Smile every time my face is up in The Source...

Buying Hip-Hop magazines that would like to lead us to believe that certain sub-standard acts are actually the future of rap stopped for me along time ago. But while buying records at the weekend and seeing Ice Cube staring at me from The Source I thought I'd give it ago. What's the worst that could happen as those Dr.Pepper adverts would like us to believe. It was their 200th issue so perhaps it would be nice to see what they would do for it. Looking at the cover while waiting to pay the early signs were encouraging, Lupe Fiasco was on the cover, Little Brother too. When I managed to flick through I realised it would only take one trip to the bathroom to get through the garbage inside. For a magazine that has been through the rough the last three years you would think they would use the 200th issue as an opportunity to reflect back on the good days while using it as a stepping stone for the future.

But ain't a damn thing changed. A guy wrote about a column he used to write many moons ago without actually revealing anything interesting from those days or give an opinion on anything like one would assume he used to. Seeing the likes of Dead Prez and the like is a good thing, but rather than giving them some valuable pages they had them instead commenting on slept on albums and songs they wished they recorded.

The mags reflection on the years of Hip-Hop in the time of The Source only made for a sad reflection of the calibre of acts they used to feature heavily (A Tribe Called Quest, Pharcyde) to the the noughties (Cash Money, Nelly & Chingy).

What once was a bible for Hip-Hop has seen better days and granted is still trying to turn around the damage left from the Benzino anti-Interscope era, but there is a still a long way to go before they will ever instill that excitement into buying an issue again, especially when you can find out pretty much everything on the internet these days.