At the VIBE offices, downstairs is where cover stories are dreamed up and musical careers are launched. It’s also where life is a little cluttered, the evidence of creative minds at play. Rap’s staccato rhythms burst discreetly from radios tuned to Hot 97 while an aromatherapy candle filched from a Jody Watley press kit wafts through the office air. The dress code is up-to-the-minute boho: headwraps, dreads, Nubian knots, baggies and hoodies — after all, when your raison d’etre is being the arbiter of all that is hip, ya gotta look the part, right?
Upstairs, where deals are struck and money is made, things are a little more buttoned-down, a lot more Harvard MBA. Which makes sense, since the man running things at VIBE, the glossy, monthly paean to “urban culture” (read: hip-hop), is a Harvard MBA.
And true to his business school pedigree, VIBE President and CEO Keith Clinkscales, the 34-year-old product of a union between a schoolteacher and a former Harlem Globetrotter, a man who once admitted that his role model was Martha Stewart (more on that later) is all about expanding the empire. And so, as VIBE, the brainchild of music/TV mogul Quincy Jones, approaches its fifth anniversary, expand it Clinkscales does.
Besides VIBE the magazine, dubbed by ADWeek as one of the “10 Hot Up-and-Comers,” there’s VIBE the syndicated TV show (which airs locally on UPN), a late-night talk affair starring affable standup comic Sinbad; VIBE the Web Site, the popular VIBE OnLine extravaganza; VIBE the Music Seminar, where contenders to the throne flock to rub shoulders with the power elite of the urban entertainment industry; the Urbanworld Film Festival, VIBE’s version of Sundance; Jamizon, VIBE’s 26-city music tour; and VIBE the publishing venture, which last year released The New York Times bestseller “Tupac Shakur.” Then there’s VIBE’s eyebrow-raising acquisition of alternative music mag SPIN. And, in keeping with the nature-abhors-a-vacuum dictum, in August, there will be VIBE II, or BLAZE, a hip-hop rag devoted exclusively to the rap scene.
“Now,” Clinkscales says, a tad gleefully, “we have a more formidable daily presence than the mighty Rolling Stone.”
Which is precisely the point. From the minute Jones set his sights on creating a magazine that gave rap — the music — and hip-hop — the burgeoning culture surrounding the music — their props, he wanted to create a Rolling Stone for the New Millenium. A magazine that chronicled the entire culture of the genre, from fashion to politics to the music itself.
“Hip-hop is this kind of fiendish underground culture; it’s vast, but it’s also self-enclosed,” says Bill Adler, president of spoken-word label Mouth Almighty Records, and the publicist who helped shape the marketing image of the legendary rap label Def Jam in the 1980s. “Vibe opened that up a little more, and they did it in welcome directions. VIBE represents a lifestyle; it represents a culture.”
Just don’t call it a black magazine.
`Cool’ people of any color
“What VIBE needs to be about is cool people,” Clinkscales says. “And cool transcends race. Quincy embodies cool. So does a guy like Bruce Willis. I’d love to have him on our cover.”
Such declarations pose interesting questions to onlookers who argue that urban culture, an amorphous term embraced these days by music industry folks, is really about black popular culture: the music, the language, the art, the poetry, the fashion, the films, the energy, the inner city flava’.
“Those of us who are more Baby Boomer than Generation X feel a little disappointed that Vibe feels it has to succeed by shunning its Afrocentricity or by packaging it in something that is more race neutral,” says Ken Smikle, president of Target Market News, a Chicago-based research firm that monitors African-American consumers and media.
“Hip-hop is a black art form; regardless of how many non-blacks are attracted to it, it is still a black art form,” continues Smikle. “VIBE in its position has become the bully pulpit for the multiethnic, multicultural focus of the `90s, and I find that offensive. It would be good for business if VIBE took advantage of its diverse audience by raising more issues in its pages about the situation facing African-Americans. This is an opportunity to sensitize the white audience, who might only be there for entertainment news.”
Indeed, look at the ads in VIBE, and you’ll find a rainbow coalition of faces peddling everything from Saturn cars to Adidas to RayBans to Schick razors to Master P’s latest CD. The fashion spreads promote a similar we-are-the-world sensibility, with languid models of all hues decked out in duds from Gucci and Versace.
But as for the content, from cover photos to inside articles, the faces featured in VIBE are overwhelmingly brown and black — even when a face is that of an elder stateswoman, like Toni Morrison, giving her opinion on this country’s newest art form: “(Rap) is totally compelling. . . It’s like an underground railroad of communication.” The mood is au courant, the articles a teasing hint of what’s hip and what’s happening. Sex is doled out liberally: R&B songstress Toni Braxton poses on the cover in the altogether; on another, Janet Jackson debuts her nipple ring.
In the past, VIBE went from covering the story to becoming part of the story. The well-publicized feud between the late Tupac Shakur and the late Notorious B.I.G. (a k a Biggie Smalls) was played out on the pages of VIBE, with Shakur accusing Smalls of setting him up to be gunned down.
“In reality, VIBE may have started out black, but it is not a black magazine,” says Jim Glover, president of Millenium Group Urban Advertising, a new, Chicago-based ad agency. “It is a magazine of the hip-hop culture. And you can’t isolate hip-hop to black any more. Ask any suburban mother or father, and they’ll tell you. Hip-hop is the music of the times, like Motown was. And like jazz was.”
This is a debate that’s been percolating since the genesis of VIBE back in `92, when Jones founded the magazine as a joint venture with Time Inc. Indeed, from the very start, there’s been drama.
Originally, Jones had his eye on purchasing Source, a rap mag founded by two Harvard grads. Together, he and rapmeister Russell Simmons of Def Jam Records came up with the idea for a slick hip-hop magazine. But Simmons defected from the project when Jones tapped Jonathan Van Meter, a gay white man, as editor-in-chief.
Simmons told the Washington Post that he had problems with Van Meter heading up a hip-hop magazine, particularly since rap music was “the most macho art form to invade pop culture in the last 50 years. . . the idea that (VIBE) will be a bible for the hip-hop community is dead.”
Racial discontent swirled internally as well, with some black writers grumbling that VIBE was a “plantation.” The divisiveness came to a head when black staffers threatened to walk out and/or sue when a white editor was hired away from the rival Source — at that time, five of the top six editors were white.
“If VIBE was a plantation in those days, the ironic thing was that Massa — Quincy Jones — was black,” comments Mouth Almighty’s Adler, who is white. “He always held the reins in his hands.”
Today, VIBE is headed by Danyel Smith, at 33 the magazine’s first African-American editor-in-chief (and first female in the slot as well). She succeeded Alan Light, a white male who stepped down from the position to oversee VIBE’s publishing efforts.
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These days, the name-branding of VIBE is helped along by the exceedingly deep pockets of Big Willies (powerful dudes) like Jones and Robert Miller, the publishing brains behind Martha Stewart Living. Miller, who turned the home ec queen into a runaway brand name phenomenon, helped bring VIBE into fruition as a 23-year-veteran with Time Inc. In 1996, Time sold its interest to VIBE Ventures, a partnership headed by Jones and Miller, who now runs the Los Angeles-based Miller Publishing.
Still, VIBE continues to have its detractors.
“VIBE is like fool’s gold,” says a former VIBE writer who asked not to be identified. The writer, who says his decision to leave the magazine was mutual “after I cursed everyone out,” says this about his former colleagues: “They’re middle-class white people and black people who are on a cultural safari. Yet they control this magazine, which is ostensibly about people who are on the bottom, which is what hip-hop culture is about.”
Mention such accusations, and Clinkscales says he’s too busy trying to turn VIBE into a brand name to play the race card, dismissing such talk as “the high priest of black syndrome,” i.e. mind control from the black thought police.
“When people are challenging me, I’m challenging the status quo,” he says. “People far too often are caught up in racial politics. Microsoft and Apple are making deals, while we’re dealing with the pathetic innuendos of race.”
Adds Smith: “We are the mainstream now, know what I mean? Don’t underestimate people because they like hip-hop. People said the same thing about rock. But we don’t have to be 40 to run this magazine.”
