Cinnie said:

Yeah Cinnie it was an off-shoot of Vibe that was a must read for all us Hip-Hop heads out there.

KidaDynamite said:

T.I is gonna be pissed to know that The Dream is touching Tiny's titties like that

bboy87 said:

Are you being sarcastic or did you not know that was Nick Cannon's former fling?

Timmy84 said:

I knew who it was. I was being sarcastic

bboy87 said:

Please, if that was Tiny it would have been the face they were covering, not the tittay's!

IdentityCrisis said:

That's one of the few times I gotta say that she don't even look good. Way too trashy. Anything for attention, I guess. What's next - sex tape?

bboy87 said:

It's hard to tell after recent events. Thought I'd lost ya, bruh.

Timmy84 said:

I'm disgruntled by the sheer crappiness of that eyesore magazine cover.

NastradumasKid said:

It pops out, don't it? VIBE had some ugly ass covers over the years.

Timmy84 said:

Was Quincy really the founder?

Didn't he produce The Colour Purple and Fresh Prince Of Bel Air as well?

graecophilos said:

Yes, among many many other things.

dreamfactory313 said:

I had an orginal subscription. For the first three years or so. I haven't missed it.

Cinnie said:

That's an idea, but will people pay for an online subscription?
Will their current advertisers follow them online?

July 2, 2009
Media
Vibe Magazine, Showcase for Hip-Hop and R&B, Dies at 16
By DAVID CARR
On Tuesday an independent magazine backed by private equity owners succumbed to the punishing ad market and announced it would cease publication immediately. It was, as things go in publishing these days, a fairly routine story.

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 it’s 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 Dad’s magazines; the Source was founded in the late 1980s but had little for readers who weren’t 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, Vibe’s 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.

“I think that the magazine defined a cultural moment during the whole East Coast-West Coast beef,” said Ta-Nehisi Coates, a blogger and writer for The Atlantic. “The writers and editors at Vibe were participants in the hip-hop community who went to the same shows and the same parties as the people they covered.”

Vibe was closely — some would say too closely — aligned with the industry it chronicled. But it managed to help turn the word “urban” into a lifestyle and find a young, difficult-to-access audience that advertisers coveted. But beyond the general problems of the music and magazine industries, a decline in chart-busting new artists along with instability in Vibe’s ownership made producing a consistently excellent magazine a big hill to climb.

Once part of a media empire and then a small publishing company that included Spin magazine, Vibe became that shiny object that was passed from owner to owner until the luster wore off and the debt grew. The Wicks Group, a private equity firm that bought the magazine in 2006, announced on Tuesday that it was ending publication. (It may not be over, over: Mr. Jones told EbonyJet.com that he had begun trying to buy back Vibe from the Wicks Group with plans to run it as a Web-only publication.)

“We were working on a Michael Jackson tribute issue, so I feel we weren’t done,” said Rob Kenner, an editor at large who was at Vibe from the first issue.

“I think that we changed hands so many times that the owners never understood the mission of Vibe,” Mr. Kenner said. “We were threatened with closing from the very start, and every issue we put out was a battle for respect, a lot like the genres of music we were covering.”

Vibe’s closing leaves just two large-circulation music magazines focusing on hip-hop and R&B: XXL and the Source. The Source went through a bankruptcy and emerged under new ownership last year.

The list of names that put sweat into Vibe is long and fittingly diverse. Jonathan Van Meter was the founding editor, Hilton Als wrote there, and Alan Light served as editor. Former staffers have fanned out across the media business. Emil Wilbekin, a former editor in chief, is managing editor of Essence.com; Mimi Valdés Ryan, another former editor in chief, is editor in chief of Latina magazine; Noah Callahan-Bever is editor in chief of Complex; Minya Oh is a personality at the New York radio station Hot 97. Carter Harris is a supervising producer of the television drama “Friday Night Lights.”

In an industry that seemed to fence out black talent as consistently as baseball once did, Vibe gave young journalists of all stripes a glossy, full-format magazine to sink their teeth into. And performers from Mary J. Blige to Young Jeezy to Jay-Z got the full frontal treatment on the cover, from photographers like David LaChapelle, Albert Watson and Ellen von Unwerth. And long before they broke big, black fashion designers flashed their wares in advertising and editorial photo spreads, including clothes from Sean John, G-Unit, Rocawear and Fubu. (Vibe won a National Magazine Award for general excellence in 2002.)

Vibe was an arbiter of taste, a clubhouse where people could gawk, preen and dis, knowing that everyone they cared about would see it. With cover subjects rendered to convey respect and cred, it was never hard to spot on the magazine rack. Those racks are thinning with each passing month, but some gaps are more noticeable than others.

Got my refund back!!!

$11.95 baby!!!

funkpill said:

For real? How?

MuthaFunka said:

Got it in the mail yesterday

funkpill said:

They just mailed it back?

MuthaFunka said:

yup

funkpill said:

Now, did you mail a check in to pay? Because I did credit.

MuthaFunka said:

yup...

funkpill said:

Damn. Maybe they'll re-credit me then.

audience1 said:

A mess while he sittin there looking trying to like Lil' Cease broke a$$ and she got the nerve looking like a two buck Kim.

For one...I stopped buying in about 2003 when it seemed every report was about some douche rapper.

Good tha fuck bye.

You would think Quincy Jones would have done something more classy than this bullshit.

I had a subscription back in the late 90's until around 2003. It was once a great, classy, real outlet for urban music and culture, but it went down hill fast, around the same time that Emil W stepped down as editor-in chief.

Anyone here ever read BitterVibes' blog back in the day? Wonder how he's taking the news...
[Edited 7/3/09 11:23am]

paisleypark4 said:

its soo wannabe Prince and Vanity rolling stone meets Janet Jackson infamous rolling stone cover
im all for expressing sexuality through art but damn this is ghetto
[Edited 7/3/09 12:57pm]

I support any magazine representing black music/culture (no disrespect to other cultures and genres of music xX)
BUT around time of the stupid dumb b.s east coast vs west i remember they did nothing but add fuel to fire so how COULD they preach unity and then use people as pawns
anyway
RIP

Vendetta1 said:

Vendetta1 said:

My sentiments exactly, they should have been shut down with that awful Ciara cover.

steelyd said:

co-sign. That Ciara cover made Maxim and Blender look like the children's magazine, "Highlight"....minus the 'Find these items' fun.