Quincy Jones, who founded Vibe, said he was trying to buy it. Routine except the magazine had an 800,000 circulation, was founded by the music impresario Quincy Jones and had an alluring name that came to be synonymous with hip-hop and R&B: Vibe.
Plenty of magazines have been felled by the punishing economics of print publishing, but few left the footprint that Vibe did after just 16 years. Founded with a test issue in 1992 by Time Warner and commencing regular issues in 1993, Vibe was a magazine about hip-hop, R&B and urban youth culture that brought luxe design values and major-league photography and writing to the music that dominated and shaped American pop culture in the late 1990s.
In the current context a black president, rap stars so ubiquitous even your mom knows who 50 Cent is, pop songs that feature drive-bys from the M.C.s of the moment Vibe would seem less necessary. But its worth remembering what an easy target rap was in the culture wars of the early 90s; Vibe did not sanitize rap so much as give it its cultural due. If there were no Vibe, contemporary black music and culture would not be quite so writ into the mainstream. Sixteen years ago black pop musicians may have been moving records and booties, but few got the A-list treatment in major magazines, at least not until Vibe. Those artists usually had to be huge to earn the cover at other publications, but Vibe took an interest in both the nascent and the known.
Born from a friendship between Mr. Jones and Steven J. Ross, then chairman of Time Warner, Vibe showed up on a magazine rack where black faces rarely appeared unless they had been charged with a crime or it was a thin August issue and a fashion magazine wanted to demonstrate some token diversity. (Yes, Ebony and Jet got there first, but they were mostly Mom and Dads magazines; the Source was founded in the late 1980s but had little for readers who werent hard-core hip-hop heads.)
Every time I see a black entertainment figure on the cover of InStyle or Cigar Aficionado, I think of Vibe, said Danyel Smith, Vibes editor in chief and chief content officer, who served two stints as its editor. You have to remember that the kind of coverage you see now did not exist before Vibe. You had this music community that was incredibly bold and vibrant, and it was getting, at best, a sometime look in most places.
Black people read it, and so did white people and, well, anybody who listened to hip-hop and R&B, a psychographic that came to include vast swaths of Americans. By the mid-90s it became a showcase for hip-hop royals, and the writer Kevin Powell and others steadily chronicled the East Coast-West Coast rap feud and the rise and deaths of Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G.
