POW MAG Enters a New Era

There once was a time when a magazine could be your life, and there still can be.

Art by Evan Solano

When I was little, a magazine was a lifeline. If you were lucky, you might catch a quick promo interview on Yo! MTV Raps or Alternative Nation. Maybe the local newspaper would profile Coolio or another crossover act. But if you wanted something in-depth and tangible—something subterranean and personal—you had to buy the latest Source, Rap Pages, Spin, Urb, or Maximum Rocknroll.

In a way, the magazines mattered nearly as much as the music. Multiple publications existed for each subcultural identity. They supplied the photos we’d slice up for bedroom wall collages. They offered essential context obliquely hinted at in the lyrics. At their best, the editors and writers were educators and gatekeepers, denouncing medium talents and empty hype. A critical beatdown could mean career excommunication. Classic reviews could change lives.

One afternoon, I overheard a basketball teammate screaming in disbelief: “THE SOURCE GAVE OUTKAST 5 MICS!!!!” I was already a huge fan, but praise of that magnitude meant that I needed to buy the CD the second that it dropped. When I finally pressed play, I was shocked that Aquemini didn’t fully resonate. I loved the singles, but the second half initially sounded too slow and esoteric. But the rave made me aware that there was something that my tadpole mind was missing. And when it finally clicked, it shifted my understanding of what sound could be—even “Mamacita.”

When I was old enough to pursue a life as a writer, the party was almost over. There was just enough time to chug a drink or two as the bar closed and the chairs got placed in storage. Budgets were slashed. Word counts shrank. Advertisers migrated to Google and Facebook. Back then, two media truisms were inescapable: print is dead and information wants to be free. Neither turned out to be true.

In the 2000s, illegal downloading had the major labels playing defense. Corporate media faced existential peril. But digital media promised to be the great equalizer. You no longer needed to move to New York, luck into an internship, or be able to afford J-school. The blog era offered a level playing field. The only things required were a wireless connection, a URL, and a masters in Megaupload.

Until that point, no one would even let me write for free. Outside of a few articles in my college paper, my journalistic resume was non-existent. Without a graduate degree or familial connections, my emails to all the big publications all went ignored. POW emerged from this asteroid crater. It was founded out of sheer necessity, a one-man operation run by a delusional-but-determined kid, who mistakenly believed that it would be hilarious if he christened the site Passion of the Weiss, after Mel Gibson’s blockbuster remake of the “Hate Me Now” video.

After a short period of abrasive, poorly-edited Blogspot screeds, I somehow leapfrogged my way into the Los Angeles Times and LA Weekly. The pay was marginal, but after years of spending my discretionary income on concert tickets, receiving legitimate United States currency to write about music made me feel like Camp Lo.

For the first few years of the blog era, it felt we were all winning. The bigger sites were lucratively swept into Complex and Spin’s ad network. Former ZShare darlings received seven-figure label deals. Even the nascent new media behemoths of 2010s were directly influenced by the looser style and upstart sensibilities of the blogs. All you had to do was exhibit a semi-original voice, or at least semi-interesting ideas, and you too might get scooped up to freelance for a publication that your parents actually recognized.

If POW started as a vessel for my own literary aspirations, its purpose evolved. It became a kindred collective of analog futurists, digital crate-diggers, and offbeat obsessives. I personally tried to steer the caravan towards artists who understood the element of surprise, the necessity of lightness and humor, and who eluded easy comparison. The only unifying commandment came from Biggie: even when you’re wrong, get your point across.

By the middle of the last decade, independent blogs became endangered. Social media killed comment sections. In search of monetizable clickbait, most major publications abandoned editorial discretion and any lingering ethical propriety. The algorithms of Soundcloud and YouTube—and later, TikTok and Spotify—started supplanting idiosyncratic personal taste. The phrase “pivot to video” echoed through the suites of C-Suite media executives, who viewed culture like shale oil waiting to be fracked.

Most nights I wanted to quit. No staff. No ad sales team or real revenue. No secret trust fund that afforded me the leisure time to smoke Moroccan hash and read 19^th century symbolist poetry. I’m leery of anyone who tells you that something is a “labor of love,” but I’m hard-pressed how else to explain the bleary early mornings attempting to rewrite copy for the next day’s post (all apologies for the typos). Or the frantic emails begging our contributors to write something, anything, that would keep the site from falling into the same broken 404 abyss that befell most of our peers.

POW stayed afloat because it filled a void. With the extinction of alt-weeklies, dailies, and large and small magazines alike, fledgling music journalists had increasingly few spots to hone their skills. If you’ve read anything about new rap in the last decade, the odds are that POW was the first place that the writer regularly published. As micro-generations of “content creators” continue to virally mutate, POW aims for the opposite. This isn’t meant to be PR. This isn’t a backdoor path to become fake friends with rappers. The plan is the same as it ever was: to try to cover the art with the same respect and rigor as our predecessors.

The media landscape has become unrecognizable. A few years ago, I framed a bunch of magazine covers that I’d written. Modern-day legends like Lil Wayne, Tyler, the Creator, Kendrick Lamar, Madlib, DJ Quik, Freddie Gibbs, and Vince Staples. But the magazines themselves are already receding into memory. Only last week, The Face announced that it was shuttering, which means that 100 percent of the dead trees hanging on my wall are now from dead publications.

POW started as a side project, became a hobby, and eventually, offered a higher purpose. When Drakeo went to jail for a murder that he didn’t commit, his first interviews from behind bars were published here. For legal purposes, I technically can’t say that we solved the murder of Mac Dre, but we now know the truth. We were either the first—or among the first—to seriously write about Kendrick, Danny Brown, Gibbs, Isaiah Rashad, Kodak Black, and 03 Greedo. While most of the venture capital-backed behemoths folded or became disembodied meme accounts, we’re still standing.

Survival alone would be a small victory. But in an industry teetering on total collapse, new institutions must emerge from the rubble. Or else music writing might as well be a myth from CB4, Almost Famous, and the rest of the Tubi all-stars. It’s only right that in this bleak cultural moment—at a time when all of journalism is in total disarray—we are relaunching POW in its most fully realized form.

In what many have described as the free agent signing of the decade, we have hired Paul Thompson (Pitchfork, Los Angeles Review of Books, Rolling Stone), one of the best culture writers and editors working, to be the EIC. Paul started his career at POW, so it’s a full circle moment to have him return to help cultivate the next generation of gifted young writers.

From Monday through Friday we’ll publish an original essay, list, review, or interview that re-frames or illuminates an essential part of music history or 2020s chaos. On the weekends, we’ll offer a glimpse at the most exciting, emergent rap music rarely being covered elsewhere.

It’s easy to be cynical, but there are plenty of brilliant artists and thriving local scenes remaining; the problem is that too few viable outlets are around to tell the story. Despite a plethora of talented writers and editors, a chasm continues to grow between the quality of the work and the ability to achieve long-term stability. We have no illusions about “saving” music journalism, but we want to be a part of the solution.

The most exciting news is the launch of a POW print issue later this year. The details will be forthcoming, but the magazine will take inspiration from the classic aforementioned publications—as well as Grand Royal, Ego Trip, and theLAnd. My experiences in the ashes of journalism have taught me a bunch of invaluable lessons—not just what succeeds and fails, but what makes publications truly unique and valuable to their readers. The old models failed. Our goals are more narrow and direct than the bloated scams of the recent past: we would like to foster community, create something sustainable, and pay writers, artists, and editors what they deserve.

We are no longer living in the world that we were raised in. This reality becomes unavoidable every time you peruse your timeline, pump gas, or buy drinks at a bar suddenly so expensive that you can pay for your whiskey and soda on Klarna. Just the other day, a book critic for the New York Times got caught using AI in their review. If that happens to one of our writers, I promise you that I will pay RXK Nephew to make a diss song about them.

The conventional wisdom is that no one reads long or short-form writing. The most middling minds of this generation insist that everything should be Mr. Beastified into 45-second morsels. Every bedroom should have a podcast studio where you can do your daily two minutes of hate at today’s target. And yes, it’s true, we have launched a podcast and may launch more. Our Instagram is active. There is even a POW TikTok, though you will never catch any of the editors, all in the video… dancing.

But the truth is that we aren’t attempting to be everything to everybody. Corporate media executives spent a quarter-century selling souls for mass appeal. They dumbed everything down, exploited reader’s trust, and treated us all like sausage-fingered rubes eager to be swindled. They deserved to fail.

The shortcomings of the digital advertising model have forced a return to a diminished version of the pre-internet media realities. Subscriptions and paywalls are necessary. There is no way around it: POW can only survive with your support. Our goal is to make as much available for free as possible. But writers, editors, and artists deserve to be compensated for their time and talent. Every single subscription will be deeply valued. And if you’re too broke for one, hit us up. No one will starve. Either way, you can sleep easy knowing that your dollars are not being poured into the pantsuit budget of the devil who wore Prada.

I don’t believe in grandiose promises, but I can tell you that we will care. You can’t recreate the past, but you can aim to channel the spirit and ambition of long-vanished inspirations. History is not there to be repeated, but to remind you that it can actually happen again. There once was a time when a magazine could be your life, and there still can be.