About

Whatsup

First I’d like to begin by thanking you for taking time to visit my site. Secondly I’d like to thank you a little more for taking enough time to be curious about the origins of this site. If you don’t know, my name is Maurice Williams and I also go by Ambition-1 from time to time.

I decided on the name rapaveli.com because of what I consider to be my first album review. During the summer of 1997 I attended a youth program, which consisted of sports activities and a little bit of educational stuff. Naturally my education came from rap music so when we were given the chance to write something and present it to everyone else I went home and listened to the Makaveli CD, The Don Kulumanati: The 7 Day Theory.

When I finally got to the point of thinking of a legit name for a hip hop website I figured that it needed to have the word rap in it somewhere and somehow or another I remembered that little assignment and I put the two together. Most of my good ideas occur while I’m either doing something important, taking a shower, or after sex! I think this one came after I did!

Sometime in late 2004 I first started toying around with the idea of starting a fitness site. Understand that I honestly had no room to even begin believing that I was capable of running a website but my desire burned. It burned so long that even in the summer of 2005 while I was carrying a wheel barrow full of cement at construction site the idea to start a hip-hop based website just seemed to drop out of the sky like a long awaited rain drop. That very evening I began planning the basics of what this site would be about and how it would function. Everything seemed to go hand in hand with the fact that I had started writing music reviews while in my dorm room at the University of Kentucky in March of that same year.

The next two years would be full of on again off again planning and pitching my idea to various friends and associates. It wasn’t until January of 2007 when I finally decided to stop dreaming about owning a website and start realizing it that things really started to change. Even though I had already done countless hours of planning I decided that my music reviews would be all that I needed to get started at the very least. Beginning in January of 2007 I bled a new blood of consistency as I was able to keep everything up to date all the while reading various books about writing and blogging. In May of 07 I got a postcard in the mail from Brown Mackie College and by the first week of June I was enrolled as a full time student again.

Shortly after re-enrolling in college I decided that it was time to stop bullshittin and get the website in motion. Sometime around the middle of July 2007 I registered the url rapavelli.com with godaddy.com and began the final preparations before I’d go live. My first and second months of school were filled with me copying and pasting all the album reviews I had written for the year. Finally on August 23, 2007 I launched rapavelli.com and then proceeded to celebrate by getting in the air with my good friend Ricco Washburn.

Over the years I had set several launch dates, which were sub sequentially missed due to negligence. I chose to launch on August 23, 2007 because that’s the same day that my father dies in 1995. I felt this was appropriate because my father was my first example of how a man should own his own dynasty no matter how big or how small. Almost two years removed I’m happy to say that we’re still moving and growing on a daily basis. That’s the story of rapavelli.com. Once again I’d like to thank you for visiting the site and reading this letter. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns please feel free to shoot me an email and we can deliberate.

Maurice “Abition-1” Williams
Rapavelli.com
The Only Hip-Hop Blog That Matters Now!