Lost Recipes

In 1991, Spin magazine took the Compton rap collective N.W.A out to eat for a profile at the Russian Tea Room in Manhattan. The white author presents gangsta rap as a cynical enterprise, no different than escapist, violent popcorn blockbusters. “They’re not stupid, even though you may think so by the time you finish this article,” he writes of one of the greatest groups in the history of recorded American music. The first printed interview question is “Would you consider yourself a professional n****?” (The word was printed without asterisks.) The headline on the article is “N****Z4DINNER."

The author, documentarian, and former photo editor at The Source , dream hampton, remembers that article serving as a rallying cry for the early iteration of The Source ’s Mind Squad, including but not limited to the late, great James Bernard, Reginald Dennis, Matteo “Matty C” Capoluongo, Ed Young, Rob Tewlow, Dan Charnas, Kierna Mayo, Chris Wilder, and founders Dave Mays and Jonathan Shecter. “[Spin] were rock journalists thinking they are the punk to Rolling Stone’s mainstream. This type of shit was considered edgy at the time," hampton said. "The Source saw itself as being directly in conversation with that kind of drive-by journalism, with that kind of racist journalism. Because they loved this genre of music, hip hop, they were radicalized a bit around race. They rightly took offense to that kind of shit, and they saw themselves as an antidote to that. They were going to be people who actually understood and loved the music while everyone else was just kind of dabbling.”

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.