Where’s Interscope When You Need Them?
A postmortem: XXL magazine, 1997–2014
By Byron Crawford
There was a time, after I began blogging for XXL, when I thought I should read the actual magazine, I mean if I was gonna be working for them.
Sometimes in the afternoon I’d go to a Barnes and Noble and just stand around for a few hours reading magazines for free. I started doing this at a Borders (RIP) back in the mid to late ‘90s after someone told me they encouraged people to do this—it was part of their business model.
I’d pick up a magazine and flip through it from cover to cover, skimming the parts that weren’t good for anything other than a skim anyway. If there was a feature that interested me, I’d read the entire thing right there in the store and then put it back on the shelf and walk out.
Like a boss.
There was never an issue with me needing to take a magazine with me because I had something better to do, because I had all the free time in the world. My time literally had no value, in the sense that I was incapable of exchanging it for money. Not at a McDonalds, not anywhere. XXL was one of the few companies to ever have the sense and the foresight to hire me, and that’s one of at least a few reasons it really will be missed.
Alas, I’m not sure if anyone will miss the articles. I could hardly ever bring myself to stand there in Barnes and Noble and read them for free, let alone actually buy a copy.
Not because they were so poorly written, mind you. Some of them definitely were poorly written, probably the majority of them, but over the years they employed at least a few writers I actually like. Seemingly anyone and everyone who wrote about rap music professionally worked for XXL at some point in time or another in the past 17 years, from the worst of the worst to the best of the best . . . relatively speaking.
The content, meanwhile, was comparatively uniform in that very little of it interested me personally, and I can’t imagine it interested very many people. I mean obviously, if they’re going out of business.
XXL began with a test issue put together in the weeks after Biggie Smalls was assassinated, and a premiere issue with a Volume 1-era Jay-Z on the cover—or an alternate version with Master P, for the kind of person who, presented with two magazines, one with Jay-Z on the cover and one with Master P on the cover, would pick the one with Master P.
XXL came to an end 17 years later with a washed up, elderly-looking G-Unit on the cover of what ended up being its very last issue, at least for the time being (more on that below). There was a brief window, in the mid ‘00s, when 50 Cent was popular enough that not only could he sell magazines, he helped XXL finally overtake an ailing Source, but 50 Cent’s music always sucked balls, and so did so much of the rap music that was popular during XXL’s run.
Not that it was their fault that the music wasn’t any good. It was XXL’s unique misfortune to have come along at a time when rap music had already run its course artistically.
There was hardly ever a good reason to pick up an issue of XXL.
Years later, after my XXL-blogs colleague Ron Mexico said something that upset Trick Trick, i.e. he tempted fate, someone from XXL randomly hit me up wanting to know my home address so they could sign me up for a free subscription. It was definitely someone who worked for XXL, rather than, say, one of Trick Trick’s babies’ mothers trying to fool me, and they may have honestly been trying to get me a free subscription. I just didn’t feel it was worth it to take that risk.
I never did respond to that email. Ron Mexico responded to Trick Trick in a post that supposedly included his home address. I copied and pasted it into the Google, and come to find out it was the address to an NYPD precinct in Harlem. Fortunately, I don’t think Trick Trick would leave Detroit to beat the living shit out of someone anyway. He might be “on paper” in the State of Michigan. You’d have to go to Detroit for that to even be an issue, and why would you want to go to Detroit?
One of the dangers of doing business in hip-hop is that gangbangers might show up and try to extort you or just kick your ass.
It’s like trying to run a Caribbean-themed restaurant in an area controlled by the mafia: even if you can get people to eat there, you’ll never make any money. All your inventory will go in the front door and out the back door, along with random fur coats and shit. Eventually, you’ll end up with no choice but to burn it down for the insurance money. I’ve seen it happen a million times (in the movie Goodfellas).
Dr. Dre generated hundreds of millions of dollars for Death Row and Interscope, of which he received little, if anything. 2Pac and Eazy-E were famously extorted by the Jewish Defense League, which threatened to kill them and then charged them money out the ass for “protection.” That time Kanye West got into a car wreck and later famously recorded the song “Through the Wire” with his jaw wired shut he supposedly got beat up by Chicago gangbangers who extort local celebrities, possibly the same people who killed Jennifer Hudson’s family. #allegedly
XXL was founded by guys who had to leave The Source because they were having problems with founder Dave Mays’ old, good friend from Boston, Ray Benzino, then known as Ray Dogg or something to that effect (or am I confusing him with the guy who sings “Why Must I Cry?”), and his rap group/vicious street gang The Almighty RSO. The Almighty RSO would show up to the Source offices, steal promo copies of great ‘90s-era rap albums from people’s desks while they were out having lunch, threaten to kick people’s asses and demand for articles on The Almighty RSO to be run in the magazine.
Source staffers didn’t want to run articles on The Almighty RSO for a number of reasons, including the fact that Dave Mays had been managing the group since he was at Harvard, so that would probably constitute a conflict of interest (I was pre-med), and perhaps most importantly, the fact that, if an article on The Almighty RSO said that The Almighty RSO sucked balls, i.e. if it were accurate, The Almighty RSO would probably beat the living shit out of the magazine’s staff, if not pull a Jaylen Fryberg on the Source offices.
Their best bet was to avoid mentioning The Almighty RSO altogether.
To their credit, the fact that The Almighty RSO didn’t just threaten to beat up the Source staff if they didn’t run an article on the group suggests to me that they were more reasonable than they were given credit for.
That would have put Source staffers in a position in which they had no choice but to run an article on The Almighty RSO. That would have also put the RSO in the position of having no choice but to follow through on their threat, if Source staffers still refused to run an article on the group, just to protect the integrity of a rap magazine—but if you Google The Almighty RSO, nothing about them suggests that they wouldn’t have kept their word. The fact that serious legal consequences may have resulted was neither here nor there. It’s probably not legal to steal raer rap CDs or threaten to kick someone’s ass either.
Because The Source was a rap magazine and because founder Dave Mays has cultivated a ‘90s-era wigger look to the point where he could pass for a light skinted black guy (he looks like a broke Jon B), law enforcement may not have intervened any more than they tried to get 2Pac’s money back when it was revealed that he’d been extorted by the JDL.
I don’t mean to suggest that Dave Mays was being extorted by Ray Benzino, because I honestly don’t know the nature of their relationship, and I don’t think it’s right to presume to know why someone does something for their friend.
We know that Ray Benzino was somehow given an ownership stake in The Source, and later an executive position that presumably came with a salary, despite not having been present—in any meaningful way—at the magazine’s founding and not putting up any of his own money, but we don’t know why and how this happened.
It could just be that Dave Mays fuxwit Benzino heavy on a personal level. I think I speak for all black people when I say that we value the kind of white people we can call from jail and actually expect them to pick up the phone. If we needed another friend who’s not worth a shit, we could just befriend another black person. Personally, I’m looking for the kind of white friend who’s willing to invite me over to his house to have sex with his sister, like the drill sergeant in Full Metal Jacket.
Because Ray Benzino is somewhat blacker than Dave Mays, he conferred a legitimacy on the magazine that was important when many of its early staffers walked out. The Source could still be said to be at least partly black-owned. The question is, if your black co-owner is himself only partly black, how much should that count? Arguably, there should be the equivalent of one full-on black person. So, for example, two Halfrican Americans would count as partly black-owned, but not just one.
At any rate, Dave Mays chose to insert an article on The Almighty RSO in a 1994 issue of The Source. He waited until the people who actually put the magazine together sent it off to be printed up, then called the printer and told them to insert a few extra pages, ostensibly for a last minute ad.
He then inserted an article on The Almighty RSO, the rap group he’d been managing for years, that he’d written himself. It didn’t mention the fact that The Almighty RSO sucked balls, for a number of reasons, including the fact that Mays himself had a financial interest in the success of the RSO, and maybe also because Benzino would have put a shoe on Mays if it had. Again, it’s just not possible to speak on the nature of someone else’s friendship.
Source staffers, including editor in chief Jonathan Shecter, now editor of Medium’s own Cuepoint, and XXL founder James Bernard, who I suspect also works with Cuepoint in some sort of administrative capacity, essentially ratted Dave Mays out in a fax sent out to all of their contacts in the music biz. I seem to recall once reading that it was sent to 6,000 people, but that doesn’t seem right, does it? They then took their proverbial marbles and went home. Shecter and Bernard reportedly later received $1.5 million for their stake in the magazine.
The other black guy who was a co-founder of The Source thought the fax was a bitch move and chose to stick around for a while after that. He sold off his stake years later, when rap music was closer to its commercial peak and before Mays and Benzino ran the magazine completely into the ground. I couldn’t find how much he received. He’s certainly free to share his personal information, including financial documents, using Medium’s new “Write a response” function. Otherwise I think it’s only fair to assume that he didn’t get anything at all. Perhaps this was the source of Benzino’s equity. No pun intended.
XXL was founded by James Bernard and Source music editor Reginald Dennis (not to be confused with Reginald Denny) only in the sense that they were amongst the magazine’s first employees.
No offense to those brothers, but they were founders of XXL magazine the same way that I’m the founder of the XXL blogs. Really XXL was founded by white people from Harris Publications, which owned the magazine until they sold it a few weeks ago to radio conglomerate Townsquare Media.
A guy named Don Morris, who’d been a “co-founder” of Harris’ basketball magazine Slam, came up with the idea for a rap magazine, which he pitched to his bosses. This was at a time when the media landscape was lousy with upstart rap magazines, oftentimes-amateurish knockoff versions of The Source.
Rap magazines in the 1990s were the equivalent of rap blogs circa 2008. It’s an aspect of hip-hop history that’s likely to be forgotten, if only because who gives a shit. Complex, if you can imagine, put together a list of all the rap magazines a while back. There’s more of them than you’d think.
So this guy’s idea to start yet another rap magazine wasn’t as visionary as, say, XXL’s decision to let me write a blog for them. It generated a shedload of money anyway. Morris also came up with the name XXL, the XXL logo and the tagline Hip-Hop on a Higher Level.
Bernard, Dennis and the rest of the people they brought over from The Source and elsewhere (the mastheads of the first few issues are roughly the length of the phonebook in the town where I went to college) were brought in to craft the magazine’s content, modeling it after The Source, but with fewer gangbangers and wack rappers on the premises.
As far as I know, none of these people were co-founders of XXL in the sense that James Bernard can be said to have been a co-founder of The Source, meaning that if they were ever forced to walk off in a huff they’d be entitled to a substantial windfall. Perhaps it’s a meaningless distinction in terms of the actual definition of the term co-founder, but it’s an important thing to consider when it comes to matters of ownership, cultural appropriation and exploitation, i.e. the only non-rape subject matter we’ll be discussing on the Internets from here on out.
In a recent issue of my free weekly email newsletter Life in a Shanty Town I said I never read XXL. This wasn’t a lie per se. What I meant is that I was never a regular reader of XXL at any point in its 17-year history, and now, unfortunately, I’ll never have a chance to be.
In fact, I bought at least the first three issues of XXL. I found them earlier today, while conducting “research” for this essay, on a bookshelf in my house in a shanty town, sandwiched in between more or less every issue of The Source from 1994 to 1997, when I was a subscriber; various ‘90s-era video game magazines, which, in retrospect, my parents should have viewed as a sign that I wouldn’t turn out right; and late ‘90s-era “men’s” magazines like Maxim, Stuff and Details, which were probably more fapworthy than you remember, even if you remember them as being imminently fappable.
Note that according to the Google, Details might be a magazine for gay guys now, like Vibe. Trust that when I was checking for it it was nothing of the sort. I’ve got an issue with the underrated Selma Blair on the cover that got me through some difficult times as a freshman in college.
Looking through these issues of XXL, it isn’t clear to me that I’ve read any of them, aside from some of the “front of the book” stuff—brief, inane capsules of information put together for the benefit of corporations that didn’t want their ads run alongside anything interesting . . . I’d imagine.
What do I know about magazines?
The third issue, with D’Angelo on the cover, looks like it may have never been opened. The features in the first two issues don’t seem familiar to me, and even though these magazines are old enough to legally have sex with in the State of Missouri (no Boutros), you’d think I would remember these articles if I’d read them. I remember articles I read in The Source from longer ago than that. I was a magazine-buying fool in the late ‘90s, and it’s likely that I bought these issues, flipped through them once or twice, and filed them on a bookshelf never to be looked at again until just now.
My subscription to The Source ran out in 1997, but I continued to buy it into 1999, finally giving up on it mostly because I was now in college and I could get a sixer for the same amount. If I didn’t learn shit else in college, I picked up a sense of priorities. In those last couple of years of high school, I bought all kinds of shit in addition to The Source, including the aforementioned men’s magazines and video game mags, Spin and various “stroke rags,” which I was able to buy, without ID, from the time I was 16, probably in part because I was a black guy in a white area, but also in part because I was only a child in the nominal sense of the term. I was a large brother.
Flipping through those first few issues is an interesting experience in light of what we know now about the history of rap magazines, rap itself and so many things that have happened subsequently. You can see how they’re both a reaction to what came before, in particular problems people seemed to have with The Source, and they also seem to predict some current trends in hip-hop journalism.
For example, clearly there’s an attempt to cover “regional” rap music just as much as “East Coast” rap. The first issue has features on Cee-Lo, upwards of a decade before Gnarls Barkley, Eightball & MJG and Master P. The East Coast, meanwhile, is represented only by Jay-Z, Ma$e and Rakim. And Rakim doesn’t really count, since it’s obvious he was picked to represent old school artists. He just happens to be from the East Coast. He’s what white people looking for a diversity hire would call a “twofer.”
Jay-Z and Master P were supposed to be on the cover together, but neither of them wanted to be on the cover with each other. Jay-Z didn’t want to be pictured with Master P because he felt he might somehow become a worse rapper just by being in the man’s presence. Master P didn’t want to share the cover with Jay-Z because he probably made like $100 million that year, and Jay-Z didn’t really start to blow up until “Hard Knock Life,” a full year later. He was on tour that summer as an opening act for Puff Daddy, who was touring stadiums as a rapper—before Foxy Brown went on, as I recall.
The second issue of XXL had features on Too $hort, E-40 and OutKast, from the South, with only Fat Joe and Redman representing the East Coast. The truly ridonkulous third issue, the last one I ever bought, had features on Goodie Mob, Above the Law, Brotha Lynch Hung, C-Bo and Young Bleed, representing everywhere else on the map, and DMX and The Lox from the East Coast.
There’s also an article on Ultramagnetic MCs by Brian Coleman, author of the new Check the Technique, Vol. 2. Failure to sufficiently cover old school acts had been an issue in The Source, and there was a minor, long since forgotten controversy involving old school artists not being invited to the Source Awards. Some 50 year-old men almost had to lay the smack down.
Similarly, OutKast once received a Source Award for Best New Artist, or something to that effect, only to be greeted by a chorus of boos. An upset Andre 3000 grabbed the microphone, declared that the South had something to say, and then didn’t say anything . . . which is really all you need to know about both Andre 3000 and people who consider him the greatest rapper of all time.
OutKast’s first album received four and a half mics, which was more than generous, as far as I’m concerned, though many, including OutKast themselves, would argue that it deserved a full five mics. The fact that it wasn’t declared an instant classic came to be viewed as evidence that The Source was biased against the South.
When Aquemini received five mics, in 1998, it was viewed as an honest acknowledgement of that album’s musical superiority by people who hadn’t been paying attention. Same with Scarface’s The Fix and Bun B’s Trill OG. LOL
Ironically, this patronizing treatment almost comes off as an insult, like treating a fat chick like she’s just as attractive as anyone else at your school. You’re likely to hurt her feelings even more than if you just kept it real with her and explained to her that she’s kinda gross but you’ll fuck her anyway because maybe that’s the best you can do right now; you’ve got your own problems to sort out. Providing equal coverage for rappers from all over seems like a good idea the same way that making the entire plane out of the same material they use to make the black box seems like a good idea to Jaden Smith. In practice, it mostly just results in a magazine that would interest hardly anyone.
Worse than the random yokel coverage are the articles on women, who don’t seem to be featured for any reason other than that they’re women, and the editors don’t want to be branded as sexist; and R&B singers, who seem to have made the cut because they’re black, and black people like R&B, right? Sometimes the woman doubles as the R&B singer, in another convenient twofer, since I guess there’s only but so many female rappers. The first issue, for example, has articles on both Faith Evans and Joi. The Faith article may have focused more on Biggie’s then-recent assassination. I wouldn’t know.
In general, there seems to be a lack of understanding of who would buy a rap magazine. The front of the book sections of the first couple of issues seem overly antagonistic towards both white people (which I approve of wholeheartedly, mind you), and black people who are viewed as not being sufficiently black, like Russell Simmons, who’s listed alongside the likes of Al Roker and the guy who played Carl Winslow in an article about non-threatening black men. In the second issue, Rush’s close personal homeboy Brett Ratner is clowned for claiming to have some special understanding of black people, and Mariah Carey is clowned merely for having appeared on the cover of Jet magazine.
I think Rush may have once tried to buy The Source, and later he was part of the original team that created Vibe as a sort of corporate knockoff version of The Source. Whether or not that had anything to do with this beef, I’m not sure.
James Bernard and Reginald Dennis were notorious for beefing with rappers. Once, B-Real from Cypress Hill complained to Bernard about TLC being on the cover of an early issue of The Source, in a foreshadowing of the kind of bad decision-making that went into at least the first few issues of XXL. This led to Cypress Hill being dissed in a year-end issue, in part for not having any black fans. Cypress Hill responded by burning a copy of The Source on stage. In the next issue, Reginald Dennis said something to the effect of how funny it would be if they accidentally burned their green cards.
Could any of this have had to do with both Bernard and Dennis being gone by that third issue? It’s literally impossible to say. I can’t even fix my mouth to form those words. LOL
XXL staff at the time must have been under strict orders not to discuss any personnel issues anywhere in the magazine. I experienced this years later, when editor in chief Elliott Wilson was relieved of his duties. I was told I was not allowed to mention it, which means I didn’t . . . until the guy who told me I wasn’t allowed to also left, at which point I mentioned it every other post. The editorial in that third issue, signed The Editors, does mention several changes both in the staff and the magazine itself, without saying what they were.
The reference to changes in the content must mean the political content of the first two issues—presumably the work of James Bernard, who was said to have been behind a lot of the political content of The Source—which is stripped from the third issue of XXL altogether, to the point where you’d never know it had been there if you hadn’t seen those first two issues. It’s a striking thing to realize, in light of who owned XXL and what little we know about the magazine’s history, but it’s also kinda neither here nor there if, like me and probably everyone else who picked up a copy of those first two issues, you never actually read any of those articles.
Otherwise, the content of the third issue is identical to the content of the first two issues to the point where you could switch out the articles with the articles in either of the first two and no one would notice. They’re written by a lot of the same people. When Bernard and Dennis left, for whatever reason, they must not have taken very many people with them.
An article in The New York Times from 2000 says that the black staff of XXL demanded an ownership stake in the magazine and were told to take their demand for an ownership stake and shove it up their black asses (I’m paraphrasing), at which point they walked off en masse. There were whispered allegations of racism, but not for any reason that I’m aware of other than the dispute over equity.
Elsewhere in the article, publisher Dennis Page is pictured leaning over Elliott Wilson’s shoulder ordering him to insert curse words and bad grammar into the copy to make it more authentically black. Like Brett Ratner, he claims to have a special understanding of black people, because his father ran a liquor store in Trenton, NJ, and he hung around black people as a kid, though he has no black friends as an adult. The Brett Ratner dis in one of those first couple of issues may have hit close to home for him. Is it any wonder the guys who probably came up with it didn’t last very long?
The fact that the magazine’s entire black staff is alleged to have quit possibly due in part to some sort of race issue seems like an interesting-enough story that I would have heard about it before I did, while conducting “research” for my first book, The Mindset of a Champion, in 2012, which makes me wonder how true it is.
It would be impossible to say for certain if the entire black staff of XXL quit unless the masthead of the third issue was accompanied by corresponding photographs in which the various writers and editors held a paper bag up to their faces, as applicants to Morehouse College were once required to, and a list of people who appeared to be darker than said paper bag was cross referenced with a list of people who worked on the first two issues. I’d be willing to put together the spreadsheet and what have you, but it wouldn’t be of any use without the photographs.
The editor in chief of the third issue of XXL was one Sheena Lester. In the time in between when the original staff left, in late ‘97, and when Elliott Wilson was appointed, in September of ‘99, the top editor job was passed around like a joint in a “directional school” dorm room. Lester didn’t have it for very long, and I think a few other people also had it. I checked the wiki, and it doesn’t say who. There’s a minimum level of notability required in order to be listed in Wikipedia. Whether or not that was an issue here I’m not sure.
By the time Elliott Wilson was considered, he was worried that he’d be viewed as a sellout if he took the job. Elliott discussed the issue with other members of the Ego Trip collective, with whom he’d edited a now-defunct rap magazine. Ego Trip had been somewhat politcal. Certainly it was race-obsessed. Elliott wanted them to tell him that he wouldn’t be a sellout for working for XXL the same way a desperate guy tells a fat chick she’s just as attractive as any of the other girls in high school. When they couldn’t bring themselves to lie to him, he broke down in tears and had to go into the bathroom of Ego Trip’s headquarters and regain his composure.
This wasn’t just a matter of principle. Elliott Wilson had $8,000 worth of credit card debt that he’d run up buying ‘90s-era hip-hop clothes when he was in community college, before dropping out. He’d been out of a job since he quit The Source, where he’d been music editor, supposedly over a review of a Kurupt album. Elliott says he gave the album three mics and then Dave Mays went in behind his back and increased the rating to three and a half mics.
I can’t imagine anyone, even Kurupt himself, giving a shit about a Kurupt album; and half a mic, on an album that was only bumped up to three and a half mics (still a mediocre rating) hardly seems worth the time it would take to go and edit. When I first read about it, again while researching Mindset, it seemed like BS, like there must be more to the story that we just don’t know about.
But there definitely is pressure on music editors at rap magazines to give out ratings that skew high. (Er, there was.) Years later, when I was with XXL, I heard then-editor in chief Vanessa Satten on Sirius satellite radio saying she’d avoid assigning a review for an album that would receive less than an L on XXL’s rating system. Literally everything reviewed in XXL, at least at that point, was guaranteed at least a three out of five.
There may have been something similar going on at The Source. The issue, then, wouldn’t have been whatever minute difference there is between a three mic album and a three and a half mic album; it was, What if Kurupt’s label was considering taking out an ad in the next issue and decided against it because they couldn’t be guaranteed their albums wouldn’t receive negative reviews?
Dave Mays probably never even heard that Kurupt album.
Long before XXL came to be known for dickriding Interscope Records, at the height of the 50 Cent era in the mid 2000, its “special relationship” with the label was solidified in an incident in which The Roots attempted to put their label on blast.
This was also long before the current incarnation of ?uestlove as America’s pet black music expert, the grinning Kevin Eubanks to Jimmy Fallon’s Jay Leno, and in fact, this incident might come as a surprise to people who only became familiar with ?uestlove during the Black People Twitter era. This was disgruntled, struggle rap-era ?uestlove, putting CACs on notice!
The Roots were interviewed for an article set to appear in a 2001 issue of XXL magazine. This was during the time in between the release of ‘99s Things Fall Apart and ‘02's Phrenology, and The Roots were having problems with their label, despite the fact that Things Fall Apart had gone gold and they’d won a Grammy for that song “You Got Me.” It wasn’t clear that another Roots album would even be released.
The Roots landed on MCA Records, a subsidiary of the Universal Music Group like, say, Def Jam or Interscope (if not nearly as successful), through the same late ‘90s-era major label consolidation in which so many groups were dropped like a bad habit. It’s likely that The Roots would have been dropped as well if Things Fall Apart hadn’t been as successful as it was.
Still, they’d yet to release an album that earned back its advance. Not even Things Fall Apart, let alone their first few albums on Geffen, which cost that label boatloads of money. Geffen, at the time, was flush with money from those Nirvana albums, of which Kurt Cobain supposedly only ever received $300,000 in his lifetime, possibly contributing to his suicide.
?uestlove, in a roundabout way, may have killed Kurt Cobain.
MCA Records wasn’t about to spend shit promoting the next Roots album. This was at a time when rap videos still cost $500,000 on the low end and into the seven figures on the high end. Karrine “Superhead” Steffens was still showing up to the sets of rap videos and giving people blowskis which she’d later write about in Confessions of a Video Vixen. XXL’s own kris ex was on the set of the Ja Rule video where she received her famous nickname.
There was a controversy having to do with the song “You Got Me.” Jill Scott co-wrote and sang on the original version of the song. MCA didn’t feel a Jill Scott version of the song would have sufficient commercial appeal, because Jill Scott. (Don’t front like you haven’t seen the noodz.) The Roots were forced to rerecord “You Got Me” with Erykah Badu, who was red hot in the late ‘90s, both in terms of her looks and her career.
The “You Got Me” single was released under the artist name “The Roots featuring Erykah Badu.” Eve, who raps the song’s second verse, wasn’t credited, nor did she appear in the video. Upset with the group for not being properly credited, she may not have been interested in appearing in the video. The video instead features an Eve lookalike. Of course Jill Scott, then an aspiring artist, wasn’t allowed anywhere near the video. This was no Redman video.
Ironically, both Eve and Jill Scott released projects that were even more successful than The Roots’ album shortly thereafter. They may have even earned back their advances! Essentially, The Roots had thrown their own people under a bus, and in the progress destroyed the progressive image they were attempting to cultivate (albeit only for people who were paying attention), for no good reason.
Somehow word got back to the label that the Roots planned to reveal all of this in XXL, and believe it or not, they didn’t like the idea. Word on the street is that MCA’s parent company, Universal Music Group, threatened to pull its ads from not just XXL but other Harris Publications magazines, like Guns and Ammo for Law Enforcement, if they ran the article.
At the time, Interscope Records CEO Jimmy Iovine was rumored to secretly run the entire Universal Music Group. In Ja Rule’s autobiography Unruly, in which he claims to have beat up 50 Cent twice, he breaks down how Iovine forced Def Jam to drop him because he was going at 50 Cent and 50 Cent was making way more money for Interscope than Ja was making for Def Jam.
Shortly after the release of Phrenology, MCA Records was folded into Geffen Records, which itself was later folded into Interscope. The Roots’ next album, the dismal Tipping Point, was released on Geffen/Interscope. Its lead single was a knockoff version of a 50 Cent song.
The article on The Roots was pulled from XXL. In its place ran a photo of the group bound and gagged with duct tape, beneath the headline “The Greatest Story Never Told.” Interscope is alleged to have increased its support of the magazine in subsequent issues as a show of appreciation. A version of the article later ran in Philadelphia City Paper.
While flush with ad revenue from Interscope, XXL languished far behind its competitors. In 2000, a year after Elliott Wilson became editor in chief, XXL reported its own circulation at 175,000. The Source’s circulation at the time was 425,000, and Vibe’s was a whopping 700,000.
Most likely, Interscope didn’t mind buying a shedload of ads in XXL because XXL couldn’t charge very much for them, because hardly anyone read XXL back in the early 2000s. I’m not sure if I believe that 175,000 people copped XXL each month. Researching past issues to write this essay, I don’t even recall seeing them in stores.
It wasn’t until a few years later that XXL finally overtook The Source, in a vicious one-two punch in which Interscope both pulled its ads from The Source and offered access to its top acts to XXL. The Source found out the hard way what happens when you don’t capitulate to Jimmy Iovine’s demands the way Elliott did.
In the years since much of the original Source staff quit over The Almighty RSO trying to force its way into the magazine and threatening to kick people’s asses, Benzino had somehow been retroactively named one of the magazine’s co-founders, along with Dave Mays (fuck those other fools), and also given an exec position as Chief Brand Officer, or something to that effect — which is ironic, because he pretty much single-handedly destroyed the Source’s “brand.” As the saying goes, Ray Benzino only had one job to do, and he somehow fucked it up.
The early 2000s was the closest Benzino ever came to having a viable career as a rapper. I can vaguely recall actually seeing the video for “Boottee,” from ‘01's The Benzino Project, on BET. According to the wiki, “Rock the Party,” from ‘03's Redemption, was his highest charting single. It cracked the top 20 of the Billboard Hot 100 and appeared on the soundtrack to the Jason Statham movie The Transporter. Those Benzino albums would be stuffed to the gills with big name guest appearances, and the rumor was that artists were being forced to appear on his albums if they wanted to be featured in The Source.
Of course the other thing that Benzino was most famous for during this period was his beef with Eminem. I imagine many people, if they never ever heard another Benzino song, may have heard “Pull Your Skirt Up”—not to be confused with Lord Jamar’s classic Kanye dis “Lift Up Your Skirt.” Presumably, the impetus for this beef was the fact that Eminem’s second and third (major label) albums, 2000's The Marshall Mathers LP, and ‘02's The Eminem Show, both sold 10 million copies, and Benzino thought that dissing Eminem might be the thing to put him over the top; he might have a viable career as a rapper just yet!
I sunk a good 15 minutes of my life that I’ll never get back into trying to find out why Eminem and Benzino were beefing with each other, and I’m honestly at a loss. The most I could find is that Benzino honestly did see it as his role to protect hip-hop from cultural appropriation, which has since destroyed hip-hop, and I refuse to accept that as an answer. If Benzino was so upset with Eminem back in the early 2000s, where has he been the past few years, during the reign of Macklemore and Iggy Azalea? All he’s done is act on hoodrat reality series and get shot by his own cousin at his mom’s funeral. At least Eminem can rap.
At the same time, Elliott Wilson was going back and forth with The Source each month in his legendarily ridiculous editorials. Like Benzino, his purpose was to try to boost his own career by trying to enter into a beef with someone more successful than he was at the time. He was also still bitter about the thing with the Kurupt album and whatever else may have led to him having to leave The Source. He took a lot of shots at then- (and current) Source editor in chief Kim Osorio, who was rumored to be, ahem, “romantically involved” with many a rapper. 50 Cent says he let her play with his balls back before they had much value.
This all culminated in the February ‘03 issue of The Source, which hit the streets in January of ‘03. Benzino’s album Redemption dropped January 14th, but you’d be a fool and a communist to suggest that there was a connection. That month’s issue of The Source famously came with a double-sided poster. On one side, a huge guy in a Source t-shirt breaks Elliott Wilson in two, and on the other side, Benzino holds Eminem’s severed head. Inside the magazine were glowing profiles of Benzino, articles critical of Eminem and an ad which offered a free three-month subscription to The Source to anyone who actually bought the Benzino album.
Interscope Records responded by doing the same thing they threatened to do if XXL ran that article in which The Roots put MCA on notice: it pulled its ads from The Source. At the time, Eminem was coming off of two of the best-selling rap albums of all time, and 50 Cent was about to drop Get Rich or Die Tryin’. XXL made a mint putting 50 Cent on the cover every three months throughout the mid to late ‘00s. He was even on the cover of what ended up being the very last issue. If he wasn’t as much of a draw as he once was, it was still the best they could think to do.
That same month, XXL put Dr. Dre, Eminem and 50 Cent on the cover. The tagline read, “The Real Hip-Hop Is Over Here,” a reference to KRS-One’s Nelly dis song. That month, for the first time ever, XXL outsold The Source. Elliott Wilson found the formula to success, which he then proceeded to ride into the ground for the remainder of his tenure with XXL, with Lil Wayne taking Fiddy’s place towards the end there. To his credit, what was viewed as Interscope dickriding may have honestly just been desperation and lack of imagination.
50 Cent appeared on the cover again later that year, if you can imagine. It was the magazine’s 50th issue, and 50 Cent was chosen to serve as “guest editor.” It was the first time he appeared on the cover by himself. The very last page of this issue, the same page on which The Roots were once pictured bound and gagged with duct tape, featured an illustration of an aging Benzino rapping on stage with his son, with a caption that read, “They won’t stop rapping til they retire,” a reference to a line from Run-DMC’s “King of Rock,” natch.
Benzino saw this, and I guess he didn’t find it amusing. He was also upset about rumored plans for the cover of the next issue of XXL, which would be a picture of Nas burning a copy of The Source. In reality, it was a picture of Nas burning several rap magazines with himself on the cover, including both The Source and XXL, but you try explaining that to an angry Ray Benzino. Benzino decided that this was finally enough.
It was time he pay Elliott Wilson a visit in his office at XXL.
Benzino, Dave Mays and umpteen goons walked from their offices at The Source to XXL. Benzino told the receptionist at XXL that he was Smokey Fontaine, the guy who used to run Dame Dash’s America magazine, whom Dame beat up, and that he needed to speak with Elliott Wilson. Elliott didn’t have the foresight to provide his receptionist with a photograph of Benzino and strict instructions not to let him into the offices for any reason. Because it was a rap magazine, they probably did get a lot of sketchy-looking black guys coming up there.
Elliott tried to steer Benzino into a conference room so his staff couldn’t see Benzino do whatever he was about to do, but Benzino wasn’t having it. Benzino then proceeded to deliver what Elliott himself described as one of the most vicious tongue-lashings ever received, including a lot of accidental spitting in Elliott’s face. There’s no record of what he actually said, other than that he told Elliott that he was no longer allowed to dis Benzino, The Source and Source editor in chief Kim Osorio, and he forced Elliott to apologize in front of the entire XXL staff.
If only smartphones had been around back then.
Aside from a general decline in interest in rap music, it was XXL’s inability to transition to a successful website that sealed its fate, and I’m proud to say I was a part of that failure.
I was arguably the most integral part of said failure.
I blogged for the XXL website from the time the site was “relaunched” in early 2006 (before, it hadn’t been anything other than an order form for a subscription to the dead tree version) until they decided to get rid of the blogs altogether in early 2011, which many would argue was the end of that website “for all intensive purposes.” At least a few people thought XXL went out of business back then and were surprised, a few weeks ago, to hear that it was sold to Townsquare Media, which immediately discontinued the print version. But again, let’s not get ahead of ourselves here.
I’ve never had much in the way way of insight as far as how magazines and websites decide who gets to work for them and who doesn’t. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be writing this. I know it helps to be white. LOL
The original staff of the XXL website was a melange of people who actually worked for XXL and people who’d attempted to write album reviews who weren’t considered good enough. You can go over the list of contributors and try to figure out who was who. I don’t want to upset anyone.
XXL sent out a press release announcing the impending relaunch of its website that was found by someone else I don’t care to argue with at this point. (He might be dead anyway. At least a few people from back then are.) It circulated the hip-hop Internets. People took a look at it and were like, Who in TF are these people? If you were going to start a hip-hop blog, and you could probably pick anyone, why would you pick them? In an angry blog post that’s since disappeared from the Internets, Elliott Wilson was said to resemble a bag of grits with an S-Curl, or something along those lines, and charged, figuratively, with “felonious cocksucking with attempt to swallow the evidence.”
It was in this atmosphere of slander and suspicion that I was brought on, largely to placate the hip-hop blogosphere. I didn’t give a shit why I was brought in, because I didn’t have shit else to do. I’d already been out of college for a couple of years at that point, and I had no prospects. McDonald’s wasn’t hiring—I checked. I was coming off a period when I didn’t have a job to speak of other than my blog, and I came seriously close to ending up out on the streets. I knew very little of XXL, and needless to say I wasn’t aware that it was allegedly run by racist white people. I can’t say that I wouldn’t have still taken the job even if I was, though keep in mind I say that as a 33 year-old who’s worked for more racist white people than I can remember. That’s just a fact of life for a black man in America.
I was told that I was allowed to say anything I wanted to say, which was perfect for me, because every now and again I’ll say something that rubs someone the wrong way. I know . . . it’s hard to believe. I don’t know if I’d been there a month before I was involved in my legendary beef with Bun B. I’ll spare you rehashing it in its entirety and instead suggest you check out my first book, The Mindset of a Champion, in which it’s covered.
The gist of it is that one of my colleagues, Noz, was really into UGK. I’d heard of UGK, growing up in the ‘90s, but I never paid much attention to them, because UGK. I then heard a guest verse Pimp C spit on a T.I. album that was out at the time. The rhyme scheme he was using wasn’t any more complex than something Dr. Seuss might come up with, and it wasn’t clear to me why it was so important for him to be released from prison, if that’s all he brought to the table.
Bun B read this and must have disagreed with it, and the rest, as they say, was history. The two of us went back and forth for a while after that, with me breaking down why a lot of his smart-sounding arguments actually weren’t very smart at all, and revealing the real reason why Pimp C went to prison in the first place, which I’d read on okayplayer back when I was in college. Supposedly, he was walking around in a fur coat in the middle of the summer in Texas. He had an AK-47 tucked inside it, which he pulled out on a woman in a mall. The only aspect of my version of the story that Bun B ever disputed was that it was a woman he threatened. Bun says there was a whole group of people, and one of them just happened to be a woman.
So be it.
After my third UGK post in a row, this one mocking Pimp C’s PCP habit, I was contacted by someone from XXL who said he thought we’d agreed that I wouldn’t just continue to slander UGK indefinitely. Actually, he’d emailed me and said he thought I shouldn’t just continue to slander UGK indefinitely. I hadn’t agreed. I’d been told I was allowed to say whatever I felt like saying. Still, I may have been in danger of losing a job I was doing for free anyway.
That would have been difficult to explain to my parents.
Occasionally, there’d be times when I had to go back and edit or delete something I wrote. Elliott would see something I wrote that he didn’t agree with, and he’d have one of his lackeys play the good cop role. “Personally, I thought it was amusing, but Elliott says you have to change it.”
Once I referred to Marley Marl and KRS-One as a couple of old crackheads in a post I wrote about their album Hip Hop Lives. KRS-One merely acts like a crackhead, but Marley Marl was on crack for years. I ended up reading an article on him as a result of something I wrote about Kanye West, which I promise I won’t get into here. (I wrote a book about it.) I’m sure Elliott was aware of this. Nevertheless, I was forced to edit the post. I ended up replacing the word crackheads with the word leprechauns, a reference to an early YouTube video in which a crackhead down in Georgia or somewhere claims to have seen a leprechaun. A mere matter of days later, Marley Marl suffered a heart attack as he set out on tour to promote the album, but you’d be a fool and a communist to suggest that crack smoking had anything to do with it. After all, Andrew Breitbart died of “natural causes” at the age of 43. These things happen.
The first post I ever wrote that disappeared down the memory hole, so to speak, as if this were the novel 1984 and not a damn rap magazine website, was something I wrote about 50 Cent being upset that XXL had interviewed this guy Chaz “Slim” Williams.
Williams had been a famous bank robber back in the ‘70s and was 50 Cent’s manager back in the “How to Rob an Industry Dreaded N-Word” era. There may or may not be a Chaz “Slim” Williams episode of the Combat Jack Show. I can’t remember. 50 Cent alleges that Williams set him up to get shot nine times, or didn’t prevent him from getting shot nine times or whatever. Williams was interviewed to rebut claims 50 Cent made in an issue a few months before.
‘When 50 Cent heard about this, he called Elliott and demanded that the article be pulled, threatening that Interscope would pull its ads the same way they’d pulled their ads from The Source. Elliott must have called Interscope using the red phone on his desk and confirmed that 50 Cent didn’t have the power to pull ads from magazines. The issue went to print with the Chaz “Slim” Williams article in tact. ?uestlove quietly groaned to himself and then “ate his feelings.”
The blog post I wrote about it, meanwhile, lasted for an hour or two before it was deleted altogether. I didn’t get a chance to save a copy for myself, to remenisce on when I’m in my 60s, or anything. This set a bad precedent, and several more of my posts ended up disappearing in this fashion. Maybe as many as 30 of them. I’d write something, then I’d check back a few hours later to see if anyone commented on it, and the shit would be gone.
Speaking of shit being gone, it wasn’t long until Elliott Wilson was shown the exit. I only ended up working with him for a little less than two years. I was there for a full five years total.
His firing came as a complete surprise to me, maybe because I bought into the idea of Elliott Wilson as the greatest hip-hop journalist of all time, at least on a subconscious level. His prose is serviceable, if not anything you’d read if you weren’t already interested in the subject matter, and his ethics are questionable, but look at how many high profile jobs he’s had. There’s a tendency to want to think that everyone who has more money than you is better than you, the fact that they dropped out of community college notwithstanding—it’s the ideological basis for much of the interest in post-Black Album Jay-Z.
It was never revealed why exactly Elliott was let go. I’ve read that his contract had come to an end and Harris brass simply declined to renew it—which doesn’t make sense to me, because I think he started there in the summer of ‘99, and he was let go at the very beginning of ‘08. Would his contract not have come to an end during the summer of ‘07? To paraphrase Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, I know how to do math. Rumors circulated that management found cocaine in his desk, that he had to be escorted from the building by security and that it was on his birthday. I can confirm, using the Google, that it wasn’t on his birthday. It was a week before he turned 37.
In retrospect, he was probably let go because he just plain couldn’t deliver. This wasn’t obvious to us at the time because we didn’t have access to the circulation numbers and the company’s financial information. It’s the same reason it came as such a surprise years later when XXL was sold to Townsquare Media, probably for not very much money at all, and the print version was immediately discontinued. Elliott only really had one trick—he’d find whoever was the most popular artist and put them on the cover as many times as he could. It may have led to some success back during the Get Rich or Die Tryin’ era, but how many times can you pull the same shit?
Ironically, XXL ultimately fell victim to the same systematic underdevelopment of black artists that it aided when it helped censor The Roots. The industry didn’t invest in building rappers’ careers, because it could give a rat’s ass about a rapper’s career, and this resulted in there not being very many rappers famous enough to put on the cover of a magazine. This has been the music biz’s m-o with regard to black artists for years, and in fact it predates rap music. Black artists on major labels are shuffled off to dedicated black music departments, where the labels don’t spend Jack Schitt to promote them. If they somehow blow up anyway, which happens fairly often, the TIs get a bonus. If they don’t, they’re simply dropped like a bad habit and replaced with the next crop of potential superstars.
XXL’s annual Freshman 10 issue, which I believe began with Elliott Wilson and then continued under his successor Vanessa Satten, is the hip-hop journalism manifestation of this phenomenon. There was one issue, that predates the proper education-themed issues, that nevertheless was the beginning of this trend. According to the wiki, this was in 2008, though that seems incorrect. It may have been as far back as 2006.
It looks like the idea may have been to gather 10 guys whom the major labels had been pestering XXL to feature who weren’t nearly famous enough to be on the cover by themselves. Some of them had already been around for a while at that point. Subsequent Freshman 10 issues would focus on up and coming artists, though they’d occasionally feature guys who were already in their 30s.
More than 70 artists were featured on the cover of XXL Freshman 10 issues in the time in between when the feature began and when the magazine went out of business. It’s truly a rare honor. Most of them didn’t go on to do shit. The two who have been most successful have been Macklemore and Iggy Azalea, both from 2012. Read into that what you will. Chief Keef and Trinidad James, both from 2013, were recently dropped like a bad habit, from Interscope and Def Jam respectively. They went from being hot new artists to watch to being dropped from the label in the space of a year.
Life really does come at you fast.
Due to the state of the economy, XXL never would have run out of “aspiring rappers” to put on the cover, but so far literally none of them have gone on to become someone who could really move magazines from newsstands, like a mid ‘00s 50 Cent, and if any of them ever did it would have been dumb luck. I don’t know that a single one of them has since appeared on a cover by himself. If that’s true, that’s a pretty low batting average. Even if it’s not, there can’t be very many of them. Looking at the list, I seem to recall that OJ da Juiceman shared a cover with Gucci Mane shortly after appearing on that year’s Freshman 10. That clearly doesn’t meet the criteria I established, but I’m willing to be generous here. We’ll call that a half. And shit, it’s OJ da Juiceman.
Odd Future were the 2011 equivalent of an Iggy Azalea or a Trinidad James, but way more talented. And so young!
You don’t hear about them as much these days because everyone who pretended to be so into them back then has long since moved on. They were never on the cover of a Freshman 10 issue, maybe because there’s like 40 of them and that would be retarded, but they seem to have followed a similar career trajectory anyway.
I wrote an article in which I compared Odd Future to Juggalos, and it may or may not have led to me being fired from XXL.
This was back when Insane Clown Posse was popping. They had that song “Miracles,” with the line, “Fucking magnets, how do they work?” Which I’m pretty sure was explained in 10th grade science class, though I’ll admit I have no idea how they work. I got such powerful boners in 10th grade science class, I couldn’t pay attention. I could have just as easily stayed home.
Saturday Night Live somehow managed to create a parody version of the “Miracles” video, which already seemed like a parody in the first place, and I’d say that tells you pretty much all you need to know about Saturday Night Live. Similarly, this was the height of publications like Vice and the Village Voice sending hipster CACs to the Gathering of the Juggalos to report back on whether or not there were open air drug markets and naked fat chicks.
Jared Lee Loughner, the nutty CAC who shot Arizona congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords, was probably a Juggalo. An article that came out in The New York Times a day or two after the shooting said he was upset because he couldn’t understand how magnets work. They failed to put one and two together because The New York Times is a mere shadow of its former self.
Tyler the Juggalo was upset because I called Odd Future black Juggalos. He said they weren’t, and in fact he didn’t even know what a Juggalo was until just then.
I think he went to one of those high schools where they teach you about hip-hop, and this just goes to show there’s no teaching and learning going on in those places, if it wasn’t already obvious.
He also didn’t care for the part where I suggested that Odd Future were being astroturfed—that they didn’t go, seemingly overnight, from Tumblr to Late Night with Jimmy Fallon on the basis of Tyler the Juggalo’s bars.
Tyler the Juggalo was so upset in fact that he was reduced to tears. He said so himself in one of those multi-tweet bitch-fits celebs sometimes post when they’ve got something especially important to share with America.
In this one, Tyler the Juggalo said he seriously debated dissing XXL but decided against it, presumably because he might need to be featured in XXL one of these days. Better to dis a relatively obscure blog like 2DopeBoyz. If they had in fact been signed to Interscope, they could have tried to get Jimmy Iovine to pull ads.
I’d finally made a rapper cry. There’s worse ways you can get fired from your job talking shit about rappers on the Internets two days shy of your 30th birthday, I’m sure.
My post on Odd Future disappeared from the Internets not too long after Tyler the Juggalo complained about it. It was the last of my posts to disappear down the memory hole, and it’s one of the few you can probably still find somewhere on the Internets, it being the benefit of what’s known as the Streisand effect. XXL’s attempting to censor the post led other sites to copy and paste the text from Google’s cache, and I think a few MSM outlets may have even reported on the controversy.
A few days later, I went to log in to the XXL website, and my password didn’t work. I figured it may have been a tech issue. The XXL website was a piece of shit the entire time I was there. I emailed a guy who was nominally in charge, or at least more so than I was, and he said it was because I didn’t work there anymore; they’d fired me a few days before and just forgot to tell me. Because the staff had turned over six or eight times since I began, they may not have had my email address.
I asked the kid if the Odd Future post had anything to do with this, and he said it didn’t. They were just getting rid of the blog section of the site altogether, and since that’s all I did there, they didn’t need me anymore. I asked him if there was anything else there I could write, and he said they’d be focusing more on straight news items, which I probably wasn’t capable of writing.
He may have been under the impression that my college degree comes from a special kind of school we have here in the Midwest where you’re allowed to write stories about rubbing one out to pictures of girls you found on Tumblr, or whatever the equivalent of Tumblr was at the time, peppered with the phrase no homo.
Yes, this was a white guy, but you’re the one who’s a racist if you think race had anything to do with it. Plus, take a look at XXL’s website, which is still on the Internets. That shit really does look like it would be difficult to write.
At the very least, I suspect that this guy really was being sincere when he said that me being let go was because they were getting rid of the blog section of the site, not because of the Odd Future post. I wrote a lot worse things than that while I was there, and management probably didn’t even read them.
They honestly didn’t give a shit.
The tragedy of my career as a semi-professional hip-hop journalist coming to an end in this way is that you know good and well there were people who weren’t worth a damn who continued to draw a paycheck from XXL until it went out of business, and maybe to this day, as a web-only publication under Townsquare Media.
No offense to any XXL staff past or present, I’m just saying. The XXL website was never worth a shit, ever. It’s the reason Harris Publications finally decided to cut their losses. They only know how to publish dead tree magazines, and hip-hop is all Internets now. I was let go because they probably hired some dumbass to fix their website, and his suggestion was to get rid of me. They probably paid him more in one year than they paid me in five. FML
The Too Short Fingerbang Incident is proof that there still wasn’t anyone minding the candy store, so to speak, even in the post-Bol era. Dammit, I should have been part of the Too Short Fingerbang Incident! No homo.
XXL made this video where Too Short gave advice to middle school-age kids about how to deal with women, based, presumably, on his dealings with crack whores in late ‘80s Oakland. One of his tips involved pushing a girl up against a wall, spitting on your finger, shoving it down her pants and using it to tickle her clit. I hate to be so graphic, but I feel it’s necessary to describe what happened in the video in order for you to understand why people were so upset with it. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have typed that.
Several days after the video hit the Internets, a girl from one of those black news sites that just report on the happenings on Black People Twitter somehow found out about it. This resulted in several outraged “think pieces’ and, eventually, a petition by the same people who got Pat Buchanan fired from MSNBC. The petition called for Harris Publications to drop editor in chief Vanessa Satten like a bad habit and generally made it seem as if the nether regions of America’s black middle school-age girls were in serious danger as a result of the Too Short video. They were under the Fingerbang Advisory System equivalent of an Orange Alert. A Weather Underground-style splinter group headed up by, you guessed it, dream hampton, had a whole list of demands that included pretty much everything short of Too Short committing Japanese ritual suicide.
The call for Vanessa Satten’s job seemed to be motivated by race as much as it was anything else. People didn’t like the idea that a white woman could have the top job at the top rap magazine, at a time when it might actually be easier for a black man to become president than to get a job writing about rap music (this really is the future we’re living in), and this Too Short video was as good an opportunity as any to get rid of her.
I thought Harris Publications might take the petition as an opportunity to send Vanessa packing the same way they did Elliott, not because they felt that the Too Short video caused any real harm, but because it really didn’t make any sense to have a white woman in charge of XXL. When Vanessa became editor in chief back in ‘08, she’d been there since 1998, and the magazine only began in August of ‘97. If they hadn’t made her editor in chief, they may have had a discrimination suit on their hands. Kim Osorio, another non-black woman head of a rap magazine, won something ridonkulous like $15 million from The Source. 47,000 people signed the petition. Imagine having a job where 47,000 people signed a petition for you to be fired, and management decided they were just gonna ride it out with you. I realize now that I should have been more focused on trying to “rise within the ranks” during my time at XXL. There’s a good three years of compensation for rank incompetence that I missed out on.
At some point in between when they attempted to improve the website by getting rid of me and when they of course went out of business XXL went to a bimonthly release schedule.
It’s never a good sign when a magazine goes bimonthly. I remember thinking it was only a matter of time back when it was announced that Vibe would only be coming out every other month. Since then, it’s gone out of business like five times, including the time when the bank they owed money to brought in security guards to make sure the staff didn’t steal anything on the way out. I joked at the time that Elliott Wilson and Vibe editor in chief Danyel Smith were the first husband and wife team to be escorted from magazine offices by security.
Magazines make their money running ads. If they cut back the release schedule to every other month, that means they’re only running half as many pages. I did the math. If they’re only running half as many pages, that means that, at best, they’re only making half as much money as they used to. Why would you purposely choose to make half as much money as you used to? XXL must not have been making shit from those ads. Circulation must have dropped to the point where they couldn’t charge very much money for them, if anything; they were offering ad space for crackhead prices. If I had known, I would have seen about taking out an ad for my most recent book, Kanye West Superstar, or maybe even trying to purchase a blowski from someone in the business department. They may have even been running the magazine at a loss, to keep up appearances until someone could be duped into buying it.
Townsquare Media, the company that bought XXL, has been buying up music blogs for the past few years now. They bought an entire network of music blogs from MOG—the streaming audio service Beats Electronics bought and turned into Beats Music—for $10 million. That seems like a lot of money for blog network, until you realize there were a thousand blogs in it. I did the math a few weeks ago while conducting research for my free weekly email newsletter Life in a Shanty Town. That works out to $10,000 per blog. That’s not very much money, even by blogger standards (worse than crackhead standards, nhjic), especially given the fact that Townaquare will own those blogs in perpetuity. Imagine if you only had $10,000 to last you for the rest of your life.
Now you’re beginning to understand my pain.
Last year, Townsquare purchased a small handful of music blogs from Aol, which just said fuck it and decided to get out of the music blog game altogether. Terms of this deal weren’t released, which leads me to believe that Townsquare didn’t pay much more for them than they paid for each of the MOG blogs. Saying you purchased some blogs for $10 million sounds impressive, no matter how many blogs you got for it. Saying you purchased three blogs for $30,000 sounds like you’re taking advantage of somebody. Townsquare didn’t say how much they paid for XXL, so what does that tell you? Remember that scene in Goodfellas where Paul Sorvino gives a coked up Ray Liotta a sweaty handful of hundred dollar bills and tells him don’t come around here anymore?
Henry Hill, the guy Ray Liotta played in the film, later released his own line of spaghetti sauce, which he sold on eBay and promoted on the Howard Stern Show. I think he died during a trip to visit the same strip club I visited in The Mindset of a Champion, so I’d say things turned out reasonably well for him, given the circumstances. There’s similar hope for XXL. The other day, it was announced that reports of the dead tree version of XXL’s demise may have been premature, even though they came straight from the proverbial horse’s mouth. The print version of XXL might not be as dead as the trees it’s printed on after all. Reportedly, they’re looking at their options, and they might release at least a few print issues in 2015, including next year’s Freshman 10 issue, probably just featuring random white children.
I went to the grocery store the other day thinking I’d cop the final issue of the old version of XXL, with G-Unit on the cover, to add a sense of closure to my collection and so I could analyze it here. The fact that they didn’t have it is, I suppose, an amusing story in its own right. Supposedly, one of the companies that distributed XXL went out of business earlier this year, and that was one of the reasons they were having problems.
What I did find was an issue of Spin magazine. This came as a surprise to me, because Spin went out of business a long time ago. The company that bought it and then proceeded to drive it into the ground also bought Vibe and actually brought it back for a while, before realizing the error of their ways, but I didn’t think they ever brought Spin back.
Come to find out this was some special U2 version of Spin. It’s as lengthy as a regular magazine, but all of the articles are about u2. This might honestly be even more ridiculous than the scheme to put their new album on every phone and computer connected to the Internets. Imagine if Spin were still a real magazine, and they took some money from u2 to put out an all U2 issue. You wouldn’t be able to believe anything they wrote about U2 ever again. I wouldn’t believe anything they wrote period.
I imagine this is what the new XXL will be like, if there ever is a new XXL. When they say they’re looking into their options, what they mean is that they’re meeting with people to see if there’s anything they can possibly print that would make someone want to take out an ad. We may not have seen the end of XXL, and hence the depths to which hip-hop journalism is willing to sink, just yet.
Byron Crawford is the founder and editor of ByronCrawford.com: The Mindset of a Champion, a former columnist for XXL, the author of five books, most recently Kanye West Superstar, and the sender of the free weekly email newsletter Life in a Shanty Town.
