The Stories Behind The First Covers of Famous Rap Magazines

The editors and designers of your favorite hip-hop publications talk about making their first covers.

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Image via Complex Original
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More than a great article, a witty headline, or an issue that breaks sales records, what people remember about any magazine is the cover. Before they can be cut out, pasted on bedroom walls, turned into T-shirts, or spray-painted onto murals, all magazine covers start as an idea. And much like an artist’s first album, the premiere issue of a magazine sets the standard for future releases. The first, and arguably most important step when launching a magazine is to create a dope cover.

That's even more crucial for publications covering rap music, an art form that's long been misunderstood and villainized by the mainstream media. The best rap magazines became an integral part of hip-hop culture. Decades before blogs dominated music media, legendary publications were launched from college dorm rooms and garages by publishing pioneers who had the foresight to take hip-hop from the streets to the printed page. With a pinch of experience and a huge dose of confidence, these classic rap mags found a way to seamlessly merge art and hip-hop. In later years major media corporations got into the game, raising the artistic stakes along the way. No matter if the images are hand-made or high-tech, when everybody does their job correctly, a great magazine cover can turn an MC into an icon.

We dug into the crates and worked the hip-hop grapevine to trace the humble beginnings of the covers that helped these rap mags, and the stars they covered, go down in history. To see just how far hip-hop has come, check out these Stories Behind the First Covers of Famous Rap Magazines.

As told to Imani Mixon (@ImaniMixon), Jaz T. Cuevas (@CueJT), and Rob Kenner (@boomshots)

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Hip-Hop Connection

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The Source

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The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine

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First issue date: October 1991
On the cover: Illustration by 8th Wonder
Cover line: The Bomb Hip-Hop Kinda Magazine
Editor: David Paul
Art director: David Paul
Photographer: N/A

Like The Source, The Bomb evolved from the newsletter of a college rap radio show to a full-fledged magazine covering all the elements of hip-hop culture. Being 3000 miles to the west of Harvard University, the first issue featured Cypress Hill rather than Slick Rick. The artistic approach favored graf-style illustrations over photography. And the roster of writers—Funken-Klein (R.I.P.), Billy Jam, Spence Dookey, Cheo Coker, Jazzbo, Faisal Ahmed, Dave Tompkins, DJ Shadow, and Kutmasta Kurt—reflected a decidedly left-coast sensibility.

David Paul says: "I was doing a rap radio show (Beatbox Friday's) on college radio in the late '80s at KCSF (City College of San Francisco). In 1990, I began printing my Top 40 playlist along with a few reviews, etc. on a double-sided 8 1/2 x 11" sheet of paper on a monthly basis and would mail this to record labels and other radio stations. I had written a couple of articles for new up-starting rap publications, but the magazines never put out their first issues. One morning I woke up and decided that I was going to do a hip-hop magazine myself. I put the first issue together in Oct. 1991 by using my mom's Royal 1952 typewriter, reducing the size of the text to create columns on a copy machine, and then pasting the paragraphs together with a glue stick...pretty archaic, but it worked! 

Photos don't really reproduce well in a black-and-white photocopy publication, so it made sense to go with graffiti illustrators. The first cover was drawn by 8th Wonder, who did a lot of art for DJ Shadow and Blackalicious back in the day. The artwork for the first issue had grays, and as you can see it didn't print well, so after that I told all the artists to submit strictly black and white line art."

Rap Pages

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First issue date: October 1991
On the cover: Ice Cube
Cover line: Cube Catches a 40 Oz. Bomb!
Editor: Dane Webb
Art director: Lou Bryant
Photographer: N/A

Dane Webb was an employee at Coca-Cola when he asked his girlfriend if he could become a freelance writer. He wrote his first piece for the first issue of Rap Pages and landed himself an editorial position working for Hustler publisher and free speech advocate Larry Flynt (according to former E-i-C Sheena Lester, the hip-hop mag was actually the brainchild of one of Flyint's bodyguards, James Sims.) Dane soon quit his job at Coca-Cola and took a job at Rap Pages, which was soon giving The Source a run for its money. That first cover shot was a pick-up shot, but the magazine would eventually go on to do its own photo shoots.

VIBE

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Murder Dog

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First issue date: August 1993
On the cover: Young "D" Boyz
Cover line: Uncut Vallejo Game "This Aint No Hip Hop We Players Out Here"
Editor: Black Dog Bone
Art director: Black Dog Bone
Photographer: Black Dog Bone

Now celebrating its 20th anniversary, Murder Dog was founded by Black Dog Bone, a Sri Lankan photographer who moved to California's Bay Area with a burning desire to shoot rappers. "I thought, if I were a magazine I could take photographs of any rappers I wanted," he says. "We moved to the south side of Vallejo, on a street called Porter, right by the railroad tracks by the water. It looked like a Third World country, like Sri Lanka or Africa. No sidewalks, nothing—and I got this house. It was really a hardcore neighborhood. I’m telling you everything in the world was going on there. But I wanted to do a magazine and there were a lot of rappers there. 

Skipping out on school, he used his student loan money to purchase all the equipment he needed and got to work on the first issue. "We wanted to be totally independent, so I bought a printing press, and I set it up in the garage," he recalls with a laugh. "I’m like very primitive. I didn’t know anything about computers or nothing. I come from Sri Lanka, and we’re just like tribal people. I didn’t even know how to type. We would type the whole magazine and go to the copy place and blow it up. The first four issues I was in my garage pasting it hand-pasted. And we had the biggest names in there. We had Fugees and Wu-Tang Clan and Onyx. We had all the big names inside, but outside we had Young D Boyz." By focusing on underground talent, Murder Dog became the first publication to put future stars like Master P and Three Six Mafia on the cover, securing their place in hip-hop history.

Ego Trip

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Caught In The Middle

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Stress

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XXL

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Blaze

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The Fader

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Ozone

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Complex

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Scratch

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Respect

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