Like many successes in the digital world, WorldStarHipHop.com began as something entirely different than what it became known for, pivoting to meet a need that it didn’t know existed. When Lee “Q” O’Denat founded WorldStar in 2005, he intended it to be a technological leap from his previous site, NYCFatMixtapes.com – instead of an online store where listeners could order physical copies of underground rap releases, they would now be able to download them straight to their computers, a relative novelty at the time.
But after a hack derailed the site for several months, in 2008 O’Denat took what had been WorldStar’s supplementary material and made it the focus, turning it into an industrious aggregator of online videos that others were often too timid to share. It soon became the go-to resource for twerking clips, recordings of police confrontations, micro-budget showcases of unsigned rappers, public transit craziness, celebrity grievances and confessions, and (most famously) cameraphone footage of people young and old beating each other up. Videos got titles that were both matter of fact and contained their own strange poetry, (example: “Outta Nowhere: Sharkeisha Confronts Girl And Super Falcon Punches Her ‘You F*cked With The Right One’ ( So Wrong For This This)”. It predicted many websites’ move towards video content that is easily shareable on social media. According to Alexa, the web traffic analytics website, WorldStar is currently the 314th most popular website in the United States, a dip from its high point in the low 200’s around the turn of the decade.
O’Denat, who was the owner, mastermind and public face of WorldStar in his ubiquitous designer sunglasses, died unexpectedly Monday afternoon in San Diego, California. According to the coroner’s office, the cause of death was atherosclerotic cardiovascular disease, with obesity listed as a contributing factor. He was 43 years old.
Raised by a Haitian mother in the Hollis neighborhood of Queens, New York, (the same place that produced rap legends Run-DMC and LL Cool J), O’Denat dropped out of high school after his freshman year. In the 90s he worked jobs in the fast-food industry and at the now defunct electronics retail chain Circuit City. It was there that he first became interested in computers. His first venture, a porn site, failed, and he was soon back in the service industry, but he didn’t give up his belief in the nascent internet economy.
As WorldStar’s success eventually grew, O’Denat said he turned down several multimillion-dollar deals from others who wanted to buy a portion of the site, most notably Sean “P Diddy” Combs. Instead O’Denat decided to keep the company to himself so he could __have autonomous control over its future. During a 2014 interview on the Verge’s video series Small Empires, host Alexis Ohanian asked O’Denat if he had any mentors as he built his company, to which he replied: “Honestly, I ain’t __have no one help me. Know what I’m sayin’? I had to learn on my own, it was tough. I have that mentality, I don’t like to owe anyone anything.”
The site’s cultural currency also rose. Artists and record labels paid to have their videos featured prominently, and that became the site’s main source of revenue. On Childish Gambino’s Because the Internet album, Donald Glover named a song II. Worldstar and sampled videos of fights he found on the site. Even HBO’s southern dirtbag comedy Eastbound & Down worked a WorldStar joke into its series finale, as a character hollered “Whoaaa! WorldStar! WorldStar!” when another got knocked out.
Still the company remained lean, with fewer than a dozen employees contributing remotely throughout the country. O’Denat moved out west, first to Scottsdale, Arizona, and then San Diego. WorldStar got representation from the famed talent agency Creative Artists Agency and then William Morris Endeavor. O’Denat spoke often in the press about looking to build the brand into something bigger than just the website. A film project with Paramount that was to be produced by Russell Simmons hasn’t made it out of development and its Laff Mobb standup comedy tour never gained much traction, but this February will see the release of World Star TV, a show on MTV2 where comedians and panelists add commentary to videos popularized on the site.
WorldStar has received criticism for its content, particularly the fights. In a 2013 open letter to O’Denat, Quadeer Shakur, the Universal Zulu Nation’s minister of information, wrote: “Doesn’t it bother you just a little that another black man (that man being yourself), has ‘made it’ out of the ‘ghetto’, only to display unnerving images and videos of young adults berating, belittling, and beating each other solely for the purpose of the enjoyment of who you are led to believe are ‘millions of Hip-Hoppers?’”
In response, O’Denat often argued that the existence of WorldStar was actually a deterrent against embarrassing or criminal behavior. In 2012 he told New York magazine, “How it is now, whatever you do, there’s going to be someone filming. You’re gonna be seen, you’re going to be recorded. The night got a million eyes. It is a surveillance society. Go out and do some dumb crap, there’s a good chance you’re gonna wind up on WorldStar for everyone to see. So maybe you’ll think twice.”
He put himself in the lineage of hip-hop artists like Tupac Shakur, NWA, Eminem, and 2 Live Crew. He defended the site using the same tactics as these once controversial figures, sometimes more effectively than others, by saying he didn’t create the situations he was drawing attention to by posting the videos, he was simply reflecting the reality of their existence. As he told the Champs podcast in 2013, “If I turn the cameras off, or if I turn the WorldStarHipHop site off, this stuff will still occur.”
There is currently no mention of O’Denat’s death on the WorldStarHipHop site. (Though it was acknowledged on its various social media accounts.) On the day the news broke, only 25 videos were posted on WorldStar, down from a count that is usually in the 30s and 40s. The most popular one of the day was “Wannabe ‘Thug’ Who Disrespected Her Mother On Dr Phil Show Gets Her Ass Beat On The Streets!” It had more than 1.3 million views.