CHAPTER SEVEN

The Source Cover

If you were a resident of a home that cared about hip-hop in the 1980s and 1990s, your home probably got a monthly delivery of The Source magazine. And if your home didn’t get it, you maybe knew the home of some other hip-hop fan who got it, and you maybe knew you could sneak off with it after they were done with their initial read. My brother kept his issues stacked in a corner, next to the large chest that held all his cassette tapes. Even in the nineties, when the CD player was becoming more and more prominent as the cost of one declined from the early to mid-1980s, allowing more CDs to be produced, my brother stuck with his loyalty to the cassette tape, influencing me to also develop a loyalty to the cassette tape. In all the ways people have listened to music over the past forty or fifty years, it can be argued that the cassette tape is the most tedious and least practical. It offers some of the same satisfaction as listening on vinyl: due to how difficult it is to skip songs, it makes the whole album listening experience vital—something worth celebrating. But the cassette is more fragile and less beloved when viewed through a lens of nostalgia. In the battered Walkman I owned, the tape inside the cassette would often get wound around one of the spokes inside the player, forcing the tape to unravel from the shell of the cassette. Countless tapes were ruined this way, by having to hand-wind the tape back into the cassette’s plastic body, warping the insides and leaving a listener with a cacophony of only barely decipherable warbling.

But despite the fragility of the cassette, when I was young, I appreciated what it demanded from a listener. A cassette locked a listener into a commitment, particularly in the mid to late 1990s, when rap albums were sprawling, overrun with skits and Easter eggs. To skip a song could also mean you’d miss something. On Wu-Tang’s 1993 Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), for example, one would be wrong to pass over the skit before the song “Method Man,” where Meth and Raekwon playfully spar over excruciating acts of torture; or in 1999, before MF Doom’s “Hands of Doom,” where two graffiti artists discuss Doom as a character, building out the ethos of both artist and persona in a few lines; or any of the children’s storybook skits that littered the 1991 De La Soul album De La Soul Is Dead, creating a narrative around a young kid finding a De La Soul album in the garbage, only to have it stolen from him by bullies who listen to and critique the tape as the album unfolds, ending with them putting the album back in the same trash can where it was first found. The nuances of the album were part of the journey, so one had to endure whatever one must to take it all in.

The value of the tape was also the crafting of a mixtape. I am from an era when we learned not to waste songs. If you are creating a cassette that you must listen to all the way through, and you are crafting it with your own hands and your own ideas, then it is on you not to waste sounds and to structure a tape with feeling. No skippable songs meant that I wouldn’t have to take my thick gloves off during the chill of a Midwest winter to hit fast-forward on a Walkman, hoping that I would stop a song just in time. No skippable songs meant that when the older, cooler kids on my bus ride to school asked what I was listening to in my headphones, armed with an onslaught of jokes if my shit wasn’t on point, I could hand my headphones over, give them a brief listen of something that would pass quality control, and keep myself safe from humiliation for another day.

The trick was recording from CD to cassette. Recording from cassette to cassette was an option, but only for the desperate, because the sound quality in that transfer would drop significantly. But if you had a good CD recorder—as we did in my house—you could set your tape to record songs straight from a compact disc, which not only improved sound quality but made for fewer abrupt stops in the process of recording. I would get CDs from the library near my house, which allowed you to take out five at a time in seven-day bursts. If you were particularly strapped for time or feeling especially confident about an artist or a group, you might just set the CD to record for the entire length of it, copying a whole album’s worth of songs and then sorting them out later. When Beats, Rhymes and Life came out, for example, I remember recording it all the way through. By that time, Tribe had earned a type of currency that engendered that kind of trust. It was assumed that any album with their name on it would surely be worth its weight in gold, with no outright skippable songs. On each of their previous albums, even the less-than-great songs managed to be tolerable.

That trust fell apart on Beats, Rhymes and Life—which doesn’t mean the album was bad so much as it means the album couldn’t live up to the impossible standards of my own imagination. It sat in my Walkman during the winter of 1996, and I would pull my fingers out of gloves and rush to fast-forward what I could before the wind forced my hands back to the warmth they craved, and then I just stopped listening to it altogether.

While undergoing the task of making cassettes, I would often sit on the floor next to the stereo and read through the old issues of The Source that had accumulated over the years. The thing about The Source, in those days, was that it acted as a multilayered beacon for hip-hop culture. There was the unsigned hype column, which turned an eye toward acts that were underground but on the verge of breaking out. There were long, sprawling profiles of rappers that ranged from the delightfully absurd to the emotionally engaging and enlightening. Every issue opened with the hip-hop quotable, highlighting the best rap verse from the past month. Before social media provided a platform for discourse, these would be debated in person, in parks during breaks between basketball games, in barbershops, or in basements. Also, The Source had covers that now seem comical but seemed brilliant at the time—covers that painted black rap stars as larger-than-life and sometimes heroic. Timbaland and Missy acting out a scene from The Matrix, or Puff Daddy hooked to a giant glowing machine, or Dr. Dre putting a revolver to his own head.

But what was more vital than all of this was The Source’s album review system. It was the first album review metric I ever knew, and one I came to rely on. It was simple: albums were rated on a scale of one to five mics. The one mic was as bad as it could get, and a five-mic album was a classic. The Source was known for its hardline, detailed reviews. They were unafraid to take a legend to task if that legend didn’t live up to what they were capable of on an outing, like giving Slick Rick three mics on Behind Bars in 1995—an album he released while incarcerated, no less. The Source didn’t deal in sympathy for circumstances. If an album was to climb the mountain and achieve the heralded five-mic status, it had to be a classic, not just on its first listen but also on its fifth. It had to be the kind of tape you could put in a Walkman and know that you would not need to skip a single song. The Source reviews were a way of life, with the “five mic” vernacular working its way into language used elsewhere, to describe anything that was fresh. It helped that The Source was stingy with its five-mic reviews in its early days. They would get close with many albums, giving out the 4.5-mic review almost as a tease and debate starter. But over the magazine’s first ten years, from 1988 to 1998, it only gave out five-mic reviews to nine albums total, with four of them coming in 1990 alone. The albums bestowed the honor of the five-mic review within that first ten-year window were as follows:

Let the Rhythm Hit ’Em—Eric B. and Rakim

AmeriKKKa’s Most Wanted—Ice Cube

One for All—Brand Nubian

De La Soul Is Dead—De La Soul

Illmatic—Nas

Life After Death—The Notorious B.I.G.

Aquemini—Outkast

The other two were two albums by A Tribe Called Quest: People’s Instinctive Travels and The Low End Theory both secured the honor, making A Tribe Called Quest the first act ever to have two five-mic albums awarded by the magazine. Later, when the magazine went back to rerate albums that they either didn’t get to upon their release or that they felt deserved a rating adjustment, others like Ice Cube and Run-DMC were rightly added to that group. But early on, it was just A Tribe Called Quest, alone at the top of the mountain with a hand on each masterpiece.

In October of 1998, the cover of The Source sent especially jarring shockwaves through the communities it landed in. Against a soft blue background, all three members of A Tribe Called Quest are cloaked in black. To the right is Phife Dawg, round sunglasses atop a head full of waves, looking at the ground. On the left, also looking at the ground is Ali Shaheed Muhammad, somehow looking even more morose than Phife, his lip protruding slightly. In the center is Q-Tip, the only one looking straight at the camera, but through a low hat, his head bowed slightly, his eyes fixated on the cameras lens—one of the few white things in the shot. It is a piercing photo. Even if one didn’t read the words below the picture, it would be obvious to anyone holding the cover that something had gone or was going awry. The words below the picture confirmed every worst fear: “Exclusive Interview: BREAK UP! A Tribe Called Quest Disbands.”

I suppose there is something to be missed about a print magazine breaking big news. I’m not sure if that could happen now. The internet existed in 1998, of course, but not in the way it existed after 2009 or so, when the accessibility of breaking news seemed to be almost too much—something that many would likely say is absolutely true now, nearly a decade later. In 1998, the rap media landscape was also different. Yo! MTV Raps had been gone for three years already, and BET’s Rap City—certainly a worthwhile show—was in a state of transition, bringing in new hosts and moving on from the earlier ones. If one of the biggest rap groups in the world wanted to announce their disbandment in a way that would reach the rap world quickly and with the right level of weight, they would do it in the biggest print rap magazine there was at the time. It gives me a type of comfort, like hearing a cassette player click when it reaches the end of a really satisfying tape.

One of the only other magazines that arrived at my childhood house was Jet. Jet was a legacy black publication, the kind of magazine that any black person could find in almost any other black person’s home. It was almost a test: you go into a black person’s home and look around, and before you know it, there’s a Jet magazine on the kitchen table, or in the bathroom, or on a tray next to some hard peppermint candies. It’s tough to say who had the subscription to Jet in my home. It often felt like a subscription to the magazine was something passed down though generations. Jet was started in 1951 by John Harold Johnson, who was the grandson of slaves and who loved learning so much that he once repeated the eighth grade in rural Arkansas just to stay in school, since there were not yet high schools that black people could go to. His family eventually moved to Chicago, where there were more opportunities for schooling and work for black people. After high school, Johnson worked for Harry Pace at the Supreme Life Insurance Company. Part of his duties included making a small weekly newspaper to circulate among the staff and in surrounding neighborhoods. With an eye for engaging audiences of readers and a small window into how the publishing world worked, he dreamed up an idea of publishing magazines. The first, Black Digest, he set up in 1942. He used his mother’s furniture as collateral and secured a $500 loan.

Of all the sacrifices of black motherhood, I imagine this to be among the highest, in some ways. The Johnson family grew up poor, with little to their name. In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison talks about the pride the Breedlove family has in their couches—the way these things can be symbols for a people who don’t have much but own the little they do have, and own it as a result of their own pained labor. I do not know what had earned John Harold Johnson’s mother her furniture, but she was willing to risk her ownership of it for her ambitious son. And so it was.

Black Digest was changed to Negro Digest before its first publication, and then eventually to Black World. In 1945, Johnson used the slight momentum and trust he had gained to start Ebony magazine, which took off, regularly selling out of its 25,000-copy run. What Johnson knew was simple: when these magazines took off, black people not only wanted to see positive images of themselves, they needed to see positive images of themselves. It was the right magazine at the right time. Many living black people in the early to mid-1940s were like Johnson and his family: children and grandchildren of slaves. The historical impacts of slavery were still echoing far and wide throughout parts of the country, particularly in the southern states. Ebony, in its initial stages, offered full-color photos of successful black people, along with photo essays and glamorous ads with black people in them. It wasn’t a magazine that could save the world or any black people in it, but it did offer a small glimpse into a better possibility—a window of some dreams being fulfilled in a place that might not be your place, but a place where someone who looks like you is living a little better, and you could live through them.

All of Ebony’s success allowed for Johnson to pursue Jet magazine in 1951. Jet’s initial aims were a bit different from Ebony’s, in that Johnson wanted the magazine to lean heavier into the roots of a digest. It was released weekly, and the magazine itself was small in shape. In the first issue, Johnson stated: “In the world today everything is moving along at a faster clip. There is more news and far less time to read it.” Jet became notable for how much it could fit into an issue. The magazine contained fashion tips, entertainment and television news, politics, and—starting in 1952—the Beauty of the Week, usually the final page in the magazine.

In our home, Jet magazine would sit in our bathroom, on the back of the toilet. Because they accumulated at a weekly clip, finding a space in your home to hold all of them throughout the year became tricky. Cycling through a month or two in stacks behind the toilet seemed as good a way to do this as any. The Beauty of the Week was the closest anyone in my house could get to print magazine indecency. I didn’t grow up in a house where one might stumble upon their father’s stash of Playboy magazines or VHS tapes of porn. Jet, for all of its historical weight and cultural relevance, also provided a place for a curious kid to see beautiful black women every week. In retrospect, Beauty of the Week was a bit archaic—even though it wasn’t just a woman in a bikini, as it also offered facts about her life—but at the time, it was serving a similar purpose that all black magazines had served throughout their history: a window into desire.

Jet was also known for its relevance in covering the civil rights movement when few other places would. The most infamous case of this came in 1955, when Jet sent reporters to the funeral of Emmett Till. The coverage of his funeral included the now-infamous picture of his horribly disfigured body, swollen, beaten, and water-logged. Jet chose to run the images uncensored. The images also managed to capture Emmett’s mother, Mamie Till, looking stoically upon her son’s body. Mamie wanted to have an open-casket funeral as a way of reflecting the world’s horror back onto itself. Jet felt a duty to amplify this. And so, in every home and on every newsstand within Jet’s circulation, there was the picture of Emmett Till’s remains. The photo created an urgency around a movement. The things black people had been experiencing and trying to tell the world about were presented, right there, for everyone to see. A worthwhile reason to fight back emerged. The casket was always going to be open, as Mamie Till wished. But it was Jet’s ability to capture the moment that made the funeral echo through generations.

A somewhat shakier judgment call occurred a little over a decade later. Fewer people mention this when they mention Jet and the legacy of black magazines using stark imagery to provoke readers. In December of 1967, Jet ran another stunning photo of the dead. Otis Redding died in a plane crash on December 10, drowning and freezing to death in Wisconsin’s Lake Monona. Redding, still strapped to his seat and stuck, couldn’t free himself, and so he drowned. He had to be pulled from the depths of the lake, and when he was finally pulled up, he was frozen, dead in his seat.

Jet ran the photo of Otis Redding in this way. It is a haunting and terrifying image, Redding, frozen and stiff. Jet’s decision to run the photo was met with significantly more criticism from the black community than their decision to run the Till photo. Many saw it as craven and aimless, without any call to action behind it, or thoughtfulness about how it might impact people. And so, in the homes of black families and on newsstands in black neighborhoods, there was the photo of an icon, immovable, teeming with frozen blood.

Otis Redding should probably have never taken off with that plane in the first place, but isn’t that how all stories like this one start? It was raining and foggy, and the winter weather didn’t bode well for travel, especially on the route being taken. Otis was traveling with the Bar-Kays, a soul and funk group that Otis heard in Memphis and chose as his backing band. The group was traveling from Cleveland, Ohio, to a gig near Madison, Wisconsin, where the fog was increasing by the hour and the temperature was dropping.

When I think about the Otis Redding plane crash—especially in the context of this story—I don’t think about the deaths. I think about the one person who lived. It was never determined why exactly the plane went down, but when it was less than four miles away from its destination, it began a plunge into the icy waters of the lake.

Ben Cauley was the most notable member of the Bar-Kays because, if nothing else, he was the best dressed. He was always in a pressed suit, no matter the occasion. He was also arguably the best looking and one of the most talented members of the group, his trumpet skills equally matched by his vocal ability and songwriting chops. The Bar-Kays operated in such a way that they didn’t have a single bandleader, but the bulk of their creative output fell on Cauley, who embraced the challenge.

Ben Cauley was asleep when the plane began its plummet from the Wisconsin sky. He was jarred awake when he realized that he couldn’t breathe, due to the air pressure dropping. Cauley had fallen asleep directly behind Redding earlier in the flight, holding his seat cushion to his chest. When he woke, he looked over and saw his bandmate Phalon Jones looking out of a window and yelling “Oh no!”

Cauley instinctively unbuckled his seatbelt. It seems like such an odd thing to do as a plane you are in careens toward the ground, but I imagine it is a question of what our instincts tell us about getting free. Sometimes it is just the single thing. Cauley, unbuckled from his seat, was able to float away from the wreckage, still clutching his seat cushion, which he used to float above the water. No one in the plane could swim, and even if they could have, it wouldn’t have mattered. Everyone else was still attached to their seats, unable to free themselves in their panic. Since Cauley couldn’t swim, he couldn’t offer any assistance to his friends and bandmates. They screamed his name and yelled for help as the frigid water pulled them under, and he watched, helpless.

This is what a picture in a magazine couldn’t capture. The often-untold story about Otis Redding’s death is all about what it is to be unable to save the people you love, even though you want to. It’s a question of choosing to save yourself first over choosing to save everyone else. Ben Cauley said he never stopped having nightmares about the crash, right up until he died in 2015. He reformed the Bar-Kays after the crash but left the group in 1971. He lived the vast majority of his life tortured by what he couldn’t do. It’s likely he closed his eyes every night and heard the screams of the people he couldn’t save.

It is funny—all the ways we use drowning as a metaphor.

The Love Movement was the final Tribe Called Quest album, though no one knew that when it came out. It was released on September 29, 1998, just before The Source cover came out. The album got somewhat mixed reviews at the point of its release, and the reviews became more mixed as the news of the group’s dismantling surfaced. The lack of satisfaction people had was with the idea that we were given one final, unsatisfying Tribe album—one that came close to the sound of their first three efforts but not close enough. Phife’s verses sounded lazy and half-hearted, save for a few bright moments, like on “Busta’s Lament,” where he shines in a brief burst, and then he’s gone. Especially for people who thought Beats, Rhymes and Life was a turn toward a more commercial sound, The Love Movement seemed to complete that trajectory. “Commercial” is somewhat of an unfair assessment, as Tribe still wasn’t making music that could get tons of radio spins. But it felt like the ease with which they approached their past efforts was out the window.

In a 4-out-of-10 review, Spin writer Tim Haslett wrote of the album: “Toni Morrison once said of black art that it must look effortless. If it makes you sweat, you haven’t done the work. The Love Movement finds A Tribe Called Quest with sweat filling their palms.” In a mixed review from the A.V. Club, Nathan Rabin wrote: “Unfortunately, The Love Movement replicates the sound of Beats, Rhymes And Life so thoroughly that it might as well be titled More Beats, More Rhymes And Even More Life.”

And this was the way of it. A Tribe Called Quest wanted to go out on a concept album about love, but the only problem was that they didn’t love each other, and it didn’t seem as if they loved the world they were occupying anymore. The result was a tedious, seemingly joyless album. It didn’t help that 1998 was one of rap’s greatest, most sonically diverse years. Two other albums were released on September 29, 1998: Jay-Z’s Vol. 2 . . . Hard Knock Life and Outkast’s Aquemini. Even with the promise of Tribe hanging it up after The Love Movement, the album was quickly forgotten and found itself hard-pressed to keep pace with the other albums released around it—particularly Aquemini, which saw Outkast at the peak of their trajectory as the new, infallible hip-hop group. Outkast were just entering the period when the critics began to call them hip-hop’s answer to the Beatles. Their sounds came from the South but spread everywhere. Their songs sat in a listener’s bones and forced a bounce out of them. The members of the group were comical and eccentric, and they could really rap. Outkast made the hyperserious focus of Tribe—particularly Q-Tip—seem archaic. The two albums, when contrasted, felt like listening to what rap was, and then what rap was becoming.

I purchased both on cassette the day they came out, even though CDs were by then truly all the rage. I listened to The Love Movement longingly on a school bus in the early fall in Ohio, where the leaves began to fight against their inevitable departure. By the tree that hung over my bus stop, the leaves slowly began to gather around the tree’s base, as if to say We did our best. We’ll try again next time.

It is really hard coming to terms with watching something not have any fight left. It’s not that A Tribe Called Quest couldn’t have continued to be great and attempt great things, and it is not that the sound in hip-hop was shifting so drastically that they couldn’t have found a lane. Sure, my pals and I stopped being fascinated with the jazz hybridity when our parents stopped giving a fuck that we were sneaking rap albums into the house. But A Tribe Called Quest could still have had a niche, even with groups like Outkast and labels like No Limit and Cash Money Records starting a trajectory of southern chart dominance. The problem was that A Tribe Called Quest simply didn’t have it in them to fight anymore. They built the whole tree, and held on to it for as long as they could, and then their season arrived, and they decided to drift down and make their peace with falling.

Every group of two or more musicians often has a clear leader, and here it is the one who could stand to look into the camera when the photographer had the other members of the group look away. Here, it is the one who stood in the center of the photo to absorb the full weight of whatever came next. I blamed Q-Tip for a long time. I stayed angry at him the way someone might stay angry at a loved one who abandons them and takes the whole home with them when they leave. I figured it must have been Q-Tip’s wild ambition that pulled the group apart and nothing else. For years, this was the narrative sold. Q-Tip was the genius of the Native Tongues collective. Beyond the brilliance of Monie Love, the Jungle Brothers, even beyond the brilliance of De La Soul and Queen Latifah, there was Q-Tip.

It helps that he was a visionary and that he was ambitious, and it helps that he couldn’t fathom failure as an option for A Tribe Called Quest, which did lead to him dragging the band along to and through his vision, no matter what it was.

But it was easy for me to blame Q-Tip, flawed as the premise might have been. I imagined the toll his relentless vision may have taken on everyone else around him. I remembered a shot from a Yo! MTV Raps interview in 1991: in a hallway, A Tribe Called Quest is being interviewed before they go on stage. Q-Tip has his arms around host Fab Five Freddy, eagerly rapping into his mic while Ali Shaheed Muhammad holds another mic in Q-Tip’s face. Q-Tip is energetic, talking with excitement about the group’s tour and album, while Phife, walking several steps ahead, stares blankly into space, almost invisible to the viewer.

There is more to it than this, of course. Q-Tip and Phife had a complex relationship, made more complex by the fact that they had known each other for their entire lives—since the age of two years old. What is hard to do is imagine a world in which someone you have loved—before you knew what love is—has to balance that love with whatever ambitions they have for a journey you set out on together. I don’t know what it was like for Q-Tip to have to fight to get Phife into the studio during the first few albums, and I don’t know what it was like for Phife to feel that he wasn’t able to get any creative control of the vision he had for the group and its music. But I know that sometimes you have to pull away from your brother in order for you to keep looking at him like he is your brother.

I stopped blaming Q-Tip nearly a year after the group broke up, when it became clear that they weren’t getting back together. The two hardly spoke of each other, and they didn’t seem too interested in being in the same worlds anymore. It was both tragic and understandable.

In my bedroom, I went through a phase where I cut out pictures from magazines, or tore old magazine covers off and taped them to my wall. This was in the early 2000s, when magazine covers were arguably at their best and most absurd. By that time, I had subscribed to ESPN the Magazine and Slam magazine, and XXL magazine came to my house. Everyone on every cover was larger than life, plastered against some wild background or paired with some animal: Ma$e with a tiger or basketball player Kevin Garnett with a wolf. It’s like the magazines catering to black people finally had the eyes and resources and capital to catch up with what Rolling Stone had been doing with covers for decades.

I hung the old Tribe cover of The Source somewhere above my bed. I’m reminded of how black magazines lean first on sight before trying to stimulate any of the other senses. A small magazine started by one black man and some furniture as collateral started a movement once, they say. They don’t all do that, of course. But sometimes they provide an image that haunts you, be it a frozen soul icon or the whites of Q-Tip’s eyes against so much darkness. Asking for forgiveness, maybe, but still with a bit of hope. As if he’d grown tired of watching everything he built drown slowly, and decided to finally stop fighting against the water and trying to save it.