Can't Stop Won't Stop (68 page)

Staffers say that Mays asked them for coverage on RSO, and for the right of final edits. “We knew he was under pressure and Dave was damn near pleading to help with RSO,” says Dennis. “But by the time they got the deal with RCA, Ray had already dug his grave with us. His music, while average at best, wasn't the worst thing that had ever appeared in the magazine, but it certainly wasn't worth our integrity as a group to go along with the program. It was a situation Dave had to deal with by himself.”

In June and July, Scott specifically threatened associate editors Carter Harris and Rob Marriott. According to Bernard, when Scott still believed he was getting a review he told staffers, “If I don't get at least a four, I'm putting niggas in bodybags.”
²²
He was threatening Mays again, too. Bernard told Mays they should call the cops, but he says that Mays refused to do anything. Then the threats suddenly ceased. “And I didn't think about it at that point that it was strange,” says Bernard. “I'd see them and it wasn't like it used to be, but it was fine.”

As the staff began to prepare for the November issue, which would hit the stands in October, Bernard penned a lead editorial decrying rapper violence and defining the values he felt that the hip-hop generation should uphold. “First, if artists are too thin-skinned to take fair (or even unfair) criticism, then don't put
your music in record stores, on music video shows or on the radio where it's up for public discussion and consumption,” he wrote. “Our responsibility—whether you're an artist, a writer, a fan or all of the above—is to build hip-hop. And hiphop cannot be built unless we hold each other up to the highest standards imaginable.

“I don't equate building hip-hop with propping up the careers of individual artists when they put out weak shit,” he continued. “Ask anybody who has successfully built up any thriving sports team, business, grassroots revolutionary organization, or, fuck it, a Crip or Blood set, and they'll tell you. Your friends ain't those who soup you on the regular, holding their tongues. Your true homeboys are the ones who care enough to take you aside to let you know when you're slippin'. It's best for you and it's best for the whole crew.

“Anybody who hasn't learned this yet had better grow the fuck up.”
²³

In September, the editorial staff closed the November issue and sent it off to the printer. The RSO fiasco seemed to be behind them.

Bernard and Mays's relationship had completely deteriorated. The militant and the marketer were barely speaking to each other. Mirroring their split,
The Source
's editorial and business sides had become divided camps. Mays proposed the two go to lunch at the end of the week. It was Friday, September 23.

Mays asked Bernard what he needed to do to make things right. Bernard and Shecter had been working without proper ownership papers, so Bernard asked Mays to take care of their stock certificates. Mays agreed. Bernard said he had to meet Dennis for a previous engagement. Mays nodded and said that he had one more thing to tell him. When they returned to the office building, Mays explained to Bernard that before the magazine went to the printer, he had exercised his right as publisher to insert a three-page feature into the November issue on the Almighty RSO.

Bernard was dumbstruck. This wasn't keeping it real. This was gunpoint ethics and crony capitalism. He asked Mays for a copy of the article, and went to meet Dennis. “The first thing Reggie said,” Bernard recalls, “was ‘I guess that's it.' ”

The next day a copy of the article—a virtual press release entitled “Boston
Bigshots” that Bernard realized was ghost-written by Mays himself—was under his door. He read it, composed a resignation letter, then called each of the editorial staffers to an emergency Sunday night meeting. When they convened, Bernard passed out copies of the letter he had written.

The staff agreed with all of Bernard's points but one: Bernard did not need to resign, Mays did. They decided that Bernard would leave later in the week, and fax his resignation letter out. The following week, the rest of the staff would resign in solidarity. First, Shecter and Bernard would meet with Mays to get him to admit what he had done, and they would tape the conversation. The next day, the two confronted Mays.

Although Shecter was supposed to let Mays confess, he instead began debating with Mays, using arguments from Bernard's still unreleased resignation letter. Mays realized that the staff was planning to expose his RSO gambit. When Shecter and Bernard left the office, he called Scott. By the afternoon, Scott had escalated the tension to the breaking point with a threatening voice-mail message for Shecter:

Yo, you fuckin' bitch. You better keep your fuckin' mouth shut. A-ight . . . You can't help niggas out? You fuckin' faggot. You let me hear one more fuckin' word out of you, Jon, I'ma fuckin drag you up out of there. A-ight? You better keep your fuckin' mouth shut. You fuckin' sellout white boy bitch. Don't fuckin' play us, man, we fuckin' knew you before, before there was any
Source
. Don't fuckin' play us.

Bernard, Dennis and Shecter took the tape to the police.

The detective told the three that they could make an arrest, but that Scott would be likely be back on the street in a day and an arrest might escalate the situation. Instead, they were offered the option of using a voluntary writ that would begin a conflict-resolution process. The next day was a RSO press day at RCA. The three agreed to deliver the writ then.

Shecter never showed up. So Bernard and Dennis walked it up to the press suite. When they entered, Scott and three others from the crew were surprised. “Ray literally looked like he had seen a ghost,” says Dennis. “He was visibly shook and stammered, ‘Yo, I didn't know
The Source
was coming down.' ”
Bernard handed the summons to Scott and told him, “Look, you can't be threatening our people like that.”

Scott's mood turned sour. “You trying to embarrass niggas on our press day?” he shouted. The four rushed Bernard and Dennis, and they all exchanged blows. Bernard and Dennis made it to the doorway, caught the elevators down, and headed back to the office. By then, Scott had called Mays, who immediately headed up to RCA. As Mays and Scott discussed what to do, Bernard's resignation letter came through on the label's fax machine.

Bernard had written, “You have made a mockery of my efforts to protect our staff from physical assault as well as the magazine's efforts to take a stand against the rising tide of violence in the Hip-Hop Nation. And in the process, you have destroyed every bit of the magazine's integrity.

“Dave, it is a tenet of journalism that there is a wall between the editorial ventures and the business ventures,” Bernard's letter continued. “But it seems as if you are willing to push me to shape the editorial vision so that we don't step on too many toes in order for you to build your entertainment empire. This is simply unacceptable.”

Overnight, a remote automatic fax machine would deposit the letter in 750 industry offices. When Mays and RSO rushed back to the offices, the staff was gone.

Later that week, Bernard told the press, “This is a fight for a precious thing, a magazine that speaks directly to a hip-hop generation from people who are part of that.”
²⁴
But he and his staffers knew the battle had already been lost; the conviction to storm the mainstream on their own generation's terms, the standards and codes that they had upheld against the threat of corruption—all of that seemed to be crumbling. Hip-hop seemed free for the taking. On the other side of this moment lay empires and ruins.

Bernard and Dennis had found an investor willing to put up $3 million for a buy-out, but without Ed Young, they did not have the controlling interest to force Mays to sell. They considered other options, including “further violence and retaliation,” Dennis says. “But it was clear that there was nothing that could be done to salvage the situation. Our time at
The Source
was over, and outside of a
time machine there was no way to repair the damage.” Soon after, Bernard and Shecter received their stock certificates from Mays, a move that was part preemptive strike and part pimp-slap.

Mays was forced to rebuild an editorial staff from scratch. He told anyone who would listen, “The Almighty RSO—whether they were my partner or not—merited some kind of coverage in the magazine, the way any other group that had an album on a major label that was making some kind of noise deserved coverage. Because of their problems with me, [the former editorial staff] refused to cover the group in any way.”
²⁵
The crew's EP stiffed.

Almighty RSO was renamed Made Men, and Ray Dog became Benzino. None of their records became big hits, but with Mays as their manager, they always seemed to land another major label deal and some new fans. Each time a new Made Men or Benzino record was about to be released, it seemed, a struggle broke out between Mays and his editorial staff, people walked out in protest, and Mays was forced to rebuild again.

But his entertainment empire grew. He began the nationally syndicated
The Source Magazine
Radio Network,
The Source Magazine All Hip-Hop Hour
television program, a series of hits compilation CDs, the annual
Source Hip-Hop Music Awards
syndicated television special,
thesource.com
, and The Source Youth Foundation. He bought back Bernard's and Shecter's shares.

In 1997, as Bernard and Dennis launched
XXL Magazine
to compete directly with
The Source
, Mays entered into partnership negotiations with
Rolling Stone's
Jann Wenner. But Wenner reportedly refused to pony up $15 million for only a quarter ownership of the company.
²⁶
Now Mays had a new goal. “I want to build the Time-Warner of this generation,” he told anyone who asked.
²⁷

The law continued to hawk Scott and his crew. An FBI investigation into Scott's murky past commenced. Two Made Men associates were convicted of stabbing Boston Celtics star Paul Pierce.

“I'm not going to stand here and pretend that myself or the guys grew up as angels, but the wreckage of our past should not be used to judge the path of our future,” Scott angrily told the press in 2000, after serving a thirty-day bid stemming from a shopping-mall confrontation with police. “For years the media has been slandering our name and it's time for this vicious attack to stop.”
²⁸

In 2003, as Scott prepared for the release of another record and
The Source
continued under yet another editorial staff lineup he suddenly appeared on the masthead as a “cofounder.” Scott revealed that he and Mays were coowners of
The Source
. “I didn't buy in,” he said. “I didn't give Dave a dollar.” Instead of cash, he said, “I gave him my love, my loyalty, my honor and my vision.”
²⁹

Just months after the meltdown, at the second annual Source Music Awards in the spring of 1995, Suge Knight stepped up to the podium and called out Puffy and Bad Boy. The rap industry had become the fastest-growing sector of the music industry. By then it was also out of control.

The Source
's collapse seemed to prophesy a new kind of predatory, mercenary, get-it-while-you-can impulse in the hip-hop nation. Beef—Death Row and Bad Boy, Tupac and Biggie—rose to a high-stakes spectacle. Competition inspired paranoia. Greed led to violence. A bloody climax from the deadly end of warm guns felt inevitable.

Four years later, DJ Kool Herc stepped onto the same stage, to finally receive his due recognition, and to make things right. Flanked by Grandmaster Flash to his right and Jam Master Jay to his left, Herc received a long standing ovation.

He said:

I want to thank God for me being here, alive, drug free, to live to see this day . . .

Let me set the record straight, it's been twenty-nine years. Got stabbed, nearly got killed in a party, but I didn't give up because the youth was having fun. They said, “Herc when is the next party?” and that's what kept me going.

1520 Sedgwick Avenue. My sister was behind me. In the Bronx y'all, in the Bronx right here is where it started. But it went worldwide. And we give the kids a culture. That's what came up out of it. . . . Because kids could have been doing something else, but now people living good, having good jobs, an economy . . .

There's a lot of heroes that's not here, that died for this here. Ain't no sense for us to be killing each other over this music. We got to love each other for this, man.

Because I'll tell you one thing, what happened was the gangs back in the days killed it at the Puzzle, the Tunnel, and I'm the one that started to play, and all I asked for was respect. . . . It wasn't about me being big and brawn, I never used that over nobody.

I gave respect to get respect and that's how I keep my life flowing.