David Mays and Jonathan Shecter launch The Source magazine from a Harvard dorm
Two Harvard undergrads turn a hip-hop newsletter they'd been hand-distributing into a glossy monthly. Within five years, The Source's Five Mic album rating becomes the most influential single review designation in the genre — a perfect rating reserved for what the editorial board considers genre-defining work. By the mid-90s its monthly cover is the closest analog hip-hop has to Rolling Stone's role in rock.
Why it matters
Before The Source, hip-hop coverage in the music press was scattered across niche columns and one-off features. The Source's monthly cadence created the genre's first independent critical infrastructure — a place where the canon could be argued out month over month. The post-2003 collapse, driven by editor-owner-rapper Raymond 'Benzino' Scott's interventions into the editorial product, marks the equally important moment hip-hop loses that infrastructure (and partly explains why we tier-shift the magazine pre/post-2003 in our sourcing policy).
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