People // Tassili Bond // Blog

Hello everyone. I have taken part in two Indaba contests. The Mariah Carey comp and The Roots comp. The common denominator in both is that there seems to be a lot of dissatisfaction with the voting system. On the surface I have no problem with it other than the fact that some people (like my older relatives) find the process a bit convoluted. But I see no problem with asking friends and family to vote for you. They love you. They'll do it. No problem there. But I do see one flaw in the system. You see I investigate people who do extraordinarily 
well and I have found some very interesting things. It turns out that one fellow from the Mariah comp had a staggering 128,000 Imeem friends. No wonder he finished in the Top 25. Hell, he should have his ass kicked for not finishing in the Top 5! And lo and behold, one of my Top 25 Roots comp brothers has an amazing facebook friend list of over 123,000! The thing is that you can pay companies that will build your friend list for you. You know, send out requests and all for a fee. So if a person is getting their votes primarily from their mammoth friend list then it could be said that they paid their way to the top if they indeed used such methods to build their Myspace, Imeem or whatever. Now I would say that is a bit unfair. But since it's not against the law what can you do? Don't get me wrong. What I am saying in no way excuses all of the whining and belly aching that I heard in both comps. Seems the are a lot of prima donna's that think they're too good or talented to lower themselves to picking up the phone and asking their cousin to vote for them. Forget them. They don't deserve to win. But there are some truly hard working people who want to win the right way but have to compete with folks who have 100,00 plus "friends" on a website. What to do?

I don't claim to have the perfect answer but I do have what I think may be an interesting solution. You've heard of the NCAA basketball tournament right. The teams are "seeded" before the tournament. In essence it's designed to give the teams that the writers think are the best the easiest road to the Final Four. Why not do a similar thing at Indaba? Before open voting begins the Inadaba community would vote on their favs. The top vote getter would start at the No.1 spot and vice versa. That should end the complaining. If you have a dope track, start off at No.1 and STILL can't hold on to a Top 25 spot then no better for you. On the other hand if the consensus is that your track sucks ass and you start off at #678 and fight your way to the top then bravo! I don't give a damn if you have a million myspace friends you get props from me! So that's my idea what's yours? Any solution is better that all this bitchin' and moanin' that's been going on.