Quincy Jones launches Vibe magazine
Quincy Jones, in partnership with Time Inc., launches Vibe — a glossy hip-hop and R&B magazine pitched at the genre's broader cultural ambition. Edited initially by Jonathan Van Meter and later by Alan Light, Vibe runs through 2009 in print and becomes one of the two major hip-hop publications of the 1990s and 2000s alongside The Source.
Why it matters
Vibe magazine launched in September 1993. Quincy Jones was the founder. Time Inc. was the corporate partner. The pitch was: a glossy, well-designed, well-edited magazine about hip-hop and R&B, treated with the production values that other Time titles got. The Source had been doing the journalism work for hip-hop since 1988; Vibe brought the celebrity-glamour photography and the broader cultural-tastemaker positioning. For the next sixteen years Vibe was, alongside The Source, one of the two outlets that defined the cultural conversation in hip-hop. Vibe broke the Tupac/Biggie cover stories, the Suge Knight profiles, the Lauryn Hill interviews. Editors included Jonathan Van Meter, Alan Light, and Danyel Smith. The magazine shut down its print operation in 2009 in the broader collapse of the print magazine industry; it survives as a digital outlet now. If you wanted to know what the cultural register of mid-90s hip-hop felt like, the photo spreads in Vibe are still the closest available document. You can find archived issues. You should look at them.
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