Rap’s media moguls: publish or die tryin’

http://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/apr/20/hip-hop-media-moguls

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Watch your throne, Rupert Murdoch. Hip-hop’s big hitters are entering the world of publishing. This past month, Kanye West has launched a new fashion zine, while Tyler, The Creator and Frank Ocean are both releasing print mags alongside their respective new albums. Rapper Mykki Blanco, meanwhile, is quitting music completely to become an investigative journalist. But will they be as serious about their print endeavours as they are about their Instagram accounts? And will they hack it as editors?

Rappers’ past efforts have shown them to be crap at meeting deadlines. The Beastie Boys’ 90s fanzine Grand Royal had loads of innovative design (the first issue’s cover looked like a kung fu VHS sleeve) and countercultural content (sample coverline: “Was Timothy Leary a CIA agent?”) , but it lacked punctuality quite spectacularly: issue two was a whole year late. After just six issues in four years, it closed in 1997.

Contemporary rappers are unlikely to be so slapdash: many aspire to be serious media moguls, following the lead of Jay Z, who recently launched a streaming service. Tyler, The Creator is similarly ambitious. In tandem with last week’s Cherry Bomb album, he launched Golf Media – “Basically my brain in one place” – which manifests itself in an app. It will stream radio and house unique content, and subscribers will get a free issue of Golf magazine, Tyler’s “visual art journal”.

In the same way that Spotify execs must be feeling pretty twitchy right now about Jay Z and co’s Tidal, editors of high-end fashion magazines will have quietly noted the launch of Kanye West’s Season last month. Initially digital-only, and designed to show off his debut collection for Adidas, free print editions are now available in a handful of locations around the world. The content is a mixture of artfully photographed female nudes and avant garde style. Contrast this with the recently closed Loaded and you start to see the way the game is changing for print magazines; crass and paid-for is out, free and pretentious is in. Given Kanye’s growing influence in the fashion world, there’s no reason Season couldn’t one day evolve into something that challenges Vogue.

As for Tyler and Frank’s new magazines, only time will tell if they are genuine “brand extensions” that deepen our understanding of these artists or just vanity projects. Neither Ocean’s Boys Don’t Cry, nor Tyler’s Golf (not about golf) are out yet.

Ideally, of course, rap’s new wave of editors would radicalise the way we think about magazines. And if they nail it, perhaps they’ll grow their portfolios. Just imagine what the remaining members of NWA might do given the keys to the Mid Sussex Times. Straight Outta Plumpton is a paper we’d all like to read. Publishing may have a very odd future indeed.