I HAVE my heroes. All of us do, I think. My heroes aren’t the same as most others. They didn’t all garner celebrity or fortune. In fact the more recent ones are the ones who struggled, who documented, who did it all for the love of the game, as some might say. If you got into print journalism for anything else, then maybe you’re beating down the wrong path. Because there isn’t a whole lot of fame nor fortune to be had. However the trade-off is that I get to talk to some people that inspire me or make me believe that there’s something going on out there in the universe that acts as an aggregate ray of hope, as I see a world that sometimes doesn’t seem to have as much hope as it should.

And maybe it’s a romanticized perspective, but I would like to think that the hip-hop journalists that documented the subculture I was so entrenched in as a kid, are the same, as I believe I am roughly their ages now, that they were then in the 90s, when I began reading the litany of mags from the culture. I came across this Dave Tompkins’ URB Editorial on graffiti and I can only hope that one day I inspire someone to write or cite a work of my own. But I am also afraid that hip-hop culture’s run and any real chance at serious journalism concerning it, have all seen their peak. Hip-hop and the magazines that represented it in my mind, were bestowed with a special, impeccable timing.

Scalable version [Here]