Can't Stop Won't Stop (65 page)

Harlem-raised Rutgers grad Reginald Dennis joined the staff as an intern, and inputted ten thousand subscribers into the Mac. “I knew that these ten thousand people, you could build an empire around,” he says. “These were the tastemakers.”
In their press kit,
The Source
boasted of being “the most widely-read, well-respected rap music publication in existence.”
²
They backed it up by filling 30 percent of the pages with advertising. Then they declared themselves “the voice of the rap music industry.”

The Source
's tenth issue, which arrived at the beginning of 1990, boldly canonized “The Rap Music Decade: 1980 to 1990”—who else had the knowledge and confidence to champion the Crash Crew or the Ultramagnetic MCs?—and immediately established themselves as
the
rap insiders. Jon Shecter, now editor-in-chief of the magazine, crowed, “The magazine you are holding your hands is, easily, the best thing ever published concerning hip-hop.”

There was better criticism to be had in
The Village Voice
, better industry coverage in
Billboard
, better reporting and actual copy-editing in
Spin
, but
The Source
had the authority of young heads on a mission. Hip-hop wasn't kid stuff; it was the kind of tidal wave that rolls through once in a generation and takes everyone with it. Up to that point, Dennis says, “Hip-hop writing was done by people who were looking at it from the outside. It wasn't life or death. They weren't gonna die if they didn't write about the stuff. Whereas we probably would have.”

In a media where urban youths were most often seen in handcuffs or police drawings,
The Source
would speak to its audience in their own voice, reflect their concerns and controversies, and feed their needs. It would epitomize hiphop's
attitude
—that b-boy stance, with its brimming streetwise confidence, scowling generational defiance, the barely secret joy of having something no army of parents, baby-boomer cultural critics, or grizzled rock journalists could ever really understand—and put it into words.

As
The Source
grew, the tension that hip-hop's downtown patrons had seen taking shape in the early ‘80s, and that Tate had named by the late ‘80s, became its central dialectic. The magazine was caught between wanting to exploit its generation's market potential and representing its potential militancy.

In the beginning,
The Source
looked and read like Mays had originally planned it to be: a rap industry trade magazine. In an effort to rationalize the national market,
The Source
reached out to local DJs and promoters and gave them “regional scene” columns in exchange for street promotion. This advertorial
content-for-promotion swap had long been a tradition of magazines in emerging music scenes. For years, Tom Silverman had done the same with his
Disco News
and
Dance Music Report
magazines. The insider-intelligence gave the magazine a backbone of legitimacy, while industry execs used the regional columns and the radio, retail and video charts as a roadmap through the music and as a vehicle to promote their new high-risk signings.

But as
The Source
developed its readership, its mission changed. By 1992, the regional columns and charts had become a casualty of the increased emphasis on full-length features, reviews, and issue-advocacy journalism. For a time, local heads angrily denounced the magazine for selling out, but
The Source
had a larger destiny to fulfill. No longer just “the voice of the rap music industry,” it was now “the magazine of hip-hop music, culture and politics.”

The editorial staff, who flamboyantly dubbed itself the “Mind Squad,” took that idea seriously. They created the template for hip-hop magazines, including sections like record release dates, Hip-Hop Quotables, and the controversial five-mic record ratings guides. At the back of the book, they often featured hiphop fashion and models. Fashion editors Julia Chance and Sonya Magett featured Sean “Puffy” Combs and Tyson Beckford in their first photo shoots. Matty C and Reef's “Unsigned Hype” column, a demo showcase, became an A&R's wet dream, discovering artists like Notorious B.I.G., DMX, Common, Mobb Deep and DJ Shadow. Dave “Funken” Klein's “Gangsta Limpin' ” was an irreverent stream-of-consciousness freestyle of witty disses, reluctant props, and gratuitous shout-outs. James Bernard's “Doin' the Knowledge” column became the stylistic blueprint for a generation's tough, opinionated political writing, putting a hip-hop gen spin on the issues of the day—crime, incarceration, AIDS, Islam, electoral politics, the Persian Gulf War.

Above all, the Mind Squad was committed. They had daylong debates about what belonged in the magazine. Did rapper X deserve a 200-word blurb? Was TLC really hip-hop? Was Too Short's record really worth four mics or just three and half? Every month, that passion was reflected back by its readers. Fans complained they were too critical or not critical enough, too West Coast or too East Coast. Rappers and promoters angrily stepped to staffers in the clubs about perceived slights. Mays began to hear complaints from his advertisers.

But the wall between the business staff and editorial staff was sacred, and
anyway, the editorial side would never back down. From the tenth issue on, the “Publisher's Credo” at the bottom of the masthead read:

We at
The Source
take very seriously the challenge of being the only independent voice for the rap music industry. . . . With respect to any of our business relationships, we feel it is our responsibility always to strictly police the integrity of our editorial content. Only in this way can we continue to bring to you the clear and unbiased coverage which we hope has won the respect of our readers.

When James Bernard returned from the west coast in 1991, he took up most of the staff management duties, and eventually became coeditor-in-chief. Chris Wilder became senior editor and Reginald Dennis became music editor. New staffers like Kierna Mayo and dream hampton added strong female voices to the magazine, forcing gender issues onto the table. Together they formed one of the most integrated staffs in the history of magazine publishing. Content-wise the magazine had become decidedly blacker. In their March 1990 issue, they put a picture of Malcolm X in Egypt on the cover. “I think it was a natural evolution,” says Bernard. “Jon and Dave knew that the magazine needed to be perceived as real.”

In their 1991 year-end wrap-up, after Rodney King and Latasha Harlins and Crown Heights, they convened for what would become a heated staff discussion, using Ice Cube's
Death Certificate
as a starting point. Shecter asked a question about anti-Semitism on “No Vaseline”: “By pointing out that Jerry Heller is Jewish—why did he bother to say that he was a Jew?” Chris Wilder retorted, “Because it rhymes with ‘to do'.”
³
And then it was on. The conversation swerved for another three hundred words through Black-Jewish and Black-Korean relations, Black diversity, misogyny and homophobia. A feisty, fractious, principled bunch, the Mind Squad were going to represent where they had come from, to say what could not be said anywhere else, even if that meant arguing all day to get to consensus on an album, or splashing their personal and ideological tensions all over their pages. With increasing probity and passion, the Mind Squad tackled the question: what does it mean to be a member of the hip-hop generation?

The Source
gave youths a sense of a hip-hop nation beyond their lunch-table rap ciphers, community center break-battles, bedroom studios, and graffiti yards, one that was populated by others exactly like them. Hip-hop journalism had the opportunity to center plain-speaking from the margins, insist on the added value of free speech and the entertainment value of shit-talking, argue an aesthetics of boom-bap, celebrate different kinds of beauty, and take the money, all at once.

“We all knew that there was a slight chance that, if everyone played their cards right, it could possibly diverge from
all
historical precedent,” Dennis says. “Maybe the business could be right, maybe the journalism could be correct, maybe the point-of-view could be correct.”

On the other hand, Dave Mays had begun to invoke the name of Jann Wenner, the baby-boomer counterculturalist-turned-magazine-mogul, as he boasted to the
Wall Street Journal
that his magazine could become “the
Rolling Stone
of the next generation.”
⁴
His slow, painful process of estrangement from the Mind Squad had begun.

In 1991, a year after their move to New York,
The Source
had a circulation of 40,000, captured 286 ad pages at between $2,000 to $3,000 per page, and was clocking nearly a million in total revenues.
⁵
That success seemed mind-boggling. But by the end of the decade
The Source
had increased its circulation to 500,000, and its $30 million brand name was being leveraged across a website, a TV show, record albums and a televised gala annual awards show. On the newsstands, it even outsold
Rolling Stone
. What happened in between is an archetypal story of the hip-hop generation.

When
The Source
came on the scene, the entertainment and media industries were undergoing a once-in-a-lifetime paradigm shift, moving from a broadcast model to a niche model.

From World War II through the peak of the broadcast era in the 1970s, large companies like television networks and the film and music conglomerates, created and pushed their programming to mass audiences. It was a one-size-fits-all popular culture, where centralized decision-makers filtered through “subcultures” and repackaged them for the mainstream. The broadcast model favored high capital investments, massive economies of scale, and vast infrastructures of
production and promotion. The late ‘70s, after all, were the era of the sitcom, the blockbuster film and soft rock.

But by the mid-1980s, the broadcast model came under fire. In TV, cable began to segment audiences that were formerly the sole province of the Big Three networks. In 1991, a new data-tracking system called Soundscan transformed the music industry when
Billboard
magazine switched its weekly record charts to the new program.

Before then, the magazine's charts were based on a network of retail reporters. “Nobody knew what criteria they used for their top twenty,” says Tommy Boy owner Tom Silverman, an early advocate of Soundscan. “Someone sent them a check, free records or a refrigerator that week—you could've had number one.” Silverman's indie label was hit hard by the reporting system. “Planet Rock” sold 15,000 copies a week at its peak and went gold, but it never charted higher than number forty-seven. Soundscan's innovation was to install a bar-code-reading, point-of-purchase system to tally actual sales.

When the first
Billboard
chart based on Soundscan was released on May 25, 1991, the results shocked the music industry. Within weeks, country singer Garth Brooks and hair-metal band Skid Row had hit number one. Independently distributed N.W.A.'s
Efil4zaggin
debuted at number two. At the same time, dozens of big-bank pop and rock acts tumbled off the charts. What the industry thought were mere niche markets—country, metal, and rap—were in fact the biggest things going. And while the country industry was well established and the heavy metal market had peaked, the rap industry, because of years of major label prejudice, remained sorely underdeveloped. Suddenly rap appeared to have boundless crossover potential. Apparently lots of suburbanites and whites were down with a “Niggaz 4 Life” program.

Soundscan told the music industry what the kids had been trying to tell them for years. Broadcast culture was too limiting. They weren't interested in being “programmed” or hard-sold into the mainstream. They wanted control over their pop choices; they wanted to define their own identities. The emerging niche model favored fluid, proliferating, self-organizing grass-roots undergrounds with their tiny economies of scale and their passionate, defensive audiences that always seemed caught between discovery and preservation, boosterism and insularity.

The center had given way, and the pop field looked like a jumble of fragments. With the rise of the niche model, the singular underdog idea that the Bronx b-boys and b-girls had advanced—like politics, all cool is local—could be triumphant. Hip-hop's fractal spread in the new decade felt inevitable.

At the same time, mass marketers were scrambling to re-establish brand preeminence. Advertising budgets were plunging, as aging white baby boomers opted for value over brand. Low-cost big-box retailers made a comeback, their shelves teeming with generic products, and ad agencies were in a panic. But as companies like Nike, Adidas, and Pepsi searched for new markets, they discovered that urban youth of color—until then an ignored niche—were a more brand-conscious, indeed brand-leading, demographic than they had ever realized.

In 1986, Run DMC had turned Adidas into a hip-hop brand with a song. Two years later, Spike Lee and Michael Jordan took hip-hop branding to the next level. Nike, then the number-two company in the shoe business, was in a bruising but losing battle with Reebok. They started by refocusing small management teams on developing or revamping their shoe lines in narrow niche markets.
⁶
Then, in 1986, they fired their ad agency and hired Wieden and Kennedy and put $40 million into brand marketing.
⁷

One night, two W&K admen saw
She's Gotta Have It
, in which Spike Lee's oddball character Mars Blackmon stomped around in Air Jordans. A light bulb went off. They called Lee and told him they wanted to pair him with Jordan. In 1988, when Spike and Mike began filming a series of spots that would shock the advertising world, Reebok was a $1.8 billion company, and Nike trailed at $1.2 billion. A year later, Spike and Mike's ads helped propel Nike past Reebok, and the company never looked back. Not only did Nike's success confirm that niches were the future, it also confirmed that a massive shift in tastes was occurring—from baby boomer to youth, from suburb to city, from whiteness to Blackness.