The Mind Squad and editorial staff like theirs—people who understood and loved the music—would create a new, vibrant, and deeply informed style of cultural journalism that defined an era. A number of outlets rose up as a corrective to what was then the mainstream’s mistreatment of hip hop, including DIY projects like The Source and Haji Akhigbade and Sacha Jenkins' Beat-Down Newspaper, and institutionally backed outlets from savvy, opportunistic readers of culture like Larry Flynt’s Rap Pages and Quincy Jones’s Vibe. These magazines did far more than take youth culture seriously. They documented and curated stories about rap, R&B, street fashion, film, current events, race, and politics. They employed pedigreed editors, journalists, critics and photographers like George Pitts, Riggs Morales, Scott Poulson-Bryant, Selwyn Seyfu Hinds, Ben Mapp, and Joan Morgan. Much of the staff that put together these publications have gone on to become big names at institutions like The New York Times, in media as on-air talent, in publishing, and at the executive level in the music and entertainment industry. Others never got their due.
For readers like me, these magazines transformed us from mere consumers of rap into obsessives. They represented the pinnacle of culture journalism for approximately 15 years, but you can’t find much of it online. The archives of The New Yorker and Rolling Stone have made the digital transition, and their old articles, interviews and reviews are available in an easily searchable format. The institutional rap titles have not. Their websites are largely an unnavigable mess in which one is more likely to encounter 404 errors than articles. This is annoying, but it’s also a dangerous blind spot in history that could have a profound impact on the way we think, talk, and move forward as a culture. How did this happen? More importantly, is there anything we can do about it?
Syreeta Gates, a young archivist from Jamaica, Queens, founded The Gates Preserve, a digital record of Black youth culture media so complete that the photographers and writers of the pieces in her collection from that era often hit her up to ask for clips of their own work. Gates has dedicated her life to the study and collection of this history, because it introduced her to a perspective she found truer to her experiences than what she encountered elsewhere.