Which is why Kelela’s on the back cover. Because when I look at the young sistas in the R&B game, it’s clear that Kelela is in her own lane. Hearing her futuristic new-school approach to the music makes me think back to Aaliyah, Janet, and the long line of female vocalists whose footsteps she’s following in. Looking for the perfect complement to Aaliyah, it wasn’t long before Kelela rose to the top of our list. Still, some will argue that it’s all hype. Their misguided view of the media has them still thinking hype sells records. But it’s the artists’ fans that do that; we just tell their story. And we want to keep telling them, but doing it the same way we did a decade ago no longer works. The biggest magazine distributor in the U.S. just went out of business.They delivered everyone from Time and Vanity Fair to Wax Poetics and countless other indie mags.Their demise isn’t simply a WP problem, but a print magazine problem. At the rate the game is going, we’re looking at complete fallout within the next five years. If we’re still printing at all, it’ll be in very limited numbers sold directly to a dedicated fan base. By then, all of the newsstand distributors and physical retailers will be out of business, and the cost of manufacturing and distributing print magazines really won’t make sense. It already doesn’t. So like it or not, it’s all about digital.And as much as we love holding this magazine, we love telling stories even more. But we can’t make that move to digital alone; we need your help. The web game ain’t like the print game; online is all about numbers. Advertisers don’t care how smart and cool your readers are; they just want lots of them. It’s going to take your support to get us where we need to be, so be sure to hit waxpoetics.com and get your daily click on. While we play the game, we’ve got to do it our way. So we’ll continue to provide compelling content that challenges us and keeps you guessing, in print and online. Because it’s a natural part of our growth, as individuals, as well as a brand. It’s what this journey has always been about—growth, openness, and an undying hunger for fresh sounds, both old and new.
integrity in other forms like jazz. But it’s not so simple, because anything can become popular. At one point, jazz was all the rage, and the musicians were selling gold. But they lost that connection to popular culture once they started playing above their audience instead of for them. It’s where hip-hop may have gone had we stayed so focused on keeping it real rather than keeping it moving. One of the most unfortunate phenomena of the last few years has been golden-era cats shutting themselves off from anything new. It happens to every generation, so it’s our mission to keep pushing ourselves and our fans out of our respective comfort zones. Digging for beats was always about discovery, exploration, and openness—finding the surprise gem on an otherwise unsurprising record. Whether it was Christian rock or Andean flute music, everything was up for grabs. It’s the spirit that Bambaataa embedded in our culture’s DNA. Over the years, the game became about scarcity instead of quality, about the records instead of the music. But it’s always been music first for us. Many of the records we were talking about when we started weren’t even available on CD, much less iTunes. Today, most of them are just a click away on Spotify. For music lovers, that should be a good thing.Yet, we still hear old heads whining about streaming music. We love records too, but we love the music more. We want to keep knocking down the walls we all build around ourselves over time, shutting ourselves off from new music and experiences we may otherwise love if we only gave them a chance. I had to learn it firsthand from someone almost twice my age. It was the legendary founder of Sire Records, Seymour Stein, who unknowingly helped me see the error of my ways. Here’s a man responsible for the careers of everyone from Madonna and the Ramones to the Talking Heads and the Smiths, and he shows up to one of our SXSW events, cane in hand and decades older than everyone there. But Seymour was just doing what he’s always done—stay on the hunt for fresh new sounds. While we broke bread a few months later—and he regaled us with tales of his first gig at King Records and discovering multitudes of bands in NYC’s downtown glory days—I saw my future. Not as a bitter old-timer who longed for the “good old days,” but one who appreciated them while staying a step ahead and always knowing where the tide is turning.
After some of the crazy reactions to the last letter, I feel like I still have some explaining to do. From crazy props to cries of our demise, the fans spoke loud and clear.While “real talk” was exactly what some needed, it was too much for others. My apologies to anyone offended; we really do hate peeling back the curtain of the industry to reveal its seedy underbelly. But it’s important for us to give a clear perspective on why we do what we do, even though it may leave some scratching their heads. Take our cover stories, for instance. If you had asked us a decade ago, even we couldn’t have predicted Aaliyah on the cover. It was too soon at that point, but the time is now and it feels so right. From day one, we wanted to tell the stories of our culture’s musical heroes. Some were funk bands who only put out a few local 45s, others were icons who sold millions of records and profoundly influenced popular culture. So it shouldn’t be a surprise to see Aaliyah on the cover.Though she may have come from another era, to a generation of young people like our other cover artist Kelela, Aaliyah was their Aretha, their Billie Holiday. Her groundbreaking work with Timbaland and Missy signaled a new future for R&B, a future we’re living in right now. Looking at the current state of music, one could argue that it’s Aaliyah’s influence that’s reverberating the most. From Beyoncé to Rihanna, there’s no escaping the singer’s lasting cultural impact at the twentieth anniversary of her debut. But there will be those who argue otherwise. Aaliyah was a pop star, and to some, they’re not to be taken seriously.They think pop is easy, that there’s more artistic
Expect the unexpected,
Andre Torres
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