool and sit quietly in the corner of the room sipping tea and dunking biscuits until the nurse comes over to administer the medication.
Will we be celebrating in another 10 years? I don't really want to have to think about that as I'll be heading towards a rather large milestone in my life.
But chances are, no.

I made some useful acquaintances over the years through the blog and I'd like to take a minute, just sit right there and I'll tell you that a guy named Supreme was a direct influence because of his blog. This now sounds completely lame because I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the blog he used to run. It did disappear a few years back in my defence.
I remember he once posted links to grab a tonne of (digital) Battle Breaks on one blog post years back which I thought was odd as the concept of digital DJing was still quite a new thing and I didn't rally understand how it worked. How times have changed?

Waxer and Disco Scratch came along pretty early on and we became a worthwhile alliance. This was early social networking.

Another blogger, Warlord seemed to be the epitome of that (awful) 'Tubthumping' song in that every time his blog got busted he came back again and refused to stay down. Although he has not been active for a while now.

And lastly, Ramses has been a long-time follower and I can remember knocking around with him in the golden days of the oldschoolhiphop.com forum. I would say 'R.I.P.' but the board is still going although not like the heady heights of the old days.

The reason for all of life's back luck and anger can be laid at the feet of one thing: Facebook.
Many people jumped ship and now use social media for their everyday news and music links - me included, so I can't complain. I just wish that Blogger  had incorporated Facebook into it's design a bit more then it may have given it a longer shelf life.

Anyhoo, this is me, Repo, wearing a party hat, blowing a plastic horn and about to cut a slice of birthday cake. Want some?