(Van Meter's staff broke camp in July.) But already, Time Inc. Vibe's corporate parents - Quincy Jones Entertainment and Time Publishing Ventures - will gauge public reaction to the test issue before deciding whether to give it a full-blown launch. "We don't know who's going to buy this magazine." "We don't even know what the market is," says Time Inc.'s Rogin. It is a black-culture magazine for both black and white people." "But it is not all just about the street. "This magazine is certainly concerned with having credibility on the street," says Executive Editor Diane Cardwell. But imagine the serious eyeballing that would greet him, braided head and all, if he strolled into Saks Fifth Avenue to try and exercise the privilege. It's an Armani ad.Īnd you can't help thinking: Treach no doubt has the wherewithal to do himself up in designer casual wear, if he got that itch. On, a bare-chested young white man is standing on his hands, smiling. It is the upper half of Treach, a glowering young man, leader of the platinum-selling rap group Naughty by Nature and a "ghetto bastard" by his own lyrics. On the cover, a muscular, bare-skinned form, nearly as black as the big V, I, B and E, stands out sharply against a white background. And I think this is as hot as anything that's come out as a first edition." "I saw Rolling Stone when it first came out. "I saw Playboy when it first came out," he says. The bottom line is: What does the magazine look like?"Īnd on that point, Jones boasts. Cool J on the staff, because it's a different discipline. I don't know if I would feel better having L.L. In conversation, Van Meter proves to be more comfortable dealing with the white thing than the gay thing. New York Newsday's pop music writer pointed out last January that Van Meter is "white and openly gay, hardly a combination that will endear him to hip-hop politicos." Given the political peculiarities of hip-hop, the job has exposed him to a rather personal degree of scrutiny. Race and power.Īt the center of the story is Vibe's editor in chief, 29-year-old Jonathan Van Meter, most recently a senior editor at Vogue. To tell the story of Vibe is to waltz through the minefield of rap music's politicized aesthetics. The test issue of Vibe - 200,000 copies of which drop at newsstands and record stores today - is a spectacular product, 144 densely packed pages of cutting-edge design, top-tier writing, gorgeous photography, sophisticated editorial concepts - the best of what the New York magazine world can do. "And you can't write about it in a way that neuters it." "The music is urgent and uncensored," says Gilbert Rogin, the No. At least by the reckoning of two corporate editors. It's another who-would've-guessed? milestone for a music that began so humbly in the ghettos of the South Bronx and Harlem during the '70s, proof again of rap's extraordinary influence on the American youth culture, and so the American commercial culture.Īnd while we're talking milestones, Vibe occasions the first appearance of a certain unholy 12-letter expletive (and variations thereof) in a Time Inc. People will finally hold in their hands and read and talk about Vibe magazine, conceived by Quincy Jones several years ago as a "Rolling Stone for the hip-hop generation" and brought to life by no less likely a corporate funk mob than Time Inc.
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