NEW YORK, NY — The Source is the most respected voice in hip-hop journalism. Although many consider the hip-hop culture and its musical message sometimes problematic and one month’s cover featured a seemingly suicidal man with a pistol poked under his chin while another showed Eminem flipping the bird — its management has recently decided that it’s not going to accept any advertisements that celebrate or promote “filth.”
“Filth,” of course, is code for pornography and escort services.
Its pages may be filled with scantily clad vixens eagerly showing off their goodies and yearning to waggle their shapely badonkadonks to the hip-hop beat, but from now on the sex will all be suggested. Anyone who actually walks their talk and charges fees for doing so will have to peddle their lucrative papers in another magazine.
“I realize the risk that we’re taking,” publisher L. Londell McMillan admitted to the New York Times, but I think when you have the more raunchy, seedy ads, you lose ads like financial services ads, some of the travel ads, the bigger corporate consumer ads like McDonald’s, Coca-Cola, Pepsi-Cola, technology, high fashion.”
Currently, ads for what McMillan calls “booty ads” for adult websites, explicit videos and escort services take up more than half of the publication’s available ad space.
McMillan, a partner at the law firm Dewey & LeBouef hopes to maintain The Sources’ appeal to the young male hip-hop readership will expanding the publication into something “you wouldn’t mind your kids seeing.”
With roots extending back to 1988, when it appeared as a campus newsletter, The Source has gone through several changes as it has grown in popularity. The first major publication dedicated to hip-hop, it found stiff competition when Vibe hit the scene in the 1990s that drove it to bankruptcy.
Last year, McMillan and other investors purchased The Source. Since then, they have been brainstorming ways to make the magazine both profitable and more clean-cut.
“We don’t want to just glorify the lowest-hanging fruit,” McMillan justified. “There’s a lot of people that want hip-hop but don’t want some of the filth that some of the business carries with it.”
Whether The Source will focus only on equally wholesome musical entertainment is unknown. During a time of economic difficulty, such a moralizing move might well return it to its academic heritage.
