If you’re in a tense situation and someone yells “World Star,” you should probably seek cover. Those two words have become a sort of warning shot for a generation steeped in violent media, and with new amateur videos of fistfights going up every day, the site that spurred the phrase shows no signs of slowing down.
WorldStarHipHop is a website that has become infamous for featuring surreptitiously-filmed violent altercations, but last week they wound up in hot water for hosting a video that Newark mayor Cory Booker called a “human tragedy.”
The grainy footage, taken in August, shows a young man being stripped naked by three men on a New Jersey street and whipped with a belt. One of the attackers has claimed the cause of the beating is a $20 debt owed by the boy’s father before ordering him to say, “dog-eat-dog world.”
With the incident quickly going viral on WorldStar and other social media platforms, the three men suspected in the beating were soon arrested and charged with aggravated assault, conspiracy, possession of a weapon, and robbery after allegedly stealing $20 from the victim.
“We do not tolerate this viciousness. We do not tolerate this kind of evil in our community,” Booker said in a press conference. He called the incident a “blow to the conscious of our community,” pointing to a “subculture of violence we have to address.”
Dr. David Wall Rice, professor of psychology at Morehouse College believes the bombardment of violent content into traditional media spaces is definitely cause for alarm.
“What we’re really doing is integrating grotesque violence into the everyday norm,” says Rice. “When it comes to young people, developing and learning how to be in the world, these are the cues they’re picking up.”
While Rice admits that instruction from home is the foremost influence, he also argues that the immediacy and constant presence of digital media make violent content that much more powerful.
“These things are in your face, in your ears constantly without sensible examples to moderate them,” he says. “You may think it’s harmless entertainment but there is nothing healthy about seeing a young kid stripped down and hit with a belt. Ultimately, it has the capacity to desensitize those who watch it.”
And watch it they do. According to web information company Alexa, WorldStar is ranked 187th in the United States in terms of traffic. To put that into context: More people visit WorldStarHipHop.com than CBS.com (#200) and New York Daily News (#232.) Daily traffic to the site is estimated at more than 2 million hits.
The young, and mostly male, audience is incredibly active, viewing on average five pages of video content for nearly 12 minutes a day.
A quick search of “WSHH” and “fights” on Twitter revels tons of devoted fans. “I could watch black people fight on WSHH for hoursssss,” writes one user. “I need a WSHH fight comp to be uploaded. I’m bored,” writes another.
The rise of WorldStarHipHop is an incredible business story for 38-year-old founder Lee “Q” O’Denat. O’Denat launched WorldStar in 2005 as a mixtape-download site (the hip hop part of WorldStarHipHop.) Today, the value of the site is estimated in the millions. Along with headlines like “Crazy: Stoner Gets Robbed At Gunpoint During Live Broadcast” and “NY Mother Arrested After Hiring Strippers For Her 16-Year-Old Son’s Birthday Party!” the site makes money from its videos that feature aspiring hip hop artists. While the shock-and-awe footage lures eyeballs, the rap industry hopefuls bring in the dollars, paying between $750 and $4,000 to have their work featured.
Rapper Brody Boy, 26, is one such artist trying to make a name for himself on WorldStar. The 22-year-old says he sees the site as a springboard for artists not signed to a major record label.
“There’s a lot of ratchetness on WorldStar,” he says. “A lot of the viewers go on there looking to see the riffraff but the site can be good for an up-and-coming artist. If you’re just on YouTube, you don’t get any exposure on there unless you’re playing with cats. People actually look at WorldStar.”
On the first day the video for his song “Incredible” aired on the site, it earned almost a million views by 2 p.m. Brody said he’d received more than a hundred emails – a few possibly from record labels.
In a March interview with The Source magazine, O’Denat claims that his site is mere reflection of the world its audience inhabits. “I wanted to capture the realness,” he said. “That’s what WSHH is all about, we are going to bring it to you live. Hip-hop culture was built on being real and representing your everyday good, bad and ugly.”
On the other hand, Rice calls the content on WorldStar anything but real.
“I’m not saying that these things aren’t happening in society. Very sadly, they do. But let’s not lose track that they’re abhorrent, isolated incidents. The culture isn’t necessarily violent and inhumane. Sites like WorldStarHipHop are just the squeaky wheel.”
Follow Donovan X. Ramsey on Twitter at @idxr