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the rap on the source
Tullis is associate editor of Might magazine.
Imagine the reaction of James Bernard, editor and part owner of The Source, when he opened the November issue of his magazine, "the journal of hip hop music, culture, and politics," to see a three-page article he had not assigned, edited, or even heard about before the magazine went to press. How did it get there? According to Bernard, David Mays, part owner and the publisher, commissioned it, rewrote it, and hired outside artists to illustrate it, positioning it on pages that the editorial side thought were slotted for ads.
Why did Mays do it? The article was about The Almighty RSO, a rap group that he has personally pushed, but which Bernard says he had been insisting would be treated just like any other musical group. Mays, for his part, says that Bernard had unfairly shut The Almighty RSO out of the magazine because of some kind of personal prejudice. "As ironic as it may seem," he says, "what I was doing was an attempt to correct the situation and improve our credibility."
The Almighty RSO, it seems, had been a sore point between Mays and his editorial staff for some time because members of the group had been not only demanding favorable coverage but spicing those demands with physical threats. According to Bernard, Raydog, leader of Almighty RSO, told him in June that "If [my record] don't get at least a four [rating from the magazine] I'm putting niggers in bodybags."
Such threats are taken seriously lately in the nebulous "hip hop nation" of America's urban youth, where music critics have occasionally been physically attacked. Raydog says he was not serious, and Mays says office security was not a real problem.
Imagine Mays's reaction, meanwhile, to find out that Bernard had faxed a letter demanding the publisher's "resignation" to Source advertisers and to media outlets -- but not to Mays. Bernard eventually left the magazine, and seven staff members followed him out the door. "Mays's actions were so egregious we felt we had no other choice," says former associate editor Carter Harris.
Mays started the magazine in 1988, when he was an undergraduate at Harvard, and later moved it to New York. It grew quickly from a one-page flyer to a 100-plus-page glossy with a circulation of 125,000 and a readership said to be much higher than that.
