Genesis of a name - Thoof, Poof, or T-Hoof the Rapping Reindeer
Thoof.com is one of the latest entrants into the social bookmarking industry. Under the Thoof concept, the site organizers are hoping to prevent the gaming of social bookmarking sites like Digg that are notoriously gamed by digg gangs or networks over thousands of people that IM each other to push news stories to the top of the social editing news site.
So anyway, with a name like Thoof it kind of begs the question,
Where the heck did you come up with that name?
It kind of has a sound like POOF! Like when your fairy god mother magically appears and turns your computer into a pumpkin on accident, and you bop her with a fly swatter, but miss because she disappears with a very loud and airy POOOFFFF!
Internet 2.0 | Christmas | Reindeer | Rap
However, Thoof doesn’t get its name from a fairy tail. It gets its name from the street and the North Pole, more specifically from the streets of the North Pole.
Many people do not realize it but much of the great gangsta rap of the late 80’s and early 90’s did not come straight out of Compton, but actually came straight out of Santa’s work shop in the North Pole. The genesis of Gangsta rap actually has its roots in the late 1970’s. A great deal of disco music was created and when Disco crashed, Santa was stuck with a severe over supply of Disco albums and turn tables, disco lights and bling.
Santa sat on this inventory for close to a decade before he found a way to clean out his inventory and turn a negative into a positive. It started with a little reindeer born in the 1960’s in of all places Mississippi.
The reindeer was born to two loving parents that had retired from a zoo in Norway to live in a warmer climate on a small retirement. They had one small reindeer named Thomas.
Thomas was born with a slight birth defect. His right front hoof did not make a separated V patern, but instead a T-Shape.
This hoof caused Thomas, affectionately known as “T” to make thudding beat at when he trotted that progressed anywhere from 60 - 80 Beats Per minute.
Now as T got older he grew up listening to Disco, Soul, the Blues and The Sugar Hill Gang. T had a very sweet disposition and was friends with almost everyone. However, as he moved into the late seventies he moved to the city in New Orleans.
He fell in with a group of young men that were a member of a local gang. They were very intent on maintaining a brotherhood and protecting their own. Calling them a gang was more of a street wise status symbol for the teens. They didn’t really get into any real trouble or break any laws. They stuck together in order to survive the streets.
One of those teens was framed for a brutal murder that he did not commit and the police brutalized him into confessing. The youth eventually died in lockup before he ever went to trial and T was scarred. He ultimately broke away from the gang as it seemed too dangerous.
He started doing some work with an indigent defense group. He was appalled at the level of police corruption he found as he worked with many people that received the short end of the scales of justice. Too many kids (teens) were getting churned through system and the indigent defense group was losing ground.
After 2 years, he left completely frustrated. A Norwegian uncle, in a herd that traced its antlers shards back to the time of the Vikings, gave him a good reference and he took a job as an apprentice in Santa’s workshop.
Now, when T moved to the North pole he experienced an extreme level of culture shock. T felt like an outsider from a world that was less than perfect living in a world that was too nice and too perfect, while his friends back home suffered. Suffering from loneliness, T started to fall into a state of depression.
T was smart and recognized the symptoms and new that he had to exorcise these negative demons and thoughts or it would eat him alive. He started composing rap lyrics. He started playing disco albums and rapping his own lyrics while he worked.
At first many of the reindeer and elves had mixed feelings. Elves and Reindeer love to dance and the disco music just seeped into their soul trickling down their respective hooves and pointy toes. However, they were not used to the painful rap lyrics, with titles like Pigs go Pop, and My Brother’s Bangin’ Under a Different Sign and The Thoof is on Fire (inspired after a stage accident that left Thoof partly tail less).
Eventually, the sentiment sank in and the Elves and Reindeer recognized the lyrics for what they were, a new form of psycho analysis. (Elves love psycho analysis. They do not suffer from psychosis, but savor dabbling in psycho analysis like people enjoy poetry or chess. The reindeers do have psychosis as they have violent roots from the head to head conflict that they go through during mating season.
Most people have not witnessed the death matches of male reindeer fighting each other in the skies of the North Pole during the long dark nights with the Northern lights as a back ground to the blood rain of reindeers that are not up to the challenge of an expectant doe waiting on the sidelines.
So anyway, the music became an underground hit in the north pole!
Santa Claus came upon a House Party in 1982 where T, now known as T-Hoof.
Santa loved the music and being the excellent entrepreneur that he was immediately saw the opportunity to off load some of his inventory.
That Christmas Santa started sending out lots of tapes of T-Hoof’s wraps. Now, no one had heard of this music and no one had asked for it technically. Santa recognized the potential of the psycho analysis aspects of rap, and its roots in T-Hoof’s short term gang banging roots.
He hoped that children might be able to avoid some of the problems that T had experienced and so he started seeding sparse stockings in the inner city across the United States.
Many children started listening to those tapes and many were heavily influenced from Dr. Dre to a young cousin of Ice T.
That cousin shared one of his T-Hoof tapes with Ice T (some claim the then pimp, Ice T nabbed the tape and never returned it). Regardless the tape did its magic and inspired Ice T to somewhat reform his ways and become the grandfather of Gangsta rap. Dr. Dre soon followed with his group NWA and inspired a long history of gansta rappers to follow.
Some even believe that MC Hammer may have been influenced by the music of THoof, but this is not true. It was actually a music producers son that received a Thoof album and passed it along to his father that had just signed MC Hammer in the early days.
As the eighties ended T-Hoof changed his name to THOOF following a new nick name as the Big THOOF, for the new sound that he made after putting on a great deal of weight eating a north pole diet.
He ultimately left the North Pole in the mid nineties. He moved to silicon valley with aspirations of becoming an internet mogul. He unfortunately was not successful and lost a great deal of money in the dot com bust in 2001.
He decided to go back to school and obtained a master’s degree in computer science and ultimately built a new Social Bookmarking site known named after himself, called Thoof.com.
And that is the genesis of the Thoof name.
Big THOOF has come a long way, from the poorest areas of Mississippi to the North Pole and Santa’s workshop to silicon valley, University and now the new Internet revolution. He has transformed the music landscape and helped generations of youths in the inner city find a new identity and a path towards psycho analytic healing.
Now he hopes to help even more people find information and personalized news more efficiently.
