VladTV has been a staple of hip hop culture because of the people that he gets on to interview. While the foolishness is always appreciated and at times you really learn something about the artist, you and I both know that is not why you came here. You came to see dudes dry snitch on each other. When we see a VladTV title you just can't help but click to look at the coonery that is probably going on there. From there you either fall into two camps: you think that Vlad is an FBI agent engaging in voluntary entrapment, or you think the people that go up there are beyond stupid and high off the staple drug of the 2010s: clout. Let's explore both sides.
(Before doing so I would urge everyone to stop and read this article from the ringer which breaks down the etymology of a VladTV interview. I believe that it is the perfect companion piece for this article. Shoutouts to them).
Vlad is a lot of things that can all be debated. Culture vulture? Debatable. Deceptive? Also debatable. Exploitative? Pretty hard to argue against. I would say that people that come at Vlad from the snitch or culture vulture angle pretty hard. I would argue that this is not fair to him because VladTV is no different from any of the written blogs that also existed around the time. The video aspect just added a different angle to it since you can watch people spew ignorance out their own mouths. In addition, while Vlad pioneered these types of interviews, he has not been able to conduct quality interviews with younger artists. This is a consequence of the bias Vlad has towards older acts since he (as much as we don’t want to admit) is a veteran in Hip-Hop culture. He can't really relate with younger people because younger artists don’t have anything of substance to say if these interviews are any indication. Channels like ZackTv1 (RIP) and SayCheeseTV have picked up in that regard and happily feeding into the ignorance and beef that the interviewee spews on camera.
Speaking of feeding into ignorance, this is what Vlad is completely guilty of. While he has a built-in excuse in the fact that he just posts the stories and gives the platform, he is not stupid. He knows that if two rappers are beefing, bringing one up and asking questions about the beef will attract a lot of views to his page, which equals $$$. A more recent example of what I'm talking about is the amount of fire Akademiks has come under for posting potentially incriminating evidence of 69 in a video putting a hit on GBE member Tadoe. Did it need to be posted? Nope. Did it get a lot of traffic because of the fact that 69 is in jail? Yup. At the end of the day, the internet has made it so people can commit defamation with no real fear of repercussions because the victims of this are not smart enough to lawyer up to defend themselves from attacks on their character or freedom.
The VladTV effect is described as a mental state where the potential for attention to be put on one's material outweighs the moral or legal repercussions that their words may cause for people around them or themselves. As I said earlier, clout is the newest drug of the 2010s and this chase for clout has resulted in numerous rappers either detailing murders, assaults, drug deals, or generally illegal acts. Quoted from the wringer article:
"Vlad is far less likely to ask about music, and far more likely to ask for detailed accounts of alleged criminal activities and incidents. “So, uh,” Vlad might ask, “where’d you hide the gun?” He might go so far as to open the interview with that sort of question, at which point his subject, most likely a rapper, will either (a) laugh it off or (b) answer with the kind of rambling specificity that any decent criminal defense attorney would advise against."
As we all know, most rappers opt for option (b) more often than not. The part that perplexes me is that the stuff that rappers say on VladTV would be the same stuff they would antagonize someone on social media for talking about. Chicago World News, a YouTube channel which reports on the activities of the many gangs in Chicago, is constantly attacked via social media by said gang members because he is a "snitch". Every time, his response is that he is simply reporting on 1) what the gangs are putting out there themselves and 2) information that the police already know and is investigating on. People want to be the ones who brag about their street accolades so bad that they completely forget that social media is constantly used by law enforcement in order to gather evidence to incriminate them.
Vlad is definitely a disruptive force in Hip-Hop. I would argue that if his page was nuked today, the world would not care the next day. He is not needed in the culture. What he provides at this point is a platform similar to Worldstar where they can see their favorite rapper acting ignorant and talking about things that probably should be left in the dark. Rick James said cocaine a helluva drug, but it seems clout has surpassed it.