by Jeff Chang
But there was also something else, something which producer Reo Edwards put like this: “I was talking to a go-go songwriter one time. I said, ‘Man, you need a verse here.’ The guy said, ‘The rototom’s talking! Hear the rototom?’ Swear to god, he said the rototom was telling the story. ‘Can’t put no verse there, the rototom telling the story.’ Okay. Alright. You know what the rototom is saying. Maybe the people in the audience know what the rototom saying. But the people in Baltimore don’t know what the hell that dang rototom is saying!”
He shakes his head. “Go-go’s got the same problem today as it did back then. You don’t have no good storylines. Hip-hop,” he paused for emphasis, “tells stories.”
Hip-Hop Nation
If go-go was a rhythm machine, hip-hop was also an idea machine. It provided a bottomless well of stories. The culture was the call and hip-hop journalism was the response. Out of this, a generation’s sense of itself would begin to cohere.
When hip-hop burst into downtown consciousness in the early ‘80s, there were journalists ready to catch it, like Nelson George at Billboard and David Toop at The Face in London. Most of the pioneering writers worked for underground papers and alternative weeklies—Steven Hager at the East Village Eye, David Hershkovits at the Soho News, and Sally Banes, Robert Christgau and Vince Aletti at The Village Voice. Scenester entrepreneurs like Tim Carr, Michael Holman, and Aaron Fuchs also wrote about the young scene. By the mid-1980s, British zines like Black Echoes, Black Music and Jazz Review and Soul Underground were offering features, breakbeat charts and playlists, and American rock music tabloids Spin and Rolling Stone were covering hip-hop artists.
In January 1988, The Village Voice, under the aegis of Doug Simmons, Greg Tate, R. J. Smith, and Harry Allen, devoted a special issue to hip-hop entitled “Hip-Hop Nation.” Wrapped behind a cover featuring a who’s-who of the rap scene, the issue’s point was simple: this culture could make you believe. In Tate’s words, it was “the only avant-garde around, still delivering the shock of the new (over recycled James Brown compost modernism like a bitch), and it’s got a shockable bourgeoisie, to boot.” Most prophetically, he wrote, “Hip-hop might be bought and sold like gold, but the miners of its rich ore still represent a sleeping-giant constituency. Hip-hop locates their market potential and their potential militancy.”
Outside of New York City, the hip-hop nation was not yet born. It was a unorganized mass of true believers—dancers anxiously waiting for the DJ to drop a beat that would open a cipher; aerosolists in their bedrooms tearing open parcels of graf photos from towns they had never heard of; soon-to-be-turntablists scouring the bins in tiny specialty shops in Black or gay neighborhoods for twelve-inch records that had the word “rap” on their candy-colored labels. If there was to be a hip-hop nation, hip-hop journalism might provide a hip-hop nationalism to bring them together.
In August 1988, two white Jewish Harvard juniors named David Mays and Jon Shecter pooled two hundred dollars to put together a one-page hip-hop music tipsheet which they grandly named The Source. Both had been raised in upper middle-class liberal Jewish families—Mays in northwest Washington, D.C., Shecter in Philadelphia—and fallen in love with black style and culture. Upon arriving at Harvard in 1986, they realized, as Maximillian Potter wrote, that they were “probably the only two white guys wearing Fila suits.”1
Mays was an aficionado of Chuck Brown’s beat and was known as “Go-Go Dave.” Shecter, who called himself “J The Sultan MC,” had cut a twelve-inch single for his crimson-baseball capped crew called B.M.O.C. (Big Men On Campus), rapping over Wild Cherry’s “Play That Funky Music.” Shecter converted Mays to the gospel of hip-hop and they landed a weekend radio show they called “Streetbeats” on their campus station WHRB. Soon after, they launched The Source from their Cabot House dorm room. The tipsheet’s main attraction was the radio show’s “Hot Picks,” a rap singles shopping list for their listeners. In order to finance the newsletter, Mays sold ads to retailers. They netted $25 on their first issue.
This modest offering was not the first of its kind. Bay Area DJ David “Davey D” Cook, for instance, had launched a similar kind of newsletter for listeners to his KALX show on the University of California, Berkeley, campus about a year earlier. But Mays and Shecter were quick to grasp the size and the opportunity in the burgeoning national audience. Mays built The Source’s readership from a mailing list of listeners and industry folks he kept on his tiny Mac. As his industry contacts expanded, so did the mailing list. Major labels were still figuring out how to reach rap-friendly radio DJs, promoters, and retailers. The Source did the work of assembling just such a national network.
In under a year, with aggressive business acumen and a swaggering editorial voice, they had moved from a black-and-white Xerox format to a full-color covered, staple-bound magazine. Soon two other Harvard students, both Black—undergrad H. Edward Young and first-year law student James Bernard—came on board and become part owners. Bernard joined Shecter in shaping editorial content. Young helped Mays sell ads and publish the magazine.
Two years later, Mays, Shecter and Young graduated and moved The Source’s operations to New York City. Bernard moved to Berkeley to finish up law school and open a west-coast office. The staff expanded to include columnists like Dave “Funken” Klein, contributors like Chris Wilder, Matt Capoluongo, Rob “Reef” Tewlow, Bobbito Garcia and a host of passionate, big-dreaming heads. By now, the magazine claimed fifteen thousand readers, two thousand of whom were record and radio industry insiders in the rapidly professionalizing genre.
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.
Nearing the Crossroads
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.
Broadcast to Niche
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 tim
e, 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.
Hip-Hop As Urban Lifestyle
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.