At work, yesterday, I was discussing early- and mid-90's rap with some coworkers, and how The Source used to be such an awesome magazine.

(Full disclosure: I later worked with Reginald Dennis and James Bernard when I interned at XXL, and liked both of them.)

Back then, other music magazines like Rolling Stone or Spin would give hip-hop ridiculous coverage (e.g. Rolling Stone dissing A Tribe Called Quest's first album because it wasn't danceable enough!) or none at all. Unless you were in a big city, there was no hip-hop on the radio. Yo! MTV Raps was never on when reasonable people would be watching television (Video Music Box with Ralph McDaniels was awesome, though!). And there was no web to speak of.

So how did a nerdy, white, suburban kid like me find out about groups like The Pharcyde and Gangstarr, never mind indie acts like Showbiz & AG or Black Moon? By reading the one nationally-distributed magazine that took the genre seriously: The Source.

Their subsequent fall has been a decade-long train wreck (just Google for "Benzino" if you want the pitiful details), but at the time, that magazine was a Godsend.

If you miss the Golden Age of hip-hop journalism, want to see what the big deal is, or are just curious about what Biggie Smalls looked like when he was only sorta fat and sounded like, when he was a teenager who couldn't afford to make a decent demo, I highly recommend you check out this site full of old hip-hop magazine scans.

It probably stretches the bounds of fair use, but I don't see who's harmed by putting up magazine articles 15 years later. And it brings back some fond memories of The Source and its shorter-lived peers like Ego Trip and Rap Pages. Hip-hop was an exciting movement, and these are the people who were there to document it.

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