![]() ![]() Even Jones himself is saying that, even though he wants Vibe back, "print is dead". In fact, you'll find the fastest, funniest and sharpest criticism of hip-hop on the message boards and blogs currently swarming gleefully over Vibe's corpse. With such a total corporate underestimation of the hip-hop audience's intelligence, rap has now become perhaps becoming the first musical genre entirely unmediated by the printed word (and things are looking grim for Source and XXL as well). Jones pulled out in 2003, selling the mag to a private equity firm, making Vibe a deeply depressing read over the last three years, and its flailing attempts to compete with the skeez and speed of gossip sites like little short of embarrassing. Meanwhile, the magazine itself has been falling apart, butchered and botched (review sections dropped, interminable list-issues) while generating publicity for all the wrong reasons – sparking off diss-wars between rappers over its "greatest MC" lists, getting sued by starlets for its lads-mag covers and raunchy spreads. However, the Vibe brand has been diluting itself across award shows, chat shows, trainers and rap tournaments for the best part of a decade. Only three months ago, the magazine unveiled mobile and video platforms to an indifferent world (and a worried staff). Ironically, Vibe found new ways for music magazines to make money. Which makes its demise over the course of this decade all the more aggravating. ![]() Like the print equivalent of a Hype Williams video, Vibe was dazzling, irresistable, sometimes too slick, but always compelling. The Tupac and Biggie front-covers from that era are iconic to rap – hip-hop lore notes that it was a Vibe awards-party Biggie Smalls was killed leaving – and for many readers the mid-90s explosion in hip-hop from local concern to global culture is intimately linked with the unassailable confidence Vibe exuded from its pages. They were just happy that within Vibe's pages, black artists could be written about by black writers in a way that wasn't sensationalist, titillating or trading on stereotypes. Certainly Vibe's first editor, Jon Van Meter was not at first sight your obvious hip-hop magazine editor – white, gay, privileged, fresh from editing Vogue – but with Source also co-founded by two white Harvard students, most readers didn't seem to care who was putting the mag out. The haters were legion: Simmons pulled his interest before Vibe's launch, claiming that "they didn't hire one straight black man to work on that magazine. For the first few years of its life, especially with the smart writing of Kevin Powell and Emil Wilbekin's eye-popping fashion spreads, Vibe managed to be exactly that, printing incisive and fascinating portraits of rap's biggest 90s stars that the mainstream music press simply couldn't match. The intention of both was clear – in a market dominated by fan-bible the Source, Vibe was going to be sexier, classier, more journalistic, more professional and better produced, a "Rolling Stone for the hip-hop generation" as Simmons pitched it. Vibe magazine, the demise of which has just ended a pretty shitty week for Quincy Jones, started its life in 1993 out of conversations between Jones and Def Jam co-founder Russell Simmons. ![]()
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