Complex is the Ultimate Troll

Complex has been seen as one of the standard bearers for hip-hop and urban culture in the new media era. They stepped up and took over in a lot of areas when the Source and XXL kind of failed to move forward and urban men's magazines pretty much faded away due to blogs and internet forums. Enter Complex which was to me, an urban style and fashion magazine that occasionally dived into other things, like a hip-hop Maxim or Mens Journal. now it seems they have truly been taken over in a new hipster, hip-hop fashion with a strong foothold in sneaker culture, fashion, and music, specifically hip-hop.

Now one of the reasons I don't like Complex is to me they feel like Culture Vultures who jump onto any trends that is somewhat happening and take it over, purporting to be engrossed in it where they get the nuance to speak on it and look down their noses onto others. Recently, they dropped their top albums as well as top singles of the year and these lists speak to that.

Many of the times they seem to try to hard to show they are of the culture, yet not snobs because they are all inclusive, yet intelligent enough to elevate music that no one else would to cult status. Point blank, anyone who puts Rae Strummond in the top 10 albums of the year, behind Future's Dirty Sprite 2 and To Pimp a Butterfly are just being assholes. To pick the third or fourth 'best' song from Dirty Sprite as the highest rated song from the album (according to every other set of experts) is trolling in it's highest form.It's literally saying "we know you all love this, but we know better than you at this specifically".

Look I know a lot of people will go run to their site because it gives fuel to the barbershop arguments and gives something to talk about and argue over, but I can't truthfully put forth much effort when I don't feel the effort or opinion is genuine. I look at the majority of their lists and can't believe that they truly go along with the lists and posts that are made that run so far concurrent yet manage to create some way to run counter to conventional wisdom. If you're a hipster, or one of those guys who believes in Complex magazine, god bless you.