Weâre 35 floors high above midtown Manhattan and Lee OâDenat occupies the seat across from me. His is a physically-commanding presenceâa bull of a manâand I begin to think everything I have read about him up until this point is true. The designer shades. The diamond-encrusted chain. The deceptively knowing smile that spreads across his round face from time to time. He knows something that you donât.
And here he is, the Hollis, Queens-raised kid turned internet entrepreneur who built a media empire off shock and awe, the man who understands that maybe, deep down, all people really want is to be entertained, and whether that pleasure comes by watching two kids fight or some girl shake her assâwell, thatâs your choice, not his. Because it is your choice. Right?
OâDenatâs speech is deliberate and gentle, and not at all what you might expect from a man his size. âI believed in it so much,â he says. âAnd weâve grown so organically based on the trueness of the site.â OâDenat is talking about WorldStarHipHop, the video site he created in 2005 as a means to provide for his family. Heâll later tell me of the time he pawned his sonâs video games so he could buy food at Wal-mart, struggled to pay rent, but kept at it because he knew he was on to something (he admits WSHH did not turn a profit until 2009). But all of that was almost 10 years ago, and he goes by Q now.
As it stands today, WorldStar has become a household name among a generation of kids raised on Facebook and Lilâ Wayne lyrics. The site, though, is not without controversy. Aside from featuring music videos, both regional and mainstream, it regularly posts videos depicting unimaginable violence (the killing of 16-year-old Chicago student Derrion Albert in 2009, for example) and bare-ass nudity. The easy argument: Itâs all just click bait, and isnât every website doing that these days? But to Q, itâs more than that. WorldStarâs mission, so he believes, is to provide coverage of communities that larger news organizations like CNN or MSNBC might ignore. It can be ugly at times, but so is reality.
Really, itâs all part of Qâs larger plan to provide the masses with the ârealnessâ that made hip-hop such an unstoppable force. âHip-hop is profanity, itâs violence, itâs all of the above. Watching NWA, 2Live Crew, and Eminem being themselves, being real, and getting criticizedâand Tupac with Delores Tuckerâthis is who we are,â he says of WorldStar. A slight grin gives way before he continues. âIf you donât like it, go fuck yourself.â
Gawker: Before WorldStar you were in the mixtape game, right?
Q: In 1999 I reached out to a longtime friend of mine, DJ Whoo Kid, who Iâve known for over 25 years. He had a little buzz circling in the streets with his mixtapes. At the same time he met 50 Cent, and I told them, âHey, I can help you guys. Iâm learning the internet, I need to make some money, so let me help you get these mixtapes out.â Back then, no one wanted to buy. It was hard, because I was living in Baltimore for a few years at the time, and a lot of stores didnât really know who Whoo Kid was. Long story short, I just kept hustling; I got a couple on consignment based on what they sold. Then I noticed, in the internet space, there werenât many mixtapes being sold online. So I spent eight months reading and studying and learned how to build a mixtape website. It officially launched on September 11, 2001. I got the email at around eight oâclock in the morning that the site was officially open, and then a couple hours later the planes hit. At the time, there were maybe two or three other sites doing it. It was slow in the beginning, because I made it 100 percent Whoo Kid mixtapes. It was NYCFatMixtapes.com; that was my first website. It just took off, and kept growing and growing.
Did you have a background in tech? Or did the hustler in you feel like it was just something you needed to pick up?
Itâs the mentality. I grew up fast. My brother left for the Marines when I was 13 and I had to learn on my own. No father in the house. My mom worked a lot so we really didnât spend much time together. I didnât know anything about âfamily dayâ or âfamily time.â It was a Haitian homeâyou learn early that youâre on your own, and that this is life. I learned that I had to work hard for myself, because no one gave me shit. Family, aunts and uncles, nobody gave me anything. I just thought that thatâs what life is about. I had to go out, work, hustle, find ways to make my money. I used to shovel snow all over Queens, in the hood. I found my own ways to make money and understood that I was in control of my own life. And thatâs what people need to realize, no one owes you anything.
So what eventually led you into video aggregation?
I was booking a lot of after parties for Whoo Kid and G-Unit, and I found myself on the road a lot. So the site blew up based on that, and me hustling on the web side to put a nice site together for the artist, because the label wasnât. Being on the road all the time, I wasnât home to ship the CDs and people kept complaining. I was doing everything by myself, and it was hard. I was like, I gotta find a way to make people download this shit, so I donât have to be home to ship it. Then 2005 came around, and I figured why not just create a site where people can download. So WorldStarHipHop was a download mixtape site in the beginning. But it also had other things: you could watch crazy stuff, read crazy stuff; it had sex tapes. I knew I wanted to be different. Most of these sites were boring, not really showing that realness of hip-hop. You know, hip-hop is profanity, itâs girls, itâs fights. Thatâs why the culture is loved worldwideâitâs real. And I wanted a site to be real like that.
Do you remember the very first video posted to WorldStar?
It was a lot of that DVD stuff. People didnât have ways to go into the hood and buy these DVDs. So we would buy it, chop up the best part of the interview with an artist, usually two to three minutes, and people started loving it. Here we are showing these real interviews, not the ones on BET or MTV, not the PG-13 interview; weâre showing them being real, back of the tour bus, with chicks, fights, cursingâit was all crazyiness. We decided to move forward in that direction. I relaunched to make it an official video website in 2008, because in 2007 we got hacked and the site was down for seven months. When we relaunched in January 08 we never looked back.
When did you realize WorldStar had truly made a name for itself?
I guess when news started wrenching us. I remember Bill OâReilly shouted us out twice. He said the government should pay us a visit. And Iâm like, âWhoa Iâm just the video guy, why arenât you going after YouTubeâs CEO. Thatâs where I got it from?â People kept talking about us, telling me we were on Fox News. The media outside of the internet space, when people talk about us, freaks me out. Now itâs part of the norm. I remember the first official music video premiere we had exclusive to the siteâAce Hoodâs âCash Flowâ featuring Rick Rossâthat DJ Khaled gave us. That was five, six years ago. We had buzz, but we werenât the top yet. I think AllHipHop.com did better numbers than us. SOHH.com, too. Khaled saw we were growing fast, and we got that first exclusive video, and that kinda made people realize we just didnât have crazy videos, but we premiered music videos too. Then more people started premiering videos with us, and that started the price charts, the banner sales. I was one of the first guys to come up with the price plan. Labels usually do net 60, net 90, and I was the first to be like, âI want my money now, or you get no banner space.â So I changed the game. I made labels pay the check first, then Iâd put the banner up. And I was doing everything myself, handling all the business and advertisers. Being organic, and the way we do businessâweâre pretty much flat rateâit made people feel like, âWhoa this site is growing and keeping it 100.â
WorldStar has become known as a shock site, and is famous for the fight videos it posts. Was that your intention going inâto sell spectacle?
I wanted the site to have a hip-hop influence. I wanted it to be like the games that I liked growing up, and like Grand Theft Autoâvideo games where it just shows everything, where it shows whatâs going on in the streets, where Iâm from. These kinds of videos were popping on YouTube, and they were entertaining. It was something we couldnât deny. People love to see that stuff. I didnât think the site would move so much in that one direction, but WorldStar shows the good, the bad, and the ugly. And if itâs going to show something thatâs ugly, weâre just providing the medium. Weâre just providing the news.
What do you mean by the good, the bad, and the ugly?
We show things that are inspirational, but that are bad, too. But thatâs just the way news is. CNN and Fox News do the same thing. This is part of our history, our culture. Culture as a whole. People. Not just black people, but whites, and everybodyâevery culture has its bad side. People want to watch an ugly side of someone then blame us for showing it, but what about the people actually doing it? Why click on it? Itâs like why watch porno on HBO at midnight? You have the choice to watch what you want. The remote control is in your hand. People will click it, watch it, then hate on me for watching the video. Then why did you watch the video? Itâs a choice we all have. You canât point fingers. Itâs your guilty pleasure. Point at yourself.
You once referred to WorldStar as the âCNN of the Ghetto.â Do you see the site giving voice to unheard communities?
Yeah, definitely. We do a lot of community work for people that gets unnoticed. Iâm not looking for a lot of exposure on that. If it comes, great. But I know, deep down, we give back to charities.
No, Iâm talking about the site specifically, the videos that you put up. Do you see them giving voice to communities and people that go unheard?
Yeah, they get heard. These communitiesâfor example, when the WIC in LA was shut down, we were the first to go talk to those people who were in line waiting. CNN didnât do that. FOX News; theyâre not out there. Itâs not gonna be a big headline. So we like to give voice to the communities that are hurting, and let people know even though some of these videos may look ugly to people, itâs still our voice, and they need help. But fighting is a part of life. You gotta get over it. People complain to me about the fighting, but people have been fighting before camera phones, before I was born, and this is the way life is. As long as they are not shooting each other, I have no problem with people wanting to squab it out. Thatâs how this country was built, on fighting. We fight all the time, every election day thereâs fights. People need to stop thinking that everyone is going to walk around and sing Kumbaya.
But donât your good intentions get lost in all the fight videos, sex clips, and twerking montages? Is the message lost in all that noise?
Yeah, I meanâthe siteâs mission is to just capture what we find real in the world, you know? As a leader of the internet entertainment world we understand that weâre going to be critiqued for everything that we post. You still see shock TV on cable. Ridiculousness, the MTV show, mocks people all the time with their videos, Tosh.0âbut no one ever talks about them.
So why do you get all the criticism?
Because Iâm black, and from the hood. [Laughs] Tosh does it and heâs great, Rob Dyrdek and all the white people on Ridiculousness hurting their balls, falling down, cracking their heads openâitâs funny. But someone fighting in the back of a Waffle House? Oh, Qâs the devil! I accept that. Thatâs just being a black man in America. If you make it doing something someone else can easily do, theyâre going to blame you. Black people look at me because Iâm black and think Iâm doing harm to black communities. But I look at this as a positive. Itâs all about how you look at things in life. I bring awareness to those that donât want to be on WorldStar in that way. Somebody might say, âI donât want to get drunk and then start a fight.â They can, but theyâre going to end up on the site looking foolish. People are now thinking two or three times before they want to fight someone, or act ratchet and crazy. People have camera phones, so whatever you doâif youâre acting silly, stupid, belligerentâtheyâre gonna record it and send it to us. People have to realize and look at it as a positive.
But if somebody non-black comes to the site they are being sold a very specific brand of blackness. Do you see WorldStar as fueling negative stereotypes within the black community?
Stereotypes? I donât think so. If a white person comes to the site and sees black people fighting or twerking, he likes the culture. We just like to have fun, man. Black people are admired by different cultures because weâre free. We like to be free. Some people live trapped. They donât want to get wild because they feel like theyâre being judged for this. With black people, weâre just ourselves. If we fight, we fight. And weâve always been shaking our asses. Since the slave ship weâve been shaking our asses. [Laughs] We love to do these things. And now, people are attached to it. Weâre a very influential race all over the world because we keep it 100. We have negative stereotypes, sureâwe like chicken, we like to drink, we go the the strip clubâbut every race has negative stereotypes. We just have to love ourselves, admire ourselves. Know that only God can judge you. Donât worry about the critics.
[Image by Sam Woolley]
