Taking A Glowering Look At The New “Vibe”

Brian Raftery | June 27, 2007 10:00 am
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Once again, we present Rock-Critically Correct, a feature in which the most recent issues of Rolling Stone, Blender, Vibe and Spin are given a once-over by an anonymous writer who’s contributed to several of those titles–or maybe even all of them! After the click-through, a look at the new issue of Vibe:

Just as your correspondent predicted, here’s 50 Cent on the cover of the July Vibe. It might sting the mag’s higher-ups a little that his new album Curtis has been delayed until early September, but Vibe‘s best laid plans, etc., etc. About the cover: It’s obviously in 50’s (and Vibe‘s) interest for him to glower menacingly, but your correspondent will be damned if it doesn’t evoke what his own face must look like at about 8:30 a.m. every morning after a few gulps of coffee.

Being that your correspondent has trouble keeping up with who said what regarding whom to Angie Martinez on Hot 97, he’s not sure how to best decode “Stormy Weather,” the mag’s feature interview with Mr. Cent. It seems that, five years on from becoming the only superstar NYC rapper to debut in the dawning century, his efforts to single-handedly restore NYC hip-hop to its rightful dominance haven’t worked out, as G-Unit albums from Lloyd Banks and Mobb Deep didn’t sell so hot.

Accordingly, Toshitaka Kondo’s questions aren’t fawning: he (or she) addresses G-Unit’s recent failures. And God bless him, 50’s answers such queries frankly. In his telling, Lloyd Banks didn’t work hard enough to promote his under-performing Rotten Apple, and neither have many G-Unit employees: “I’ll fire everybody…How many people did Sony lay off? There’s a whole bunch of motherfuckers that don’t got work that can actually execute the job.” Not for 50 any notion of redemption or forgiveness: “I don’t see any sense in resolving issues with anyone.”

The subtext of “Stormy Weather” is that Vibe expects Curtis to be a balm to a sagging hip-hop marketplace, which itself is the bailiwick of the accompanying article, “Dirty Pop.” Therein, Sean Fennessey points out that hip-hop producers (Timbaland, Scott Storch, etc.) are fueling “pop” artists like Nelly Furtado. No big news there, but he points out that “last year, hip-hop experienced its worst year, economically and artistically, since 1991–not one rap album was one of the top sellers of the year.”

This seems to indicate that hip-hop partisans worry that the resource dear to them is being strip-mined of its purity–it’s similar to Spin or Rolling Stone complaining about there being no more proper rock stars. Why, It’s almost rockist! Your correspondent understands that it’s in Vibe‘s interest to fret about the lack of hip-hop in the top ten, but he can also point out that, in the short term, the genre’s health is more or less the same as every other mass market idiom in a collapsing music industry. And in the long term, hip-hop is an American music, and American musical genres inevitably cross-pollinate and mutate, and hip-hop has always done that, blah, blah, rock-critic blather, blah blah “crystalline,” “eponymous” blah blah…

Although your correspondent’s prior request for a Shop Boyz story was not heeded, he’s thrilled that Angie Romero got to accompany T-Pain, the avatar of Autotune, whose records YC is besotted with, to a mammoth strip club in Miami for an article entitled “Smack That.” We learn that T-Pain is not–nor was he ever–in luv wit’ a stripperrrr, but rather is a happily married man who wrote that AWESOME song from the perspective of his protégé, Jay Lyriq. YC hope’s that the soon-to-depart Idolator co-curator will find a way to spend his last week here to educate his flock as to the joys of “Buy U A Drank,” and its maker, a man who is dominating non-Pitchfork-approved music in 2007.

And now, in the Vexing Lead-Time Department: Danyel Smith’s editor letter quickly addresses how Don Imus’ “nappy-headed hos” comment occurred in a cultural context that allows rappers to use similar invective, and then goes on to struggle with how a responsible person deals with complexities of an often thuggish but still thrilling hip-hop landscape. It’s a subject that every thoughtful fan should contemplate–a shame, then, that the first that we’ve heard from Vibe on l’affaire d’Imus occurs three months after the fact.