by Jeff Chang
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
The Moment of Truth
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 RSO and the Mind Squad
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 threatene
d 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.”
Staffers say that Mays asked them for coverage on RSO, and for the right of final edits. “We knew he was under pressure and Dave was damn near pleading to help with RSO,” says Dennis. “But by the time they got the deal with RCA, Ray had already dug his grave with us. His music, while average at best, wasn’t the worst thing that had ever appeared in the magazine, but it certainly wasn’t worth our integrity as a group to go along with the program. It was a situation Dave had to deal with by himself.”
In June and July, Scott specifically threatened associate editors Carter Harris and Rob Marriott. According to Bernard, when Scott still believed he was getting a review he told staffers, “If I don’t get at least a four, I’m putting niggas in bodybags.”22 He was threatening Mays again, too. Bernard told Mays they should call the cops, but he says that Mays refused to do anything. Then the threats suddenly ceased. “And I didn’t think about it at that point that it was strange,” says Bernard. “I’d see them and it wasn’t like it used to be, but it was fine.”
As the staff began to prepare for the November issue, which would hit the stands in October, Bernard penned a lead editorial decrying rapper violence and defining the values he felt that the hip-hop generation should uphold. “First, if artists are too thin-skinned to take fair (or even unfair) criticism, then don’t put your music in record stores, on music video shows or on the radio where it’s up for public discussion and consumption,” he wrote. “Our responsibility—whether you’re an artist, a writer, a fan or all of the above—is to build hip-hop. And hiphop cannot be built unless we hold each other up to the highest standards imaginable.
“I don’t equate building hip-hop with propping up the careers of individual artists when they put out weak shit,” he continued. “Ask anybody who has successfully built up any thriving sports team, business, grassroots revolutionary organization, or, fuck it, a Crip or Blood set, and they’ll tell you. Your friends ain’t those who soup you on the regular, holding their tongues. Your true homeboys are the ones who care enough to take you aside to let you know when you’re slippin’. It’s best for you and it’s best for the whole crew.
“Anybody who hasn’t learned this yet had better grow the fuck up.”23
The Edits
In September, the editorial staff closed the November issue and sent it off to the printer. The RSO fiasco seemed to be behind them.
Bernard and Mays’s relationship had completely deteriorated. The militant and the marketer were barely speaking to each other. Mirroring their split, The Source’s editorial and business sides had become divided camps. Mays proposed the two go to lunch at the end of the week. It was Friday, September 23.
Mays asked Bernard what he needed to do to make things right. Bernard and Shecter had been working without proper ownership papers, so Bernard asked Mays to take care of their stock certificates. Mays agreed. Bernard said he had to meet Dennis for a previous engagement. Mays nodded and said that he had one more thing to tell him. When they returned to the office building, Mays explained to Bernard that before the magazine went to the printer, he had exercised his right as publisher to insert a three-page feature into the November issue on the Almighty RSO.
Bernard was dumbstruck. This wasn’t keeping it real. This was gunpoint ethics and crony capitalism. He asked Mays for a copy of the article, and went to meet Dennis. “The first thing Reggie said,” Bernard recalls, “was ‘I guess that’s it.’ ”
The next day a copy of the article—a virtual press release entitled “Boston Bigshots” that Bernard realized was ghost-written by Mays himself—was under his door. He read it, composed a resignation letter, then called each of the editorial staffers to an emergency Sunday night meeting. When they convened, Bernard passed out copies of the letter he had written.
The staff agreed with all of Bernard’s points but one: Bernard did not need to resign, Mays did. They decided that Bernard would leave later in the week, and fax his resignation letter out. The following week, the rest of the staff would resign in solidarity. First, Shecter and Bernard would meet with Mays to get him to admit what he had done, and they would tape the conversation. The next day, the two confronted Mays.
Although Shecter was supposed to let Mays confess, he instead began debating with Mays, using arguments from Bernard’s still unreleased resignation letter. Mays realized that the staff was planning to expose his RSO gambit. When Shecter and Bernard left the office, he called Scott. By the afternoon, Scott had escalated the tension to the breaking point with a threatening voice-mail message for Shecter:
Yo, you fuckin’ bitch. You better keep your fuckin’ mouth shut. A-ight . . . You can’t help niggas out? You fuckin’ faggot. You let me hear one more fuckin’ word out of you, Jon, I’ma fuckin drag you up out of there. A-ight? You better keep your fuckin’ mouth shut. You fuckin’ sellout white boy bitch. Don’t fuckin’ play us, man, we fuckin’ knew you before, before there was any Source. Don’t fuckin’ play us.
Bernard, Dennis and Shecter took the tape to the police.
The detective told the three that they could make an arrest, but that Scott would be likely be back on the street in a day and an arrest might escalate the situation. Instead, they were offered the option of using a voluntary writ that would begin a conflict-resolution process. The next day was a RSO press day at RCA. The three agreed to deliver the writ then.
Shecter never showed up. So Bernard and Dennis walked it up to the press suite. When they entered, Scott and three others from the crew were surprised. “Ray literally looked like he had seen a ghost,” says Dennis. “He was visibly shook and stammered, ‘Yo, I didn’t know The Source was coming down.’ ” Bernard handed the summons to Scott and told him, “Look, you can’t be threatening our people like that.”
Scott’s mood turned sour. “You trying to embarrass niggas on our press day?” he shouted. The four rushed Bernard and Dennis, and they all exchanged blows. Bernard and Dennis made it to the doorway, caught the elevators down, and headed back to the office. By then, Scott had called Mays, who immediately headed up to RCA. As Mays and Scott discussed what to do, Bernard’s resignation letter came through on the label’s fax machine.
Bernard had written, “You have made a mockery of my efforts to protect our staff from physical assault as well as the magazine’s efforts to take a stand against the rising tide of violence in the Hip-Hop Nation. And in the process, you have destroyed every bit of the magazine’s integrity.
“Dave, it is a tenet of journalism that there is a wall between the editorial ventures and the business ventures,” Bernard’s letter continued. “But it seems as if you are willing to push me to shape the editorial vision so that we don’t step on too many toes in order for you to build your entertainment empire. This is simply unacceptable.”
Overnight, a remote automatic fax machine would deposit the letter in 750 industry offices. When Mays and RSO rushed back to the offices, the staff was gone.
The Rewrites
Later that week, Bernard told the press, “This is a fight for a precious thing, a magazine that speaks directly to a hip-hop generation from people who are part of that.”24 But he and his staffers knew the battle had already been lost; the conviction to storm the mainstream on their own generation’s terms, the standards and codes that they had upheld against the threat of corruption—all of that seemed to be crumbling. Hip-hop seemed free for the taking. On the other side of this moment lay empires and ruins.
Bernard and Dennis had found an investor willing to put up $3 million for a buy-out, but without Ed Young, they did not have the controlling interest to force Mays to sell. They considered other options, including “further violence and retaliation,” Dennis says. “But it was clear that there was nothing that could be done to salvage the situation. Our time at The Source was over, and outside of a time machine there was no way to repair the damage.” Soon after, Bernard and Shecter received their stock certificates from Mays, a move that was part preemptive strike and part pimp-slap.
Mays was forced to rebuild an editorial staff from scratch. He told anyone who would listen, “The Almighty RSO—whether they were my partner or not—merited some kind of coverage in the magazine, the way any other group that had an album on a major label that was making some kind of noise deserved coverage. Because of their problems with me, [the former editorial staff] refused to cover the group in any way.”25 The crew’s EP stiffed.