XXL was founded by James Bernard and Source music editor Reginald Dennis (not to be confused with Reginald Denny) only in the sense that they were amongst the magazine’s first employees.

No offense to those brothers, but they were founders of XXL magazine the same way that I’m the founder of the XXL blogs. Really XXL was founded by white people from Harris Publications, which owned the magazine until they sold it a few weeks ago to radio conglomerate Townsquare Media.

A guy named Don Morris, who’d been a “co-founder” of Harris’ basketball magazine Slam, came up with the idea for a rap magazine, which he pitched to his bosses. This was at a time when the media landscape was lousy with upstart rap magazines, oftentimes-amateurish knockoff versions of The Source.

Rap magazines in the 1990s were the equivalent of rap blogs circa 2008. It’s an aspect of hip-hop history that’s likely to be forgotten, if only because who gives a shit. Complex, if you can imagine, put together a list of all the rap magazines a while back. There’s more of them than you’d think.

So this guy’s idea to start yet another rap magazine wasn’t as visionary as, say, XXL’s decision to let me write a blog for them. It generated a shedload of money anyway. Morris also came up with the name XXL, the XXL logo and the tagline Hip-Hop on a Higher Level.

Bernard, Dennis and the rest of the people they brought over from The Source and elsewhere (the mastheads of the first few issues are roughly the length of the phonebook in the town where I went to college) were brought in to craft the magazine’s content, modeling it after The Source, but with fewer gangbangers and wack rappers on the premises.

As far as I know, none of these people were co-founders of XXL in the sense that James Bernard can be said to have been a co-founder of The Source, meaning that if they were ever forced to walk off in a huff they’d be entitled to a substantial windfall. Perhaps it’s a meaningless distinction in terms of the actual definition of the term co-founder, but it’s an important thing to consider when it comes to matters of ownership, cultural appropriation and exploitation, i.e. the only non-rape subject matter we’ll be discussing on the Internets from here on out.

In a recent issue of my free weekly email newsletter Life in a Shanty Town I said I never read XXL. This wasn’t a lie per se. What I meant is that I was never a regular reader of XXL at any point in its 17-year history, and now, unfortunately, I’ll never have a chance to be.

In fact, I bought at least the first three issues of XXL. I found them earlier today, while conducting “research” for this essay, on a bookshelf in my house in a shanty town, sandwiched in between more or less every issue of The Source from 1994 to 1997, when I was a subscriber; various ‘90s-era video game magazines, which, in retrospect, my parents should have viewed as a sign that I wouldn’t turn out right; and late ‘90s-era “men’s” magazines like Maxim, Stuff and Details, which were probably more fapworthy than you remember, even if you remember them as being imminently fappable.

Note that according to the Google, Details might be a magazine for gay guys now, like Vibe. Trust that when I was checking for it it was nothing of the sort. I’ve got an issue with the underrated Selma Blair on the cover that got me through some difficult times as a freshman in college.

I had more disposable income at 16 than I do at 33

Looking through these issues of XXL, it isn’t clear to me that I’ve read any of them, aside from some of the “front of the book” stuff—brief, inane capsules of information put together for the benefit of corporations that didn’t want their ads run alongside anything interesting . . . I’d imagine.

What do I know about magazines?

The third issue, with D’Angelo on the cover, looks like it may have never been opened. The features in the first two issues don’t seem familiar to me, and even though these magazines are old enough to legally have sex with in the State of Missouri (no Boutros), you’d think I would remember these articles if I’d read them. I remember articles I read in The Source from longer ago than that. I was a magazine-buying fool in the late ‘90s, and it’s likely that I bought these issues, flipped through them once or twice, and filed them on a bookshelf never to be looked at again until just now.

My subscription to The Source ran out in 1997, but I continued to buy it into 1999, finally giving up on it mostly because I was now in college and I could get a sixer for the same amount. If I didn’t learn shit else in college, I picked up a sense of priorities. In those last couple of years of high school, I bought all kinds of shit in addition to The Source, including the aforementioned men’s magazines and video game mags, Spin and various “stroke rags,” which I was able to buy, without ID, from the time I was 16, probably in part because I was a black guy in a white area, but also in part because I was only a child in the nominal sense of the term. I was a large brother.

Flipping through those first few issues is an interesting experience in light of what we know now about the history of rap magazines, rap itself and so many things that have happened subsequently. You can see how they’re both a reaction to what came before, in particular problems people seemed to have with The Source, and they also seem to predict some current trends in hip-hop journalism.

For example, clearly there’s an attempt to cover “regional” rap music just as much as “East Coast” rap. The first issue has features on Cee-Lo, upwards of a decade before Gnarls Barkley, Eightball & MJG and Master P. The East Coast, meanwhile, is represented only by Jay-Z, Ma$e and Rakim. And Rakim doesn’t really count, since it’s obvious he was picked to represent old school artists. He just happens to be from the East Coast. He’s what white people looking for a diversity hire would call a “twofer.”

Jay-Z and Master P were supposed to be on the cover together, but neither of them wanted to be on the cover with each other. Jay-Z didn’t want to be pictured with Master P because he felt he might somehow become a worse rapper just by being in the man’s presence. Master P didn’t want to share the cover with Jay-Z because he probably made like $100 million that year, and Jay-Z didn’t really start to blow up until “Hard Knock Life,” a full year later. He was on tour that summer as an opening act for Puff Daddy, who was touring stadiums as a rapper—before Foxy Brown went on, as I recall.

The second issue of XXL had features on Too $hort, E-40 and OutKast, from the South, with only Fat Joe and Redman representing the East Coast. The truly ridonkulous third issue, the last one I ever bought, had features on Goodie Mob, Above the Law, Brotha Lynch Hung, C-Bo and Young Bleed, representing everywhere else on the map, and DMX and The Lox from the East Coast.

There’s also an article on Ultramagnetic MCs by Brian Coleman, author of the new Check the Technique, Vol. 2. Failure to sufficiently cover old school acts had been an issue in The Source, and there was a minor, long since forgotten controversy involving old school artists not being invited to the Source Awards. Some 50 year-old men almost had to lay the smack down.

Similarly, OutKast once received a Source Award for Best New Artist, or something to that effect, only to be greeted by a chorus of boos. An upset Andre 3000 grabbed the microphone, declared that the South had something to say, and then didn’t say anything . . . which is really all you need to know about both Andre 3000 and people who consider him the greatest rapper of all time.

OutKast’s first album received four and a half mics, which was more than generous, as far as I’m concerned, though many, including OutKast themselves, would argue that it deserved a full five mics. The fact that it wasn’t declared an instant classic came to be viewed as evidence that The Source was biased against the South.

When Aquemini received five mics, in 1998, it was viewed as an honest acknowledgement of that album’s musical superiority by people who hadn’t been paying attention. Same with Scarface’s The Fix and Bun B’s Trill OG. LOL

Ironically, this patronizing treatment almost comes off as an insult, like treating a fat chick like she’s just as attractive as anyone else at your school. You’re likely to hurt her feelings even more than if you just kept it real with her and explained to her that she’s kinda gross but you’ll fuck her anyway because maybe that’s the best you can do right now; you’ve got your own problems to sort out. Providing equal coverage for rappers from all over seems like a good idea the same way that making the entire plane out of the same material they use to make the black box seems like a good idea to Jaden Smith. In practice, it mostly just results in a magazine that would interest hardly anyone.

Worse than the random yokel coverage are the articles on women, who don’t seem to be featured for any reason other than that they’re women, and the editors don’t want to be branded as sexist; and R&B singers, who seem to have made the cut because they’re black, and black people like R&B, right? Sometimes the woman doubles as the R&B singer, in another convenient twofer, since I guess there’s only but so many female rappers. The first issue, for example, has articles on both Faith Evans and Joi. The Faith article may have focused more on Biggie’s then-recent assassination. I wouldn’t know.

In general, there seems to be a lack of understanding of who would buy a rap magazine. The front of the book sections of the first couple of issues seem overly antagonistic towards both white people (which I approve of wholeheartedly, mind you), and black people who are viewed as not being sufficiently black, like Russell Simmons, who’s listed alongside the likes of Al Roker and the guy who played Carl Winslow in an article about non-threatening black men. In the second issue, Rush’s close personal homeboy Brett Ratner is clowned for claiming to have some special understanding of black people, and Mariah Carey is clowned merely for having appeared on the cover of Jet magazine.

I think Rush may have once tried to buy The Source, and later he was part of the original team that created Vibe as a sort of corporate knockoff version of The Source. Whether or not that had anything to do with this beef, I’m not sure.

James Bernard and Reginald Dennis were notorious for beefing with rappers. Once, B-Real from Cypress Hill complained to Bernard about TLC being on the cover of an early issue of The Source, in a foreshadowing of the kind of bad decision-making that went into at least the first few issues of XXL. This led to Cypress Hill being dissed in a year-end issue, in part for not having any black fans. Cypress Hill responded by burning a copy of The Source on stage. In the next issue, Reginald Dennis said something to the effect of how funny it would be if they accidentally burned their green cards.

Could any of this have had to do with both Bernard and Dennis being gone by that third issue? It’s literally impossible to say. I can’t even fix my mouth to form those words. LOL

XXL staff at the time must have been under strict orders not to discuss any personnel issues anywhere in the magazine. I experienced this years later, when editor in chief Elliott Wilson was relieved of his duties. I was told I was not allowed to mention it, which means I didn’t . . . until the guy who told me I wasn’t allowed to also left, at which point I mentioned it every other post. The editorial in that third issue, signed The Editors, does mention several changes both in the staff and the magazine itself, without saying what they were.

The reference to changes in the content must mean the political content of the first two issues—presumably the work of James Bernard, who was said to have been behind a lot of the political content of The Source—which is stripped from the third issue of XXL altogether, to the point where you’d never know it had been there if you hadn’t seen those first two issues. It’s a striking thing to realize, in light of who owned XXL and what little we know about the magazine’s history, but it’s also kinda neither here nor there if, like me and probably everyone else who picked up a copy of those first two issues, you never actually read any of those articles.

Otherwise, the content of the third issue is identical to the content of the first two issues to the point where you could switch out the articles with the articles in either of the first two and no one would notice. They’re written by a lot of the same people. When Bernard and Dennis left, for whatever reason, they must not have taken very many people with them.

An article in The New York Times from 2000 says that the black staff of XXL demanded an ownership stake in the magazine and were told to take their demand for an ownership stake and shove it up their black asses (I’m paraphrasing), at which point they walked off en masse. There were whispered allegations of racism, but not for any reason that I’m aware of other than the dispute over equity.

Elsewhere in the article, publisher Dennis Page is pictured leaning over Elliott Wilson’s shoulder ordering him to insert curse words and bad grammar into the copy to make it more authentically black. Like Brett Ratner, he claims to have a special understanding of black people, because his father ran a liquor store in Trenton, NJ, and he hung around black people as a kid, though he has no black friends as an adult. The Brett Ratner dis in one of those first couple of issues may have hit close to home for him. Is it any wonder the guys who probably came up with it didn’t last very long?

The fact that the magazine’s entire black staff is alleged to have quit possibly due in part to some sort of race issue seems like an interesting-enough story that I would have heard about it before I did, while conducting “research” for my first book, The Mindset of a Champion, in 2012, which makes me wonder how true it is.

It would be impossible to say for certain if the entire black staff of XXL quit unless the masthead of the third issue was accompanied by corresponding photographs in which the various writers and editors held a paper bag up to their faces, as applicants to Morehouse College were once required to, and a list of people who appeared to be darker than said paper bag was cross referenced with a list of people who worked on the first two issues. I’d be willing to put together the spreadsheet and what have you, but it wouldn’t be of any use without the photographs.

The editor in chief of the third issue of XXL was one Sheena Lester. In the time in between when the original staff left, in late ‘97, and when Elliott Wilson was appointed, in September of ‘99, the top editor job was passed around like a joint in a “directional school” dorm room. Lester didn’t have it for very long, and I think a few other people also had it. I checked the wiki, and it doesn’t say who. There’s a minimum level of notability required in order to be listed in Wikipedia. Whether or not that was an issue here I’m not sure.

By the time Elliott Wilson was considered, he was worried that he’d be viewed as a sellout if he took the job. Elliott discussed the issue with other members of the Ego Trip collective, with whom he’d edited a now-defunct rap magazine. Ego Trip had been somewhat politcal. Certainly it was race-obsessed. Elliott wanted them to tell him that he wouldn’t be a sellout for working for XXL the same way a desperate guy tells a fat chick she’s just as attractive as any of the other girls in high school. When they couldn’t bring themselves to lie to him, he broke down in tears and had to go into the bathroom of Ego Trip’s headquarters and regain his composure.

This wasn’t just a matter of principle. Elliott Wilson had $8,000 worth of credit card debt that he’d run up buying ‘90s-era hip-hop clothes when he was in community college, before dropping out. He’d been out of a job since he quit The Source, where he’d been music editor, supposedly over a review of a Kurupt album. Elliott says he gave the album three mics and then Dave Mays went in behind his back and increased the rating to three and a half mics.

I can’t imagine anyone, even Kurupt himself, giving a shit about a Kurupt album; and half a mic, on an album that was only bumped up to three and a half mics (still a mediocre rating) hardly seems worth the time it would take to go and edit. When I first read about it, again while researching Mindset, it seemed like BS, like there must be more to the story that we just don’t know about.

But there definitely is pressure on music editors at rap magazines to give out ratings that skew high. (Er, there was.) Years later, when I was with XXL, I heard then-editor in chief Vanessa Satten on Sirius satellite radio saying she’d avoid assigning a review for an album that would receive less than an L on XXL’s rating system. Literally everything reviewed in XXL, at least at that point, was guaranteed at least a three out of five.

There may have been something similar going on at The Source. The issue, then, wouldn’t have been whatever minute difference there is between a three mic album and a three and a half mic album; it was, What if Kurupt’s label was considering taking out an ad in the next issue and decided against it because they couldn’t be guaranteed their albums wouldn’t receive negative reviews?

Dave Mays probably never even heard that Kurupt album.