I Worked At Vibe Magazine For 17 Years. Here’s What I Learned From Quincy Jones.

The first time Quincy Jones appeared on the cover of his own magazine, he had a sense of humor about it. “How come it didn’t happen earlier?” he joked with Scott Poulson-Bryant — the brilliant young staff writer who came up with the magazine’s oh-so-evocative name, Vibe — in the November 1995 cover story.
“What took so long?” Quincy added with a laugh. “I mean, it’s my baby, my dream.”
It wasn’t so long ago that the idea of a glossy hip-hop and “urban culture” magazine published by a multibillion-dollar media conglomerate would have seemed absurd. It felt like a miracle when I got the chance to write an in-depth profile of the Jamaican dancehall star Super Cat for Vibe’s 1992 test issue, which — fun fact — was all laid out and ready to go with the name “Volume” until we learned that an indie music publication in England was using that name, and Scott suggested “Vibe” at the last possible moment.
I was blessed to join Vibe’s editorial team soon after Quincy’s crazy idea was officially greenlit in 1993. Like the rest of Vibe’s young, passionate, multicultural staff, I was embarking on a life-changing journey that would also change global pop culture and the media industry forever, all of it made possible by the most influential musician, composer, arranger, producer and connector of the past 91 years.
It may be hard to imagine in a post-Vibe universe — a space and time where President Barack Obama weighs in on the Kendrick/Drake battle, where Snoop Dogg carries the Olympic torch and hangs out with Martha Stewart (who actually attended the Vibe launch party), and where most print magazines that still cling to existence lean heavily on hip-hop slang, stars and sensibilities — but back in 1992, all this stuff was very new.
The mere suggestion of something even remotely close to Vibe — a mass-market monthly that positioned Black and brown culture at the center of popular culture, employing mostly young writers and photographers of color to document said culture at the highest levels of artistic and editorial excellence — was so audacious, so visionary, so ahead of its time, that only someone like Quincy Delight Jones Jr. would dare speak it into existence.
The story of Vibe’s inception is every bit as mythical as you might imagine, because Quincy didn’t just tell good stories. He told great stories. In this particular story, Q and his mentor/homeboy/Time Warner CEO Steve Ross were somewhere on a beach, or maybe a boat, in Sardinia, or maybe Guadeloupe. Wherever they were, the main thing was to get someplace where you could get away from everything else.
“Quincy, they’re killin’ me about synergy,” said Ross, what with the $14 billion merger he’d recently brokered between Warner Communications and Time Inc., creating the largest media and entertainment company the world had ever seen.
“Well I got a great idea for a magazine,” Quincy told Ross. “But I don’t know anything about magazines.”
What he knew best was music — and people.
“People cannot live without music, man,” he liked to point out. Music had saved his life and become his calling, carrying him around the world, introducing him to all the greats. Quincy got to know all types of music — Stravinsky, samba, Santeria — but especially Black music. He lived it and he breathed it and he elevated it to unimaginable levels of popularity. As the producer responsible for Michael Jackson’s “Thriller,” the highest-selling album of all time, Quincy knew that the most important part of making music touch the world — more than all the great singers and the great players — was a great song. That’s what gave you those goosebumps that told you something magical was happening. It all came down to a melody and a story.
Quincy described the story of Black music as “the most amazing saga ever ever ever.” Documenting that saga was his other life’s work. So his homie Steve Ross sent him to the magazine experts at the Time & Life Building in Manhattan, most of whom had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Instead of goosebumps, Vibe sparked conversations in the Time & Life Building’s corridors of power about whether Quincy’s crazy idea would mean that “we have to put Black people on the cover.” Later on, while putting together Vibe’s first official issue during the summer of 1993, a veteran Time Inc. proofreader who was helping us copyedit page proofs asked me, with a straight face, whether hip-hop fans actually read.
“Hip hop is our latest Black baby,” Q explained to whoever would listen. “It needs to be nurtured and respected and evolved. And it’s not just a musical thing. It’s about a sensibility, an attitude, a lifestyle. The bebop thing was like that too. So much style and flava, from the colloquialisms to the way you walked. Lester Young was calling Basie ‘homeboy’ at least 60 years ago.”
Bear in mind that the conversations about this new hip-hop magazine were taking place at the same time Warner Music was responding to nationwide outrage and calls for a boycott over Ice-T’s “Cop Killer,” a song that was denounced by police unions as well as President George H.W. Bush. The same executive who defended Ice-T’s freedom of speech approved a $1 million budget to test Quincy’s crazy idea.
The test issue’s cover featured a stunning black and white portrait of Treach from Naughty by Nature, as profiled by Kevin Powell, a young Black writer and activist from New Jersey who’d recently become famous for his role in what many have called the first reality show, MTV’s “The Real World.” (Today Kevin is a prolific author and Grammy-nominated poet.) The issue sold like crazy. National advertisers bought in. “We had the right stuff,” Q said. Vibe would go on to become the fastest-growing music magazine in history.
Scott (who is now an author and professor at the University of Michigan) asked Quincy about appearing on the cover back in 1995, because in the space of a few years, the cover of Vibe had become a highly coveted and pressurized space. In those years before streaming and social media, everybody wanted to be on a Vibe cover. Even the advertisements were game changers. Black-owned brands like Karl Kani and FUBU earned mainstream exposure, and the sight of Tyson Beckford in an iconic Polo campaign made a Jamaican kid from the Bronx a supermodel overnight.
Scott knew haters were going to say Quincy’s cover was an inside job, a conflict of interest. But of course that cover, which featured Mr. Jones smiling alongside Stevie Wonder, Babyface and Coolio, was only right. And not just because the albums “Q’s Jook Joint” and “Gangsta’s Paradise” were dropping that month. “I get on the cover of other magazines,” Quincy pointed out with not a trace of pomposity. “I think it’s pretty natural. Don’t you?”
Working for such a legendary cultural icon was both intimidating and inspiring, but Quincy was a very cool boss. He used to drop by the office in the early days, setting the tone, raising the bar, blessing us with gems from his endless repository of great stories. Q told us he always left the studio door open just enough so God could walk in the room — and advised us to do likewise.
Never a micromanager, he pretty much let us do our thing, although he did put his foot down when the magazine’s founding editor-in-chief, Jonathan Van Meter, wanted to run a cover story on Madonna and Dennis Rodman one month after a cover story on the Beastie Boys. All of a sudden Van Meter was out, the most expensive shoot in the magazine’s history to date was scrapped, and we pulled together an Eddie Murphy cover story at the last minute just as “The Nutty Professor” was hitting theaters. That story was written by Cheo Hodari Coker, who was a college student at the time. Cheo went on to work with me on the Vibe book “Unbelievable,” a biography of The Notorious B.I.G. that was optioned to make the hip-hop biopic “Notorious.” Cheo co-wrote the screenplay, leading to a box office hit and a successful career in Hollywood.
Everybody at Vibe cared about everything, which led to some heated debates, especially in those early years. The pressure built up to the point where Vibe was about to be shut down because of some questionable cover choices. The 1993 George Clinton cover was a Funkadelic labor of love that tanked on the newsstand, and there were other near misses early on. If newsstand sales didn’t pick up, Time Inc. was ready to pull the plug.
But the magazine’s second editor-in-chief, 27-year-old Alan Light, delivered under pressure, serving up a trifecta that saved the magazine. First he landed an exclusive interview with the artist formerly known as Prince, the musician’s first since changing his name to a symbol. Next, Vibe sent Oakland’s own Danyel Smith — who would later succeed Alan to become the magazine’s first Black and female editor-in-chief — to write a Janet Jackson cover story just as she was co-starring with Tupac in “Poetic Justice.” The following month, staff writer Joan Morgan, author of the essential hip-hop feminist text “When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost,” flew to Atlanta to interview TLC shortly after Left Eye had burned down her boyfriend’s mansion. They posed on the cover in firefighters’ outfits.
In the foreword to “VX” — a coffee-table book that I put together with George Pitts, Vibe’s late, great director of photography, to celebrate the magazine’s 10th anniversary — Quincy waxed poetic about the art and science of cover choices.
“It’s about being guided by something bigger than human beings,” he said. “Being connected to a divine source. I know that sounds cosmic, but it’s true. It’s like music. It’s very elusive. But you know you’re on it when you get the goosebumps.”
Asked which covers stuck in his mind, Quincy kept it real. “Tupac and Biggie,” he said. “And Aaliyah. That hurt, man. A lot of them hurt. It was all very personal. Pac was engaged to my daughter Kidada when he was killed.”
He shared a moving story about taking Aaliyah to Fiji with some of his kids one Christmas. “Tupac, Aaliyah, and Biggie were all important covers for VIBE,” Quincy said. “It’s not just about saying that we lost these great artists. They represent a culture, they represent a socio-political aspect, they represent a lot of things. Like Miles [Davis], Tupac has a significance that is stronger than music. They’re like a collage of the totality of our humanity.”
When speaking of the totality of Quincy’s legacy, certain names must be mentioned: Ray Charles and Count Basie, Frank Sinatra and Sarah Vaughn, Michael Jackson and Will Smith. You have to mention playing the trumpet, composing, arranging, producing, scoring films, producing films and TV shows — from “The Color Purple” to “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” And you have to mention Vibe.
“Before I go, I would like to see books all over homes in America talking about our musical history,” he told Emil Wilbekin, who served as Vibe’s fashion director before becoming editor-in-chief in 1999 and beating out publishing heavyweights like Newsweek and National Geographic to win a National Magazine Award during his tenure. “It is imperative for African-American kids to find out about all of their music.”
To understand the legacy of Vibe, you have to try and comprehend the galaxy of stars — singers, rappers, producers, actors, athletes, executives, even a senator from Illinois who was destined for much bigger things — who got the chance to shine in our pages. And let’s not forget all the talented writers who honed their craft as they chronicled the culture: dream hampton, Rob Marriott, Bönz Malone, Michael Gonzales, Bob Morales, Sacha Jenkins, Karen R. Good, kris ex, Jeff Chang, and on and on till the break of dawn.
The first editorial page of Vibe’s test issue was an incandescent manifesto written by the inimitable Greg Tate, a renowned music journalist, guitarist, co-founder of the Black Rock Coalition, and author of the seminal essay collection “Flyboy in the Buttermilk.” Having inspired and championed a generation of hip-hop journalists, Tate, who died in 2021, was recently honored with a posthumous Pulitzer Prize. “VIBE is the reason I got to interview Sade, Richard Pryor, Santana, Lenny Kravitz in the Bahamas, Lisa Bonet in Topanga Canyon, Erykah Badu in Fort Green,” Tate recalled at one point. “The Richard Pryor interview is from the days when VIBE was definitely ballin’. I did that interview with my friend and Howard University J-School classmate Peter J. Harris. They’d send you out to Los Angeles for like a week, set you up at some great hotel, you’d go hang out at Richard Pryor’s house or Sade’s hotel room. A whole other moment.”
Yes, for a minute there Vibe was ballin’ — and so was its founder. So much so that it could be tempting to refer to him as a media mogul, which Scott did in that 1995 cover story. But Q wouldn’t use that term. “That’s the bebop sensibility,” he said of his multitude of media projects. “An awareness, a hipness. You want to be dealing with the hippest route. What’s happening now? What’s interesting? I don’t look at it as ‘mogul.’ It’s an extension of what I’ve been doing my whole career. It’s just the battle of the blank page. You always start there. The whole communications or entertainment business is based on two things: a song or a story. Everything else is just accouterments. You don’t call the singer or the producer or anybody else until you got the song. Same with a story. You don’t call the stars or director or cinematographer until it’s done. The premise is just a melody. VIBE is a melody.”
Nine years after the magazine ceased print publication, and I and the rest of the Vibe staff were marched out of our offices by armed guards, Quincy gave an interview to another publication that wasn’t used to the type of real talk that was his trademark. A reporter from Vulture asked if he heard the spirit of jazz in today’s pop music. Quincy did not mince words: “No. People gave it up to chase money. When you go after Ciroc vodka and Phat Farm and all that shit, God walks out of the room. I have never in my life made music for money or fame. Not even ‘Thriller.’ No way. God walks out of the room when you’re thinking about money.”
When Quincy spoke about “the most amazing saga ever ever ever,” he was thinking of the entire story of Black music. But he might as well have been talking about his own life. All the books and documentaries barely scratch the surface of what an amazing life force he possessed. From surviving the gangster life as a child on Chicago’s South Side to recovering from a brain aneurysm and a stroke and maintaining an incredible work ethic, Quincy was on a special mission his entire life. It took me a whole day to fully accept the fact of his transition. Even though he’d be the first to acknowledge that every day was a gift, he was one of those people who seemed like he might just go on forever. In one of his books, he mentioned a sign that he kept on his fridge that read: “God put us on the earth for a special purpose. And right now I’m so far behind schedule I could never die.”
Out last interaction was when he blessed my biography of Nipsey Hussle with an endorsement that money could never buy. “Rob Kenner was part of the original editorial team who brought my vision for VIBE magazine to reality, and during his 17 years at the magazine he always did outstanding work,” Q wrote. “Since then, we’ve both been on a mission to document hip-hop culture with nothing but love and respect. Rob is MY dude, and The Marathon Don’t Stop is a beautiful tribute to a legendary artist. Keep on keepin’ on my brother. We need your work!”
Thank you Q. Thanks for the music, the soul, the courage, the vision. Thanks for believing so much you made the world believe. And even when it feels like God has left the room, I’ll always remember to leave the door open.
Rob Kenner is a founding editor of Vibe magazine, and author of the New York Times bestseller “The Marathon Don’t Stop: The Life and Times of Nipsey Hussle.”