Soon enough Ed Young secured The Source’s first national newsstand distribution deal, and the current music editor announced his plans to leave. “The search was on for a suitable replacement. 'The Record Report' section was easily the magazine’s most popular — before the 'mic' icons were conceived of, albums were awarded a series of exploding records – and there were plans to revamp the section. I thought that I would be the perfect person to take over the job and patiently waited for the editors to approach me. They approached me all right, but only to ask me if I knew anyone who might be interested in taking the job! I was like, 'what the fuck?' So I threw my hat into the ring and announced to anyone who would listen my intention to become the first full time Music Editor of The Source. Because of my retail work I had a good idea of what was happening around the country and knew that there was a lot of good music out there that needed to be exposed by The Source. Plus, I just plain felt that I had a better feel for this stuff than everybody else. I told Dave Mays and he literally gave me one of those — 'Music Editor? You?' — kinds of looks. He clearly didn’t think I was up to the job. Fortunately David Watkins, Chris Wilder and James Bernard (a Source co-owner) disagreed and put pressure on Dave and Jon to give me the nod. Chris definitely felt that the more Black people on the editorial side the better and I totally agreed with him.”

HipHopDX: 1990 to 1994 was the zenith of The Source. The reputation of “the bible” was developed in those years. Being the music editor controlling such gospel, wouldn’t that make you god of hip-hop journalism?

Reginald Dennis: Well, that’s obviously not my call to make, but for a couple of years there we did exert an enormous amount of influence on this industry and much of what we did was indeed historic. But in those days, because we were all so young and so busy laying the foundations for this particular industry, there was really not a lot of time to put ourselves upon any kinds of pedestals or really look too far beyond the moment. Believe me, in terms of the media, we were nowhere near the top of the food chain. Every day life was often difficult. We were working ridiculously long hours, spending 100 degree summer afternoons in offices with no air conditioning and basically trying to hold all of this together without the benefit of any real adult supervision. The only thing that kept us going was our youth our competitive drive and our boundless energy. We all felt that this could be the start of something memorable, but once we stepped out of our comfort zones we realized that no one gave a rat’s ass what we were doing. But inside our little world, yeah, we were running shit. Continued on page 4 »