MC Hammer on Twitter, gaming, and Hammer pants
Here's the transcript from the 10-minute interview I had with MC Hammer (real name Stanley Burrell) at last week's Xbox 360 launch of the Twitter/Facebook update and Lips: Number One Hits. He's a huge tech geek and a great fan of sports games, namely Madden, although we didn't have much time to talk about gaming.
GC: When did you realise that Twitter was something that you wanted to follow?
MC Hammer: Well it wasn't really about me following, it was about engaging the platform and seeing the responses and the interactivity. How immediate it was. How stimulating it is to the mind. To send a message out, about a subject, and have some people immediately give their input which is collaboration. So the minute that I started using it, it was 'Wow, this is it'. I felt like it was a winner from the time I engaged the platform.
Do you think that as a musician, because music is stimulating people's emotions, that Twitter is the perfect platform for a musican to use?
I think that the behaviours that we already have as songwriters bodes well to tweeting. The idea in tweeting is that in 140 characters you have to be efficient and get to the point. A songwriter is used to telling a whole story in 16 bars ... so we're used to communicating in short bursts like that. We've already been trained for it. If you embrace it and not be fearful of it, you'll see that you already have a skill set that is optimised for tweeting.
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You wouldn't pick it by looking at him but rap star MC Hammer is a big self-confessed geek.
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Looking for a job? Try LinkedIn or Twitter
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What's your top game of the year?