Can't Stop Won't Stop (67 page)

In 1993,
The Source
's advertisers expanded beyond record labels to include Nike, Reebok, Sega and Bugle Boy. Its circulation was up to 90,000 readers; the average reader was a twenty-one-year-old male. Over half were Black, over a quarter were white.
¹⁵
“This isn't a niche market, or just an ethnic market,” Mays told magazine industry people. “Hip-hop is like rock and roll was twenty-five years ago. It's a music-driven lifestyle being lived by an entire generation of young people now.”

He added, “This market is dying to be marketed to.”
¹⁶

Quincy Jones, Russell Simmons and Time Warner agreed. In 1991, they had entered into discussions with Mays, Shecter and Bernard to buy
The Source
. “Their thing was we were too narrow,” says Bernard. “I think the Time Warner
people didn't think that there was going to be a big enough magazine for a hardcore hip-hop magazine, which they were wrong about. They also thought that there was a market for a mainstream Black music magazine that came out of hip-hop, which they were right about.” Bernard says the negotiations ended after Time Warner lowballed them.

Instead, Jones and Simmons took a $1-million investment from Time Warner and began developing an upmarket hip-hop magazine. How upmarket was a key question: Simmons liked
The Source
's raw edginess, Jones wanted a slick
Rolling Stone
–styled glossy. Jones installed Carol Smith as the publisher, a white forty-three-year-old founder of
Parenting
magazine who admitted she had never seen
Do the Right Thing
or
Boyz N The Hood
. Jonathan Van Meter, a white, gay twenty-nine-year-old, was hired as editor-in-chief. Simmons quit, famously complaining, “They didn't hire one straight Black man to work on that magazine.

“I don't think anybody who knows me would accuse me of homophobia,” he added. “The idea that [this]'ll be the bible for the hip-hop community is dead.”
¹⁷

With Simmons gone before
Vibe
's September 1992 test launch, all of the principals admitted they had no idea what to expect, or even who would buy the magazine. They just figured their “Black music
Rolling Stone
” would be huge. On the advertising side, they had picked up The Gap, Swatch and Nintendo, but they also landed Benetton, Armani Exchange, Gianni Versace, four pages of Levi's and five pages of Nike. Ad pages sold for between $5,000 and $6,000.
¹⁸
Their 144-page tester had fifty-four ad pages and hit the stands with 200,000 copies, twice the circulation of
The Source
. The response was strong enough for Time-Warner to make the full plunge.

Vibe
began as a high-brow experiment, mixing celebrity and investigative journalism with minimalist high-concept photography and disorienting Madison Avenue-goes-Uptown fashion spreads. The writing was often superb: Joan Morgan challenging Ice Cube on his nationalism, Kevin Powell confronting Death Row Records at its peak, Danyel Smith both documenting and mourning Tupac's tragic career.
Vibe
's elegant photography and design now looks groundbreaking, pointing forward to the pre-millennial rush of hip-hop culture-as-post white
haute couture
, 1982 eternal. The Avedon-influenced photographs presented their subjects against blank, decontextualized backgrounds, emphasizing their many shades of nonwhiteness. No gritty street-scene backgrounds
here,
Vibe
was all icon-making foreground. At the time,
Vibe
left many heads cold. To them, the magazine seemed to be turning hip-hop into a museum piece—cool but cerebral, artful but funkless, gorgeous but bourgeois.

Yet
Vibe
did not just survive, it thrived. The demand for hip-hop was larger than anyone had imagined. When, at the end of 1993, advertising execs realized that
The Source
and
Vibe
, and a host of smaller competitors like
Rap Pages
and
URB
, had not killed each other off, they turned on the tap. Brands that hiphop heads had long embraced—like Tommy Hilfiger and Timberland—belatedly returned the attention. Other brands—The Gap, Sprite—jumped in, hoping to rebrand themselves by generating tremors from the inner city out to the exurbs. Sony, AT&T, even the U.S. Army began pouring money into hip-hop magazines, which suddenly became consumer catalogs to the hip-hop lifestyle.

Hip-hop lifestyling offered, to use an advertising term, a complicated kind of
aspirational
quality. In one sense, hip-hop had triumphed over America in a way the civil rights movement never had. No matter the race, class, or geography, the kids wore the same clothes, spoke the same language, listened to the same music. Ice T and Chuck D saw this development as an unmitigated triumph of cultural desegregation. That was why, they said, white parents were so afraid of rap.

Here again, the reality was complicated. As Upski had pointed out, what kind of desegregation allowed white kids to get away without questioning their whiteness? Tommy Hilfiger's mid-1990s makeover from Ralph Lauren pretender to avatar of urban cool, Naomi Klein wrote, “feeds off the alienation at the heart of America's race relations: selling white youth on their fetishization of black style, and black youth on their fetishization of white wealth.”
¹⁹

Hip-hop journalists bemoaned the popular success of artists like Vanilla Ice, whom they dismissed as a white poseur, and M. C. Hammer, whom they derided as a black sellout, and accepted A Tribe Called Quest's “Industry Rule No. 4080”—”Record company people are shady”—as a truism. But at the same time, hip-hop relentlessly pushed toward the mainstream. “Strictly underground,” EPMD rapped on MTV. “Keep the crossover.” Perhaps this new confusion—about race and class, underground and mainstream, keeping it real and making it big—was the ultimate price of the media bumrush.

Editors like Jon Shecter and James Bernard, Dane Webb, Darryl James,
Sheena Lester and, later, Danyel Smith and Selwyn Seyfu Hinds were constructing a hip-hop nationalist worldview that was hard
and
complicated. Hip-hop nationalism was about defending a generation that loved its contradictions. Being down with hip-hop was, in Smith's words, “about the intense kind of aspiration that comes from having little. It's about the ambivalence of having a lot but knowing others don't.

“[M]ost of the time, feminists chant sexist rhymes, reformers boogie to money lust,” she wrote. “White people sing along to songs that curse their existence on this planet. Black people memorize joints that exist only to extol self-destruction. Are we close to hip-hop? Yes. Where else to be but close to the truth?”
²⁰

By the end of 1994, Dre and Snoop had dominated video and radio for two years, hundreds of “cool hunter” marketing agencies had sprung up in the gap between the broadcasters and the niches to teach confused corporations how to re-brand themselves for an elusive new generation, and the rap industry, now commanding more than 10 percent of the music market and driving massive change in the sound of pop radio, was flush with money.
The Source
had a circulation of 140,000, landed five hundred advertising pages at more than $5,000 a page, and clocked nearly $4 million in total revenues.
²¹
Stakes were higher than ever.

The flipside of the post-riot creative explosion was that hip-hop had become a fiercely competitive field. Majors signed hundreds of acts, indies were popping up everywhere, and the rap market was crowded with product. Radio DJs were drowning in records, magazine editors in interview and review requests.

Journalists from
The Source
and other hip-hop magazines had become targets. Angry over negative coverage or reviews, sometimes even angry over positive coverage, rappers and their handlers issued threats that sometimes became physical attacks. Bernard, Dennis and Shecter strengthened the magazine's code of ethics. Dennis says, “The rule was if someone cornered you, you handled the situation right then. You had to defend the shit. If anyone stepped to anyone on staff, when you saw them you stepped to them. Just to keep everybody honest.”

He adds, “This was when people was, everyday, ‘We're gonna come up
there and shoot all you motherfuckers. Man, I'm gonna kill you. I know where you live.' And I'm a little concerned because niggas did know where I lived. I lived in the city and I seen these motherfuckers every day, getting irrational over this rap music. ‘Why you gonna fuck with my money like that?' Soon as motherfuckers start talking money, the guns is next.”

Shecter and Dennis vowed that any group that had threatened a staffer or a freelancer would not receive any coverage. Wu-Tang Clan, whose Master Killa had punched freelancer Cheo Coker because he didn't like the cartoons that accompanied
Coker's Rap Pages
article, artwork for which Coker was not even responsible, was one of the first groups to get on the list. “We didn't cover a lot of people just because they crossed that line,” says Dennis. “You've got to be fair to these guys and make an example out of someone so they respect you.”

Relations between the editorial and business halves of
The Source
had become strained. With the editorial side enforcing its code of ethics, complaints from rappers, managers, promoters and label execs about editorial decisions spilled over to the business side. David Mays got earfuls. He had not written an article for
The Source
since 1989, or interfered with the editorial side. Now he began complaining to the editors about certain reviews. The editors brushed him off.

Bernard says, “Especially in the beginning, when we were kind of barely hanging on, people said, ‘We're looking out for you and you're not reviewing our records.' And of course, everybody, whatever records they put out, they all think it's a five. They all think we're not being fair. That's why we had the division between editorial and business. Because the people selling ads need to be able to say, ‘Look, I have nothing to do with it.'

“I think that people didn't really have respect for those rules,” he adds. “I don't think people were calling up Jann Wenner at
Rolling Stone
and threatening things.”

At the same time, the entry of
Vibe
into the market cast light on
The Source
's shortcomings. “After a while, me and Jon and Reggie got really frustrated with Dave because we were putting out a dope magazine that people read every month and Dave would sort of get on us because sometimes we were late. We were like, ‘What are you doing? You're still selling ads, and Ed is still doing circulation,' ” says Bernard. “We realized that the publisher should not just be selling
ads, particularly since the ads at that point were like fishing in a bucket. We were questioning what was going on, like, ‘How come you're not launching new businesses, breaking into new ads? What are you doing that's growing this thing?' ” Mays responded, in part, by launching The Source Music Awards, an event that he billed as “the rap Grammys.” He wanted to move
The Source
from grass-roots to the glamorous life.

“In the midst of this stuff going on,” Dennis says, “Dave had the Almighty RSO which is everything we all hated, everything people accused us of, and ultimately if you take this seriously, ethically, everything you can't be a part of.”

The Almighty Roxbury Street Organization was a rap crew and street clique that Mays and Shecter had met at a rap show in Boston during their Harvard days. Mays and Raymond “Ray Dog” Scott, the leader of Almighty RSO, became close friends. RSO DJ Deff Jeff joined Mays and Shecter on their WHRB show. Mays eventually moved in with Scott and began managing the RSO. Soon Mays and Shecter lost their show, and rumors spread that Scott and his friends may have been responsible. The story, however apocryphal, had the DJs before Mays and Shecter going past their allotted time by five minutes and getting beat down for their error.

Shecter was aware of Scott's rep. It was a matter of public record that at least two RSO associates had been murdered. Word was that the names of crew members were turning up in drug and murder investigations. Friends say that Shecter never thought it was a good idea for Mays to manage Scott. But even as
The Source
took off, and Mays's relationship with the crew clearly violated his own “Publisher's Credo,” he remained Scott's manager.

In 1991, Mays secured a deal for Almighty RSO through Tommy Boy. The crew cut “One in the Chamba,” a protest song against the police killing of two young Black men that was released into the height of “Cop Killer” hysteria. Claiming the song advocated cop killing, the Boston Police Patrolman's Association and Oliver North's Freedom Alliance threatened to file a lawsuit against the group. Tommy Boy dropped the group, saying the record had generated no interest at radio or retail. Another deal for RSO with Flavor Unit ended in 1993. Scott pressed Mays to get them another deal, while Mays tried to avoid Scott's
calls. When Mays secured an EP deal for RSO with RCA in May of 1994, the calls finally stopped. The crew finished a five-song EP, entitled
Revenge of Da Badd Boyz
, scheduled for a September release.

The Mind Squad had covered the “One in the Chamba” controversy sympathetically and included Scott in their “gangsta rap summit,” but the editorial staff did not consider the EP worth wasting any ink, especially once the squabbling began.

Scott seemed to have concluded that most of the new staffers, particularly associate editors Rob Marriott and Carter Harris, were not showing him enough respect. Staffers complained that the RSO crew would come to the magazine, go into their offices to snatch their records and get into shouting matches with them. Bernard recalls taking Scott and the RSO members aside to cool them out. “It wasn't like we were cowering on the editorial side. In fact my main problem was that there were a lot of people who were armed at
The Source,
” Bernard says. “My fear was that things could get really out of hand.”