“I must say it has been a pleasure having you come to the library several times a day, hoping to see the new Source magazine. If I decide to get Billboard next year, does this mean I’ll see you twice as often?”- my high school librarian Mrs. Vallar, in my ’94 yearbook.
In 1991, back when I was a lowercase “d”, I was still pretty much a casual fan of music. I loved it with every fiber of my being, but I wasn’t all into the intimate details of who produced “O.P.P.”, or what part of Cali DJ Quik was from. The closest I would come to knowin’ about all that were the “facts” on the back of my Yo! MTV Raps cards, or one of those Word Up! magazine articles on some “Kwame‘s favorite snack is yogurt” type shit. This all changed once I read an issue of The Source.
It was December, and we had just moved into a new apartment in South Baltimore a couple of weeks prior. My brother came home one day with the year-end issue, and within a couple weeks, I had “inherited” it. I read that magazine inside and out- from the review of Ice Cube‘s Death Certificate to an article in which artists picked their favorite five albums of the year. It was also the first time I’d seen what going gold or platinum actually meant, because they had a full list of all the hip-hop/R&B albums that were certified that year. From there, I was off and running with my Source obsession.
In my opinion, The Source was the first “real” hip-hop magazine- it was the first I’d read that was less about posters than it was about content. Gradually, I started going to the 7-Eleven knockoff spot down the street and buying them myself. Every second Tuesday of the month, I’d come through early that morning, ready to pick the new one up off the shelf. Sometimes, I’d even be there on Monday evenings when the magazine man got there and put ‘em up. Every issue was a must-have situation, and I always had my $2.95 ready, until I eventually went ahead and subscribed.
I don’t know if I’d been that excited about reading since I first learned how to. See, with the other magazines, I would read through those and never look at ‘em again once I’d taken all the posters out. The Source was a whole ‘nother deal- it was an experience. It was like listening to a great album for the first time. I would sit down with it for at least two hours, with my fingerprints rubbing off on the front and back, studying this shit like it had life’s answers inside. Aside from pornography, WrestleMania, and Rap City, there were few things that I was more excited about seeing than a new Source issue when I was 12.
I must’ve read all those things ’til the got-damn covers came off. It got to a point where I even paid attention to who the writers were and all kinds of other shit. The features were always on-point, and often revealed things that wouldn’t become common knowledge until months later. Other things, like the “Unsigned Hype” column (which boasts a number of artists that went on to bigger and better things) and the “Dopest Rhyme of the Month” (when shit like that actually counted for something), were equally crucial- even with them being “minor” parts of the mag as a whole.
Then of course, there was the Record Report. As noted before by Eminem, there was a time when The Source‘s ratings really held weight. In some cases, the difference between me being interested in an album and givin’ less than a damn about it was how many “mics” it got. If I was interested in something that was coming out, a good rating in the Record Report was sometimes all the extra validation I needed to go ahead and cop it (case in point: the five-mic “classic” rating for Illmatic). At one point, I was even using their 1 to 5 system when doing my own reviews for my school newspaper.
There was a time when I seriously wanted to someday be a part of “The Source Mind Squad”. I never thought there’d be a day when I’d see a new Source in the store, flip through it once, put it back on the shelf and keep it movin’. I used to do that with every mag BUT that one. Maybe it’s how the net has rendered magazines unnecessary, maybe it’s because I’m damn near 30, or… maybe it’s because they fell off yeeeaaarrrs ago with all that Benzino nonsense. He was so much more valuable to them when they were just putting ads for his weak albums on the back. It was never a big deal to me that he was running it, but by ’04, he’d pretty much turned it into a glorified tabloid (complete with stock photos and cover stories that featured no actual quotes by the people on the covers).
Still, for a solid 10 years of my life, The Source was my shit. In fact, I still own a lot of the last good ones from between ’97 and ’01 (lost most of my ’92-’96 ones). The “Magazine of Hip-Hop Music, Culture, & Politics” was at one point just as vital to hip-hop fans as some of the websites like Nah Right and RapRadar are today. Who knows how much longer it has, but for its time, they had a run and influence unlike any other hip-hop mag before or since.
-D!
(shoutout to Vincent from THIMK)
Posted by Danj! 
