Vibe Magazine shuts down
HarveyCanal
"a distraction from my main thesis." 13,234 Posts
I'm seeing people crying boo hoo about this on facebook, even trying to portray it as some moral issue, and I can't help but laugh. Why? Because at one point there was an awesome generation of hip-hop journalists who brought original street thought to the masses, in order for those masses to get used to the streets as they were. Then along came a new crop of ivory tower know-it-all's who instead of sticking to the guns of the street and thus hip-hop sold the whole shit the F*ck out to be middle-of-the-road pawns of delusional well-wishing. And now, obviously due to issues much larger than them, they are being sent packing and we're supposed to shed a tear for them? 
Comments
I don't remember when I stopped reading Vibe[/b], but it was a bit like The Source[/b] when they did an article on Bootsy Collins and the piece made absolutely no sense. It looked like it was cut and pasted from various sources and looked like a Mark Arm picture sleeve.
The one thing it did was strengthen what hip-hop journalism was becoming, and it brought forth an incredible amount of talent who knew what they were talking about. Who wouldn't want to be a part of that?
Truthfully it didnt have that long of a impact. It got loose real quick.
It was this Quincy Jones-esque idea of all of the "Urban" Exp.
I'm well aware...I was talking beyond just Vibe towards an entire generation of hip-hop related journalism.
For instance, writers either became disinterested or incapable of breaking new artists from the backwoods. Legend building became strictly a game for industry insiders rather than a game for cultural insiders.
And yes, IMO that was the main problem...the culture doesn't come from college campuses, period.
For maybe the first decade or so, they actually held true to that viewpoint. Yeah, they'd have a Mary J. Blige on the cover, but they'd also featured some up and coming neo-soul/acid-jazz act, a contemporary jazz artist who was big in his field, an interview with some veteran like Gil Scott-Heron, even the odd black rock act.
But around '03 or '04, their realm got real narrow. That is when they entered their "adult Right On!" phase, which is where they were when the plug was pulled. So they're really going to be hard to feel nostalgic for.
(Wasn't Eminem on the cover of the very last issue?)
vibe had some great articles in the past couple years. the feature piece on what happened to debarge for ex
Thanks,
JRoot
PS Does this mean that the issue of Vibe with Obama on the cover is worth more or worth less?
PPS Vibe's lengthy piece on the Debarge family from 2007 or so was still good journalism.
that was the exception, not the rule
the rest of the issue was sheer bubblegum, but the DeBarge piece was pretty solid.
And I never even LIKED DeBarge's music, but there's nothing like a good sordid rats-to-riches-to-rats tale, and that article laid out the story real well
but that's the difference, see. the Vibe of the 1990's was coming up with pieces like that on a regular basis. but in the 2000's, it became more of a rarity
That happened when artists seemed to accept the Hollywood way of promotion, something that before only happened in the music. It made the music not only bigger than life, but arguably what it wasn't (depending on one's point of view). It seems that you have to be a blockbuster in order to be important, or build your way up to blockbuster status. Otherwise, forget it. Obviously it's about making power moves, but perhaps the powers that be wanted to milk it for all its worth, but occasionally milked the teets with less nutritional value. I don't know who said it, but when Digable Planets won a Grammy, Ish mentioned a few things and a journalist had said "this is the moment when the industry said we don't want the intelligent shit, we want the other shit, and they've been pushing it ever since."
Change was inevitable, but at times I wonder when artists felt a need to comply, when things seemed to be about individuality. "It might blow up but it won't go pop" became a thing of the past very quickly, but was any of that a factor?
i dont know that it was 'sheer bubblegum' any more than any other magazines. they covered the-dream before anyone here was on his nuts. they had a big piece on dungeon fam prepared for the next issue. i dunno im not sure i buy your weird THEY SOLD OUT narrative here -- i mean i kind of h8 how major mags cover music in general but they def didnt seem worse than your average.
what mag would you like them to be more like? dont say Scratch (RIP)
I still have the Kool Keith interview saved, and well as a one page feature on Dionne Farris.
This is when it was in that big book format ala Rolling Stone/Spin.
How many issues did that run? I remember maybe 4.
F*ck that, give me a gansgta writer who writes from a gangsta perspective, a woman writer who writes from a woman's perspective, a Mexcian writer who writes from a Mexican perspective, a gay writer who writes from a gay perspective...and let them represent themselves as individuals instead of each trying to represent everyone at once...and then you are going to get some realness separated from all of the half-assed bullshucks that gets printed today.
Besides, you have to have life experience to be a writer...not just a full courseload and a blank check to make it up as you go along.
Hell, I feel the same way about Spin.
The magazine has always been a touch on the cheesy side, but at least with eighties Spin, they could put the flavor-of-the-month on the cover, but inside there'd be articles on zydeco, some indie-label rock or rap act, a traditional African or Mexican musician, the occasional new look at an older performer like a Willie Dixon or a Buck Owens. AND it was written well.
Now, it's all about Fall Out Boy and 20 or 30 other bands who sound like them. And the shit reads like a press release!
That's kinda the way it was with Vibe.
It started out dealing with a wide spectrum of black music and entertainment, and wound up being just a glorified gossip rag. Li'l Wayne and 20 or 30 other jokers who sound like him.
Which wouldn't be bad if the articles were well-written, but...the shit reads like another generic press release!
That's why the DeBarge article stood out like it did. It had facts and a point of view that put everything in perspective.
Back in 1995, stories like that in Vibe were a common thing. But by 2007 (or whenever the DeBarge piece ran), it was a left-field surprise.
Well, which is it?
You already know what the I'm saying, smartypants. Not in the mood for games today.
Naw man, Scratch was around for about 2-3 years (though, at this point, even I forget!). They probably had upwards 30-40 issues.
LOL, dude--the idea of a golden age of rap journalism is a tremendous myth.
Most rap journalism--and I hesitate to even call it that--was straight embarassing until relatively recently.
Yeah, there's a tremendous amount of dross these days, but there's also more quality.
I hope I'm not about to blow anyone's mind here, but modern journalism is very much about repurposing a press release. Some do it better than others, some add more to it than others, and some eschew the practice out of journalistic integrity, but aloooooooooooooot of the shit you read in your newspapers and magazines starts with a journalist holding a press release.
It started considerably before then. I think the big shift really came in the late '90s, right around Biggie's death. Vibe quickly began to transition into a high-end celebrity rag which more or less mirrored the excess around it.
Also, I have to echo a point Harvey makes - no other publication I've ever worked at had such a narrow editorial voice that it forced its writers into. This was a huge issue for many people who wrote for the mag - you could take some of the most compelling voices (say, Ernest Hardy) and then process it through the Vibe Machine??? and basically end up with the same style of copy everywhere else in the magazine. I'm not sure who instituted that policy but it annoyed the F*ck out of most of the writers I know and it's not as if it made the mag better for it.
That said, when Vibe was good, it was easily one of the best there was.
I don't know if I'd call it a golden age, but the late '80s seemed to bring together a lot of great, foundational writing and criticism together at places like the Village Voice, from whom Vibe recruited a lot of their early staffing. And several of the ego trip staff all cut their teeth at Vibe (and URB) first.
It's like through marketing studies, Vibe came up with what they treated as archetypal but in reality was more a fabrication of its ideal hip-hop persona...with its pros: educated, hard-working, liberal, sensitive, and its cons: consumer-driven, having an insatiable need to follow trends rather than blaze their own, etc. And the treatment was if you weren't already just like this person that you should strive to be like said person.
Yet, how many actually fit within those parameters?
Vibe was a crock of shit in that it pretended 75% of its viable audience away. Again, this was done with good intentions...to set the bar high or some shit like that. But instead, all it really did was patronize instead of inspire. Sure, it had its worth for many...but so too does People Magazine.
It was founded by Quincy Jones and Time Warner. I mean, Time Warner is about as corporate as it gets. That's like expecting from-the-heart media from MTV.
I'm looking at function over form though. Early on, you could pick up a rap magazine and learn something on top of there being enough street cred in it to still be attached to hip-hop as a street culture. And the last magazine to do that well was Rap Pages.
Since then, we get a bunch of Redbook-worthy profiles of even the grimiest of dudes in the game. It became like this cult of personality thing where personal relationships between artists, not to mention clothes and other MTVCribs-esque allusions, became more important than the music itself.
I dunno, that's just not what I'm interested in this shit for. And for many that actually are interested in that stuff, I believe they got led into it by the media rather than them requesting that the media stop covering the rawness and begin covering exactly how close to Bentley Farnsworth each artist can get in appearance and attitude.
This, if there has ever been anything, is definitely heart of a milkdud related.