VIBE Magazine Launches Idiotic Tabloid

One of the few interesting things that I’ve ever heard from Kanye West came about four years ago in a Jingle Ball press conference at the Lowell Memorial Auditorium. Another reporter asked him why the tabloids don’t pay as much attention to rappers as they do to white celebs, and Kanye responded something along the lines of: “Because we’re black - and black people don’t care about that shit.”

At the time, I thought it was a good point; my black friends might be as into stupid television shows and awful commercial music as my white people, but I rarely heard them talk about Jay-Z and Beyonce with the same senseless vigor that white folks rap about Brad and Angelina (I refuse to even write the summation of their names). But I suppose Kanye was wrong.
 
Perhaps spurred on by the success of Hip-Hop Weekly - which is devoted to covering everything but the music - this week Quincy Jones’ VIBE launches THE MOST! - “a lifestyle and celebrity magazine featuring some of the most trendsetting stars in the world.” “True to the brand’s motto: All Up In the Bizness, THE MOST! will fill a void on national newsstands by reflecting VIBE’s commitment to urban style, celebrity, [and yada, yeads, yada].”

I won’t rant here - I just wanted to pull a Rush Limbaugh and say that I hope this magazine fails. Seriously - their fucking motto is All Up In the Bizness, as if it was conceived by a gaggle of Caucasian golf buds around an oak conference table. In the past three years hip-hop has lost such credible magazines as Scratch, Mass Appeal, and Elemental - and who knows how much longer labors of love like Wax Poetics will be around? If this MOST! piece of trash does well, then the genre truly is dead and buried.