Thinking About Rap Magazines

Things have changed.

This is the first issue of The Source that I ever saw. It was sitting on a table in my friend Corey’s bedroom. July, 1994. I was 12. I’d never seen anything like it before.

Rap, this stuff I was listening to on the radio and consuming on television via music videos, was being discussed at length? I was instantly hooked and wanted more. Thus began my monthly sojourn to a small newstand-style store called J&J— in a Staten Island strip mall— where I’d purchase the magazine for whatever it cost back then.

As the years passed, hip-hop music got more popular. By the late 90s there were quite a few hip-hop magazines. XXL, Blaze, Rap Pages, Elemental, Mass Appeal, Stress, Ego Trip… etc. etc. I tried to consume as many as I could. In reality, I couldn’t get enough. My thirst for rap editorial was not easily quenched.

But it really sucks now that there isn’t a good central place to find the sort of writing that used to exist in these publications. Not just the writing, but strangely, the ads too. How else could I really know about what albums were coming out?

I was recently thinking about how the underground hip-hop scene, specifically East Coast backpack rap, cratered in the early 2000s. How there was this vibrant culture, where artists who were making fringe conceptual art records, could sell thousands of units, tour and have careers. And then suddenly, they couldn’t.

I know it’s easy to point the finger at technology, and ultimately that’s where I place most of the blame, but I can’t help but think of how a bunch of those rap magazines going belly up really hurt the smaller labels. You used to pick up a magazine like Elemental, and there was all this coverage of shit you might have never even heard of. There were ads for acts that weren’t really on your radar. On the strength of a review, you might have been inclined to check some of that artist’s stuff out. Maybe you even bought their record.

About seven years ago, blogs really exploded. It really became silly for me, or anyone really, to sit around waiting for a magazine when Nah Right was being updated 15 times a day with the freshest rap ‘content.’ Like, I still remember discovering that site. It was mind-blowing, this idea of just sitting here and checking back every 15 minutes or so, and new content being there. How progressive!

But the price of admission for both starting a rap blog and getting one’s music on a rap blog proved to be rather low, and soon that scene became terribly flooded as well. Page views became currency and blogs became businesses. It seemed like I could rely less and less on blogs to curate my rap experience.

Now we’re part of the social web, where we’re told referral is everything— What are our friends listening to? What are people tweeting about? What music is driving the conversation?

I’m not going to sit here and say that model is ineffective, but to a degree, it is. Not everyone wants to be in the conversation, nor do they want to pay attention to it either. The energy that one needs to expend to disseminate that conversation can be better spent elsewhere. Especially as you get older. You have more responsibilities. You have different priorities. That doesn’t mean you don’t want to listen to the best music there is, right?

The beauty of being able to buy a magazine is that everything is curated for you. There’s less work involved. Someone else has done that work for you. You are their audience. Their reader. They’re serving it up for you.

I used to subscribe to Entertainment Weekly. I think I just signed up for some introductory offer for 10 bucks or something and I wound up getting it delivered for 10 years. Putting out a weekly is difficult and often I would find the magazine to be a quick toilet read. It wasn’t something I spent a lot of time with. But one section, in particular, always had a lot of value to me. The reviews section. Man, I can’t even begin to tell you how many cool movies that section put me on to. It’s not about whether I agreed with the reviews or not, but just putting the movie in question on my radar.

A few years ago my credit card expired and my auto-renewal for EW subsequently failed to process. I no longer get EW. I realized recently that I never know what movies are coming out until the very last minute. Usually that’s because all the websites I follow on Twitter start posting reviews and news and anything tangentially related to the films that are coming out. But because many of these sites are in the page view business, they really don’t have much incentive to cover smaller films that fewer people care about. Consequently, I don’t know what the fuck is going on in cinema. I just know that such and such movie tanked and x movie grossed y amount of dollars.

Now of course you could sit here and tell me I should just go to the AV Club, and I’d be fine. Maybe I’m just desirous of something that doesn’t really exist anymore. I mean, I know EW is still in print (it is, right?). But even at that, I’m sure there was some part of me that was altogether dissatisfied with EW a few years ago, and that’s why I was okay with letting that subscription run out.

Ultimately, there really is a lot of value found in media brands when they’re done right. People look to thought-leaders for direction, for information, for clarity and opinion. Too often I’m looking at media brands now and I’m just seeing noise. When you hear a blast of white noise, what is your first reaction? You turn it off.

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