The Stories Behind The First Covers of Famous Rap Magazines

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

First issue date: July 1988
On the cover: Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and Derek B
Cover line: Salt-N-Pepa "Career Girls"
Editor: Chris Hunt
Art director: N/A
Photographer: Normski and others

Rap was stilll a baby when Chris Hunt and Andy Cowan brought rap news to Britain with Hip-Hop Connection magazine. The duo featured some of the most popular acts of the time and added a unique overseas perspective to hip-hop discourse. Although the graphics—a smattering of various geometric shapes and colors—would not suit a modern magazine, they spoke to the playfulness and animation that characterized hip-hop back in the day. An overwhelming number of acts were coming up at the time, and Hip-Hop Connection was determined to bridge the gap by covering them all.

Chris Hunt says: "The first issue of HHC was a one-off—at that point we didn't know it would go monthly. We had a front cover that was designed to showcase the different sides of rap—we had Salt-N-Pepa, Public Enemy, Run-DMC, and British rapper Derek B. Salt-N-Pepa was the main image, because they'd just had a massive hit in the UK with "Push It," which went to No. 2 on the charts off the back of their appearance at the Nelson Mandela 70th Birthday Tribute concert at Wembley Stadium in London.

The single had been released once and hadn't done that well, but after the concert it was catapulted up the charts. We interviewed them when they were in the UK for the concert. It was very well received, and the sales were very high, prompting the publishers to ask for a second one-off publication to be produced a few months later.

The early front covers were multi-image covers, designed to feature as many different acts as possible. HHC was launched as a teen rap magazine, although it gradually grew older with its readers. We didn't do our own cover shoot for the first issue, and many of the images on the cover were press pictures, although I'm sure the image of Flavor Flav was taken by Normski, who was the best British rap photographer at the time (and who did many of the pictures for the first issue of HHC). In fact, he had his own photo spread on pages 2 and 3 of the issue, featuring informal images taken when he was hanging with many of the biggest stars of hip-hop. I've overseen over 600 front covers as a magazine editor since that first issue of HHC. It's not anywhere near my favorite front cover, but it did its job, selling a lot of copies and helping it get launched as a monthly magazine that ran for 21 years."

The Source

First issue date: August 1988
On the cover: N/A
Cover line: The Word On The Street?
Editors: David Mays, Jonathan Shecter
Art director: N/A
Photographer: N/A
Other contacts: Jonathan Shecter

David Mays and Jonathan Shecter were college friends and co-hosts of Street Beat, a hip-hop radio show on WHRB, Harvard University's radio station, when Mays decided to create a newsletter to publicize the show. Although it looked like a typical bulletin you might see stapled on an overcrowded corkboard in a student center, it was filled with pivotal hip-hop happenings. Mays and Shecter used an address log from callers at their radio show as their first mailing list for the publication, and it grew from a one-page newsletter into a legendary monthly magazine.

In June 1989 they released their first issue with a cover image, a shot of Slick Rick that was provided by a publicist. Before adopting their famous mic-in-hand logo, The Source was flanked by cartoon figures and a distorted logo as the header. The black-and-white cover was less of an aesthetic decision and more a result of financial restrictions. The Source wasn't hosting iconic photo shoots and producing elaborate covers just yet, but Mays and Shecter definitely captured the energy and grassroots grind of early hip-hop.

Jonathan Shecter says: "David Mays, who was my college friend and rap radio show partner, came up with that first one-page newsletter, and he mailed it to me. His intention was to basically use it to promote our radio show. We met up and were like, 'Listen, this could be something. Let's figure out how to make this a business.' Very early on, we divided up responsibilities. I became the editor-in-chief and Dave became the publisher. We put literally one hundred dollars into a bank account, so we had two hundred dollars to work with—that was it. We set out to make people aware that we existed, for the industry to give us records, and to make local people aware that this was a good rap radio show. We put the newsletter into record stores in the Boston area. There were about a dozen places that sold hip-hop at that time, or maybe even less. That was the very beginning.

That black and white cover with Slick Rick in a weird pose is the first one we actually designed. We would use the earliest Macintosh computers to lay out the magazine, and it was a very ,very slow process. There was hardly any memory, and if you moved one object on the page, you would sit like 15 minutes for the rest of the page to reassemble.

At that point we had hardly any experience and very little knowledge about what a magazine should be. The business of running a magazine was all kind of a mystery to us. We picked Slick Rick because his popularity and his talent warranted it. His album came out in 1988, The Great Adventures of Slick Rick, and it was a very, very popular album and had many huge hits on it including 'Children's Story' and all of his classics basically. For two guys who had no experience with a design, that was us taking a stab at it."

The Bomb Hip-Hop Magazine

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

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

First issue date: September 1992
On the cover: Treach
Cover line: Is Treach Naughty By Nature—Or Nurture?
Editor: Jonathan Van Meter
Art director: Gary Koepke
Photographer: Albert Watson

VIBE magazine was the brainchild of legendary music producer Quincy Jones who convinced his friend Steve Ross that hip-hop and related forms of black music and culture deserved to have a professionally run magazine to document its stars the way Rolling Stone did for rock and mainstream entertainment. Ross green-lit the project, and VIBE launched in 1992 with backing from Time Inc. Ventures—the same section of the publishing company responsible for titles like Martha Stewart Living—with a striking image of Treach, front man of the New Jersey trio Naughty By Nature. The test issue sold so well that a year later VIBE went into production as a nationally distributed monthly.

Former Features Editor Rob Kenner says: "At the time we shot that Treach cover, it was still somewhat unusual for rappers to be photographed with their shirts off. Years later Treach told us that the cover made him a sex symbol, and that he was expected to take his shirt off at every live show. Albert Watson lit him to look 'like a piece of African sculpture.' The magazine was all set to go to press when at the last minute they had to change the name from Volume because of a trademark issue. Scott Poulson-Bryant came up with the new name, which was much better, and Gary Koepke freaked the redesign over a weekend. The mag hung around for 19 years or so until going all digital."

Murder Dog

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

First issue date: Summer 1994
On the cover: Nas
Cover line: Nas: Prong Beatnuts
EiC: Sacha Jenkins
Art director: Christine Schaar
Photographer: Danny Clinch

How often does it happen that your classmate becomes one of the hottest rappers in the game—and you get to interview him years later? Well that's how Sacha Jenkins, EiC of Ego Trip, got into music media. Sacha and Nas were classmates back in the day, so he didn't have to call a publicist to snag him for the first cover of the upstart magazine he was founding with super-friends Elliott Wilson, Chairman Mao, Gabe Alvarez, and Brent Rollins (with staunch support from not-so-silent partner Ted Bawno). Though Ego Trip had a relatively short run in print, its unique take as "The arrogant voice of musical truth" evolved into a brand that has spawned books, TV shows, and most recently a poppin' website.

Sacha Jenkins says: "After Beat Down, I'd launched another magazine in my bedroom: Ego Trip. I grew up in Astoria, Queens, not too far from the Queensbridge housing projects. Turns out, Nas and I went to the same middle school. And we had friends in common, most notably a man I'd grown up with named Kevin Vaughn.

Anyways, I'd known Havoc from Mobb Deep because we were both graffiti writers. There was always good music coming out of the Bridge, but everyone started buzzing about Nasty Nas...Some of his demos started circulating through the 'hood via cassette tapes. Nas' publicist at the time was a gentleman named Miguel Baguer. I'd known him loosely from Beat Down. I told him we wanted to put Nas on the cover. He said 'cool.' He then asked if we had a photographer. Then he said, 'Don't work. I've got all of these amazing Danny Clinch photographs of Nas.' When we finally saw the shots of Nas hanging out under the 59th Street Bridge, it really resonated with me. There was a homeless man in the distance, and that was the same man I used to see when painting back in that mysterious, forbidden area. So bam. There it is. Full circle."

Caught In The Middle

First issue date: December 1994
On the cover: Common Sense
Cover line: Common Sense
Editor: Kevin Beacham
Art director: Boom Design
Photographer: Jason "J-Bird" Cook

Caught In The Middle emerged out of Chicago at a time when hip-hop media—if not hip-hop itself—was strictly a bicoastal thing. The title quietly expresses the frustration of fly-over states who knew they had fly MCs. The cover is quietly dope, and the money-green hue made clear they were all about the paper. Although the publication proved to be short-lived, it made an important statement that would reverberate for years to come.

Kevin Beacham says: "We were based out of Chicago, and the '90s was a time when there were a lot of things happening. It was sort of this feeling in Chicago of frustration because they weren’t getting noticed by the West Coast or East Coast record labels. So it was happening in Chicago, and everyone was pretty much ignoring it, and that was sort of the theme of Caught In The Middle—a magazine that would push hip-hop Chicago to the outside world but also have the outside world involved in it, too.

That was right around before Common was about to do his second album. He was one of the biggest artists representing Chicago. We took that opportunity as a great way to make a statement with him on the front cover, sort of incognito, not even fully glamorize it like he’s going to be the next to blow up—just like, 'Hey, here’s a little something from Chicago that you should know about.' We made a decision with the first issue to always, no matter what happened, make the front cover a local artist."

Stress

First issue date: November 1995
On the cover: Raekwon
Cover line: Getting Lifted with Raekwon, the Chef
Editor: Alan Ket
Art Director: Alan Ket
Photographer: Dennis Dichiaro

Having Raekwon the Chef on the first issue of Stress magazine gave the mag a strong start. Even though the they had a typo in their first cover, they bounced back and kept moving from strength to strength. Founder Alan Ket would go on to play a role in earliest days of Complex.

Alan Ket says: "The first cover of Stress featured Raekwon from Wu-Tang. For a new publication, it was an achievement to land him. Thanks to the people at Loud Records, it all happened. He was photographed in Todd James' kitchen in TriBeca, which, since Todd is an old friend, he let us use for free. Since Raekwon calls himself 'the chef,' we wanted a kitchen environment, and since we were all weed heads at the time, we brought some in as a prop for the shoot. The bullet-proof vest was provided by another friend, DT, who was writing for the magazine. The cover all came together with design help from KEL First, Todd James, input from Mike Saes, and others. No one caught the Stretch Armstrong typo until I dropped off magazines to Bobbito and Stretch at their radio show and was called out on it. We learned why proofreaders are so necessary the hard way."

XXL

First issue date: August 1997
On the cover: Jay Z / Master P
Cover line: Jay Z "The Untouchable" / Master P "From the Rocks to the Riches"
Editor: Reginald Dennis
Art director: Don Morris
Photographer: Barron Claiborne / Michael Sexton

Many rap fans know how XXL was born out of frustration with The Source, where the editorial staff walked out over Dave Mays and his associate Benzino tampering with the publication's editorial integrity to promote Benzino's rap group The Almighty RSO. But XXL magazine was first conceived by Don Morris, who worked at Harris Publication's basketball magazine Slam.

"This is the god-awful truth," says Morris. "XXL was started in my apartment. I came up with the idea of a hip-hop magazine to go at The Source, because the space seemed open. They said they would do it if I came up with a name and it took me forever. The name is from a Bruce Mau architecture book. He's a famous thinker who works with a guy named Rem Koolhaas. Their book was called S,M,L,XL... As soon as I saw that I was like, 'The dot dot dot is the name of the magazine.' Also in the mid-'90s, XXL clothing was huge, and the brand XL existed through the Beastie Boys. I was like 'XXL is one size bigger.'

So the name came from an architecture book and my desire to be bigger than The Beastie Boys clothing brand. I also came up with the logo—that logo in the red square in the corner was a direct rip-off of Life magazine. I came up with the tagline 'hip-hop on a higher level.' There would be no XXL without those guys, Reginald Dennis and James Bernard. It was The Source editorial team, and they were pissed off because they had just left." Team XXL came out the gate with guns blazing, releasing their first issue as a double cover with Jay Z and Master P—both of whom were just beginning their rise to moguldom."

Former Editor Rob Marriott says: "The double cover came out of necessity because we were planning on putting Jay Z and Master P on one cover, but neither Jay Z or Master P really knew about each other, so they weren't really, fully comfortable being on the cover with each other. Both of them felt like they had more right to be on the cover than the other. This was still during the time that there was a gap between the East Coast and the West of the country. We picked them, because Master P was an incredible phenomenon at that time, and Jay, to us, was clearly the best MC at the time. The cover sold extremely well, and we got incredible responses from every part of the country."

Donald Morris says: "Barron Claiborne is the photographer who shot the famous Biggie with a crown shot. We did the Jay Z shoot at Barclay Rex, a cigar shop in Midtown across from the W hotel.

One of the key moments of that day for me was when Jay Z showed up for the shoot. I worked for a magazine called Art & Auction, so when I got into hip-hop, I started dealing with all the rappers being extremely late. Jay Z was at least 20 minutes early, so he immediately gained my respect. That's a very rare thing in hip-hop. That's always stuck out in my mind. After that Jay smoked his cigar, and Barron got the shot."

Blaze

First issue date: September 1998
On the cover: Method Man
Cover line: The Method Behind The Madness
Editor: Jesse Washington
Art director: David Harley
Photographer: Marc Baptiste
Illustrator: Matt Mahurin

Blaze Magazine was VIBE's response to the challenge posed by XXL, whose hard-driving hip-hop editorial and stepped-up graphics had VIBE feeling the pressure. With two different images of Method Man on their first cover, Blaze set the bar high.

Former Art Director Mark Shaw says: "The premiere issue of Blaze was a really huge deal and one of the largest magazine launches of its time. Method Man a.k.a. Johnny Blaze was the cover subject, and there were two different versions printed. One version was a basic portrait with Meth wearing a black snapback and brim to the side, but the alternate cover was a photo illustration by artist Matt Mahurin who created a crazy image of Method Man, mouth agape, one eye rolling back in his head, ripping the flesh from the side of his face to reveal a cyborg-like interior of clockwork gears and a smooth metal cranium."

The Fader

First issue date: Summer 1999
On the cover: Funkmaster Flex
Cover line: Is Funkmaster Flex the Most Powerful DJ in the World?
Editor: Lee "Majerz" Harrison
Art direction: Fader Design Squad (Lee Harrison, Joe Buck, Anthony Holland)
Photographer: Jonathan Mannion

The Fader grew out of Cornerstone, a hip-hop promotion company known for their mixtape series. Lee Harrison had the idea for the magazine about DJ culture and all the things that inform it and Cornerstone founders Rob Stone and Jon Cohen gave it the greenlight. That was the easy part.

Jonathan Mannion says: "A friend of mine who was working for Bad Boy at the time was like 'These guys are really good dudes, and they want to start a magazine, but they don't quite know how to go about it.' I hadn't heard of the guys, but on his recommendation, I said 'Let's go for it. Just put me in touch, and I'll deal with it, and I'll walk them through it.' So I spoke to Rob Stone first. He was like, 'We want to do this, we have Funkmaster Flex, but we're trying to figure out how to get from A to B.' And I said, 'Tell me what time you have with him, and I'll do an incredible photo shoot, and then that's the first step. I'm sure you have your other content, but if you need help with that, I'm happy to work you through that, having gone through the magazine systems for years and years before that.' From that point they said, 'Yeah but the thing about it is that for us to meet our deadline it has to be shot tomorrow.' And I said, 'I can do it but the film has to be dropped off right away.' It ended up that Flex's office where I did the shoot was on Fifth Avenue around 28th Street, which was two blocks away from where my film lab was. So I ended up shooting him on the walk from his office to my film lab to be able to drop off the film. I shot him really minimally but with good coverage. And then I shot the actual cover against the wall directly outside of my lab. I was literally shooting a roll and throwing it up to the second floor from the street to get it processed right away and make the deadline, which we did. And so began The Fader magazine. That was the kick off, although most people never saw that issue.

The Three Kings was the second issue, and I think there was a little bit of a lag time. That was the one that most people think of as the first issue of The Fader, because it was the first one that a lot of people saw. They knew that I had come through for them, so they said, 'Now we consider you part of the family, and we have an incredible concept. We have Zack de la Rocha of Rage Against the Machine, DJ Premier, and Rev. Run. I was like great, I've worked with Primo before a bunch of times. He knows who I am. And I did the Run-DMC album cover for Crown Royal. So he was like, 'Oh, I'm in good hands.' And I had a say in the design of what the thing was. I literally drew out the design of that cover magazine and literally the pages were my exact design, down to the logo being in the center of the cover. They were like, 'Oh well, if we're gonna sell the magazine we've got to put it in the corner so you can see it.' I was like, 'That's what makes it cool, man. It's different. You've gotta take a chance.' So I literally shot and designed that thing."

Ozone

First issue date: April 2002
On the cover: Red Dogg, DJ Prostyle
Cover line: All New!
Editor: Julia Beverly
Art director: Julia Beverly
Photographer: Julia Beverly

Originally a regional Orlando magazine, O-Zone covered local musical talent. From reggaeton to rap, photographer Julia Beverly decided to launch a publication that would capture the uniqueness of Orlando’s music scene, so she became editor-in-chief of O-Zone. The premiere cover features two popular Florida acts, rapper Red Dogg and DJ Prostyle, and was released as a smaller 5.5 by 8.5 inch publication. The magazine included its signature “O” in the logo that highlighted a second, lesser-known cover subject. The simple cover speaks to the rawness of Florida music at the time. Eventually, Beverly was able to forecast and document the saturated Southern rap scene of the 2000s.

Julia Beverly says: "At the time when Ozone started it was a really an Orlando-focused publication, the southern rap magazine was something it evolved into. Originally, we covered more reggaeton, Carribbean music and stuff that was really big in Central Florida. Red Dogg at the time he had a song called “Sunshine State,” which was kind of a dedication to Florida, an ode to the city kind of thing that was popular.

In the 'O' was DJ Prostyle, he was one of the top radio and club DJs in Orlando at the time, now he is on Power 105 in New York City. We chose him because he had more of a crossover audience versus Red Dogg being more of a street rapper, so having both of them on the cover would appeal to a wider audience. I just remember photoshopping a tattoo on him [Red Dogg] and now it looks corny, but I remember thinking back then that we were really technologically impressive."

Complex

First issue date: May 2002
On the cover: Nas and Dominic Chianese / Rosario Dawson
Cover line: Nas and Junior Talk Respect
Editor: Ben White
Art director: Todd Wender
Photographer: Jonathan Mannion / Dah Len

Complex was the brainchild of graf writer, hip-hop head, clothing designer, and entrepreneur Marc Ecko. "What we saw was a new cultural landscape in which the biggest rapper was white, the best golfer was black, and skaters of every ethnic background listened to rap," he explains. "We wanted to give a voice to those not-so-easily classified people in music, visual arts, fashion, technology, sports, video games, movies, and television who were taking part in this revolution. We decided to put the cool up front, because there’s no color on cool. At the time, many people weren’t ready to think outside of the box, to embrace the complexity of culture. But hip-hop and street style have always been more multidimensional than the gatekeepers would allow. They couldn’t fathom that a man would want both hip-hop and Hollywood fashion—but our readers got it right away. That’s why we’re still here, and still having fun. The best part is that we’re not just a business, we’re also a vehicle to validate other creative businesses and thought leaders inspired by the entrepreneurial virus that makes hip-hop so much more than music. We understand that 24/7, dollar and a dream, hustle hard mind-set, because it’s our mind-set, too. Today Complex is recognized as the curatorial platform for real American culture."

Former Photo Editor Matt Doyle says: "The first cover shoot was Nas and Uncle Junior from The Sopranos. It was our idea to match up different people. We had a bunch of match-ups that we came up with, and a lot of our match-ups were dream couples that we weren't gonna get on our first issue. Coltrane Curtis was working with Ecko at the time, and we were using a lot of Coltrane's connections with the magazine. He knew the people for Nas, and he knew the people for Uncle Junior.

It's funny, because I believe Nas knew what was up—he was sharing the cover. But Uncle Junior had no idea Nas was gonna be on the cover with him. The publicists knew, but nobody had told him. Uncle Junior was a little bit thrown off, but then he was cool. He was like, 'Nas? No problem.' But we were having a problem, because he didn't want to be portrayed as Uncle Junior. We had the Uncle Junior glasses, and then he said 'I'm not gonna wear the glasses.' So we had him put on a different pair of glasses, which made him still look like the part.

He and Nas had a great rapport. Nas had a lot of respect for the work that he's done on The Sopranos. And Dominick had a lot of respect for music and for hip-hop. He's a musician himself, so he had a love of music himself and a love of hip-hop. So him and Nas clicked.

We wound up with Rosario because she was a friend of [former editor] Alan Ket's. Ket knew Rosario and worked with her in the past and somehow he had a mutual friend with her, as well. So that's how we locked in Rosario. I got Dah Len to shoot the cover. We wanted to do a whole bunch of different aspects of her. Dah Len presented the different ideas. He came up with the naughty schoolgirl look and the styling and everything else on that.

Our concept was to do five different faces of Rosario. So he had the dominatrix, the schoolgirl, the gypsy, and the masseuse/murderer (we had to remove the ice-pick from her hand). She was massaging the back of some guy, and you can see she had her fist up. Advertising was concerned with the weapon, and they made us remove it. There were a lot of images that worked very well for the cover, but we liked this one, because not many covers were showing that much at the time. We didn't want to do the standard GQ three-quarter shot, so we added more dimension to it."

Scratch

First issue date: Summer 2004
On the cover: Dr. Dre
Cover line: Dr. Dre: The Ultimate Interview
Editor: Andre Torres
Art director: Evan Gubernick
Photographer: Jonathan Mannion

If a magazine gets Dr. Dre to appear on their cover, they must be doing something right. And if they can get him for their first issue, then they definitely have a bright future ahead of them. Scratch set a precedent for magazines to focus on the hitmakers behind the tracks.

Andre Torres says: "The first cover of Scratch felt like a dream come true. We flew out to LA and shot Dre at the studio he'd been holed up in for months. I remember him playing us some tracks from Game, whose album he was working on at the time. To be able to put together a magazine about hip-hop production and have Dr. Dre on the cover was the greatest start we could have ever had. The response was crazy and confirmed for us that there were lots of heads out there who were hungry for what we were delivering."

Respect

First issue date: November 2009
On the cover: Jay Z / Tupac
Cover line: Hip-Hop Classics / Paying Tribute to the Greatest Images of Our Culture
Editor: kris ex
Photography director: Sally Berman
Photographer: Jonathan Mannion / Danny Clinch

Respect magazine was the first publication to position hip-hop and its vibrant imagery as art for its own sake. Designed as a journal of hip-hop photography, the premiere issue featured archival pictures of 2Pac taken by Danny Clinch, and of Jay Z taken by Jonathan Mannion, the photographer responsible for a slew of classic hip-hop images including the cover artwork for Reasonable Doubt. According to Sally Berman, Respect's first Photography Director, the mag's debut issue is "a first edition of an Encyclopedia of hip-hop photography." We couldn't agree more.

kris ex says: "The whole purpose of the magazine when it started was to be like this piece of photojournalism. We were not trying to make a magazine in any traditional sense, and we just wanted something that was going to be classic and embody the name of Respect.

The actual photo that we were supposed to use was one of Jay Z in front of a broken Jesus statue that's never been seen. Mannion told the story—they were just driving by in Bedstuy, and they saw it, and Jay got in front of the statue and took a picture real quick. One of those shots was just perfect and classic, but then somebody was like, you know, they're not playing around with the religious imagery on the cover, and we had to take that image off of the cover.

It was always supposed to be this thing, where we were really intent on building the brand. We wanted the brand to be like, 'Yo, that Respect is coming out four times a year, it's gonna be like on some high quality paper, it's gonna be some coffee table book shit that I'm going to subscribe to. I don't care who is on the cover, I just want some really fly shit up in my crib for when the homies come over or when the shorties come over.' We were just trying to create this dope thing and circumvent a lot of what the magazine game was doing and how the magazine game was reacting to the Internet. We were trying to focus on our strengths, which was going to the tangibility, the quality, and the ability to hold something in your hands, flip through, and smell the pages."