Bad Vibes

It was a bad week for Quincy Jones, the famed composer, arranger, producer and performer. On June 25, he lost one of his greatest and closest collaborators, Michael Jackson, with whom he helped craft several remarkable albums, including Off The Wall and Thriller. Then, five days later, on June 30, Vibe magazine, which he founded in 1993, announced it was shutting down operations. That's a lot of African-American culture to lose in one work week.

I was never a subscriber or even much of a reader of Vibe, but the impact the magazine had on the cultural landscape may partly explain why I didn't need to be. One of the stated goals at the publication's founding was to insist upon greater cultural respect and media coverage for hip-hop as an artistic force, not just as the latest noise or sign of impending apocalypse. In an era dominated by hip-hop style and entertainment, in which nearly everybody's grandparents have at least heard of 50 Cent, the need to assert hip-hop's credibility may seem ludicrous. Indeed, hip-hop has become so mainstream in 2009 that one might argue it stands in as de facto American culture, for better or worse. Yet when Vibe was launched in 1993, rap music and culture was under pretty heavy fire from cultural critics and the powers that be, with plenty of media types hyperventilating over Ice T's "Cop Killer" or N.W.A.'s Straight Outta Compton while remaining blissfully unaware of such classic contemporary offerings as De La Soul's Three Feet High and Rising, Digable Planets' Reachin' or Stetsasonic's In Full Gear, to say nothing of earlier classics by EPMD, Boogie Down Productions or Eric B. and Rakim (Public Enemy got decent amounts of coverage, although largely thanks to the ignorant spew coming out of Professor Griff's mouth rather than the full sonic barrage of Chuck D and Terminator X in full glory). Looking back to the early 1990s, just before the sludge of G-Funk arrived via Southern California and replaced James Brown breaks with George Clinton synth blats, one wonders why more mainstream critics weren't actively pushing the fact that hip-hop was truly entering a Golden Era and enriching popular music to an extraordinary degree. Vibe was one voice in the midst making the point.

The loss of the magazine is, of course, tied to both the larger economic downturn and massive shifts in ad revenue suffered by the print industry. Other music magazines have shuttered in the last year, including Blender and No Depression. But No Depression was a bi-monthly publication catering to a defiantly non-mainstream subgenre. Vibe was pretty huge, with a circulation over 800,000. In fact, one could argue that Vibe had become too large - so mainstream and image-conscious that it had become more of a glossy spread for overpriced clothing ads and movie tie-ins than a place to analyze cultural trends. I'm not sure how much impact the magazine was making upon the hip-hop scene during the last few years, and it seemed like the gritty and stubborn pride of old had been replaced with a slick corporate line that ultimately revealed the utter conservatism and profit deliberations at the center of much contemporary hip-hop.

Still, those ads were specifically and deliberately aimed at African-American audiences, and one simply doesn't come across many other mainstream publications doing the same. Will there be a replacement for hip-hop style in any print offering? Or have the online purveyors once again claimed victory? I sense a great loss as our cultural voices and critics see their publications shuttered and their talents scattered across the messiness of the Internet - a review here, a review there, lots of blogging without pay. That's not the way to achieve any kind of critical consensus on matters artistic or otherwise. Rather, our current situation resembles a noisy free-for-all, defiantly rejecting editing, fact-checking or simple reflection as mere "compromise". Such an approach may be good for the democratic spirit, but seems bad for intellectual health.

So, we've reached the point where dashed-off rants on IMDb and Amazon.com vie for bandwidth with the carefully crafted words of columnists and critics. Yet we've also reached a point in which one of Vibe's final issues carried a front cover photo and article on Eminem. One could point to this as yet another compromise, with a magazine founded to celebrate black culture reduced to propping up yet another white entertainer. Yet I think it says more about hip-hop's ascendancy within the greater culture - an ascendancy that Vibe partly helped to arrange.