Mixed Vibes Haunt New Hip-Hop Voice

MTV, chili peppers and Seattle-scene hoopla aside, it looks as if, at long last, rock ‘n’ roll is finally dead.

The last nail in its coffin seems to have been pounded this week by Vibe magazine, which hopes to become the official voice of rock’s cultural replacement: the hip-hop nation.

Monday, 200,000 copies of Vibe’s preview issue hit the streets for a nationwide test run. Judging from all cultural weather vanes, such a publication’s timing is perfect.

Having already leapfrogged the underground phase that got Rolling Stone started, Vibe is poised to deliver hip-hop directly to a mainstream audience stirred up by all the Ice-Cube, Ice-T, Sister Souljah brouhahas that have been building over the past year or so.

If it works, and it almost certainly will (at least for a while), the magazine seems likely to elbow aside some fine zines already on the racks--such as the Source--and to put the pressure on publications that only pussyfoot around rap--Spin and Details.

Johnathan Van Meter, editor in chief of the Rolling Stone-sized, Quincy Jones-created Vibe, won’t dis rock by calling it a corpse.

He says only that rock has “lost its soul.”

But he does, naturally, see hip-hop as the cutting edge: “All of the social urgency in music is in hip-hop and black music now.”

But is it really still a black thang?

Most hip-hop magazines, Van Meter says, try to keep hip-hop “authentic and black (and so) tend to keep things in the ghetto.”

Vibe, he says, “puts it in the larger pop culture, which is multiracial. . . . We want it to appeal to people who are real fans of music or interested in the culture that surrounds the music. We hope they’ll be of every shape, size, color and age.”

Much of what’s in Vibe is standard rap fare: Loads of irreverent reviews, fashion stuff, features on topics such as “girl” gangstas, profiles and essays.

The magazine manages to be at once slick and subversive. But there’s the age-old rub: Vibe is published by Time Publishing Ventures Inc.

This is Time Warner’s experimental arm, but there is no indication that the corporation is eager to dismantle the so-called “system” against which hip-hop has always ostensibly struggled.

So it’s no wonder that the magazine gets pretty confused when trying to define its political/cultural positions.

In an introductory “Sound and the Fury” column, Greg Tate criticizes hip-hop as agendaless: “I have yet to hear a rapper say that commodity fetishism is the true God of this nation.”

But his words are funded by a whole bunch of advertisements, many, if not most, of which seem aimed at white readers.

There too is a catch.

An essay by James Ledbetter addresses this basic rap quandary: Contempt for white wanna-bes is a prevalent rap attitude, but those wanna-bes are a big part of the audience.

Tate is particularly ominous: “A lifetime of Tarzan and John Wayne teaches us that when the war drums fall silent, the pink man should really begin to know fear.”

Comments Van Meter: “When I first read that, I loved it, because it was a little shocking. It does create a tension between white and black. But that’s a desired effect.”

Van Meter, 28, came to Vibe from Vogue, after stints as a writer and editor and founding staffer at the respected New York magazine Seven Days. But the one credential he lacks, many people tell him, is the black skin necessary to run a hip-hop magazine.

“I’ve been made to feel like I should be uncomfortable by a lot of people, but I’m trying not to buy into it. . . . I understand what I represent--another time where one more white person got the job,” he says. “I’m aware of my color every day.”

Since he can’t change that, though, he’s trying to stay in touch with the black roots of the hip-hop nation by hiring as many black writers as possible, he says: “There are so many tremendously talented black writers who don’t get enough play.”

Even if every writer were an up-from-the-streets rapper, though, something happens when a mainstream magazine gets its grips on the counterculture.

One of the many editorial snippets that hopscotch through the graphically aggressive magazine looks at the phenomenon of “X-haustion,” the use of the X symbol from book Generation X to Double XX Posse.

“The letter has been so used, reused and overused,” the writer says, “that it’s downright common--so common, in fact, that it’s become a logo for nothing.”

That same overexposure may already be killing hip-hop.

But if what happened to rock is any indication, it’s likely to be a very, very slow death.

REQUIRED READING

* Anita Hill’s reluctant testimony against Clarence Thomas launched the Year of the Woman. But Paula Coughlin’s whistle-blowing against the U.S. Navy was far more significant and heroic, argues Katherine Boo in the September issue of the Washington Monthly.

Lt. Coughlin worked hard for eight years to prove herself equal to her male colleagues. Her motivation was the belief that “by making it yourself, you do a service to womanhood in general.”

But while attending the now infamous Tailhook convention in Las Vegas, Coughlin’s supposed brother officers subjected her to the gantlet, mauling her, pushing her on the ground and attempting to disrobe her.

Anyone with an ounce of savvy knows what the judicious career course would have been. But, in the interests of justice, Coughlin eschewed that route and publicly called the boys on their criminal behavior.

“It is precisely for those who argue that Anita Hill had no other choice that Paula Coughlin’s story is a counter-myth of crucial importance . . , “ Boo writes.

“It says that a woman can fight against injustice in a closed, hierarchical, defensive culture. And, hell, she can even prevail--not just for herself, as Anita Hill did in silence, but for hundreds of thousands of other women.”

* After a woman signs a contract with a moving company releasing it of liability, the company messes up her furniture. Can she sue?

Sure, according to one strain of feminist legal theory: Because as a woman, she may well have signed that contract without reading it since she was socialized to be more concerned about the feelings of the moving men than her own well-being.

Writing in the October issue of Reason, Cathy Young makes a good case that certain feminists and anti-feminists alike are promoting female victimhood as a means to ideological empowerment.

So it is that some date-rape activists have redefined rape as “any time a woman has sex when she’s not quite sure she wants to,” Young says, and women who have abortions are now “victims of surgical rape” perpetrated by a too-liberal society, and career women are victims of feminists, etc., etc.

The essence of Young’s essay:

“The feminist ideologues who sell the image of woman as victim, and, in a different way, their anti-feminist counterparts, are after power--the power to impose a social agenda, both on men by intimidation through guilt and on women by telling them what is good for them. . . .

“Denouncing the unfairness of life--let alone taking a hard look at some of your own decisions that may have contributed to your unhappiness--is far less appealing than denouncing men, or feminists, or both.”

SHREDDER FODDER

OK readers, let’s all get in a circle now and give each other a big hug.

You Field and Streamies, hug the Mother Jones folks. You American Heritage brothers, embrace your your Mondo 2000 comrades. . . .

The Utne Reader should be congratulated for promoting peace, love and understanding.

But come on!

The September/October issue features not one but two letters from readers ruffled into righteous indignation by an Utne reporter’s insensitivity.

It seems that reporter David Ford, in writing about the Utne-inspired conversational salons that have spread across the country, suggested that a certain type of person need not apply: Cosmopolitan readers.

“They might like each other,” he wrote, “but what would they talk about?”

Utne reader Amy decries Ford’s intolerance. Anne finds the remarks arrogant and “outright prejudicial.”

“Expressions of snobbishness seem fundamentally contrary to the creation of a community that respects diversity,” the latter huffs.

Oh, come on now: If you can’t bash Cosmo, who can you bash?

And what Cosmo readers would want to hang around people who would rather ponder the multicultural correctness of Cosmo-bashing than peruse the story about “Hollywood’s Actress-Hookers” in this month’s issue?