Hip Hop Connection magazine UK 1988-2009
Before you could upload a track and spend the evening checking whether anyone had listened, there was the considerably slower business of getting somebody to notice your demo tape. For British rappers in the late 1980s and 1990s, Hip Hop Connection was one of the places you wanted it noticed.
You bought it for the interviews, the reviews and the photographs. But if you were making music yourself, you were also looking for names. People you knew. Crews you had heard about. Your own, if things had gone your way.
Hip Hop Connection featured me more than once, so this is personal. There was a particular satisfaction in appearing in a magazine you actually read. Your name was in amongst the music, rather than stuck on another cassette somebody might never get round to playing.
HHC published its first issue in July 1988, under editor Chris Hunt. That put its launch a month ahead of The Source, which began as an American newsletter in August that year. A British magazine had got there before one of the most famous names in American rap journalism had properly started.
The timing could hardly have been better. Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, Boogie Down Productions and N.W.A were changing what rap sounded like and what it could say. British listeners wanted more than the occasional grudging paragraph in a music paper.
HHC gave them somewhere to go every month.
One of the stranger details is that Hip Hop Connection existed before there was a magazine. Its parent company had already used the name for a premium rate 0898 telephone information line, presented by Dave Pearce. Callers could listen to the previous week’s best rhyme and then record one of their own.
An aspiring MC could audition down the telephone. Whether whoever paid the phone bill appreciated this contribution to British hip hop is another matter.
The magazine’s early contributors included Ekow Eshun, Malu Halasa and Vie Marshall. Normski had his own section showcasing his photography. These were people documenting a culture while it was happening, without the benefit of knowing which photographs or interviews would become historically important.
Eshun’s later career shows how far some of that early talent travelled. He went on to become assistant editor of The Face and editor of Arena, taking the latter job in 1997. From 2005 to 2010 he directed London’s Institute of Contemporary Arts. His work as a writer and curator has included the memoir Black Gold of the Sun and the 2022 Hayward Gallery exhibition In the Black Fantastic.
Normski, born Norman Anderson, became familiar to a much wider audience through BBC television, particularly Dance Energy. But his photography deserves attention in its own right. His pictures of artists including Public Enemy, De La Soul, Ice Cube and Queen Latifah recorded the people as well as the clothes, poses and surroundings that helped define the period. His 2023 book Man With The Golden Shutter brought together work from that photographic career.
Chris Hunt had two spells as HHC’s editor before leaving for the final time in 1993. His longtime deputy Andy Cowan took over in November that year, becoming the central editorial figure in the magazine’s later history.
That continuity mattered because the ownership changed repeatedly. HHC passed through businesses including Future Publishing and Ministry of Sound before continuing under independent ownership.
The Ministry period produced a particularly odd editorial experiment. After buying the title in 2000, the company put Mariah Carey on its first cover and tried a policy of featuring only female artists on the front. Kelis and Lauryn Hill followed. It was an awkward approach for a magazine whose readers expected its covers to reflect the full range of hip hop. Ministry sold the title after about a year.
For British artists, though, the argument was often about what happened further inside.
Every aspiring rapper in the 80s and 90s & 00s wanted to see their name in there. That was how it felt from our side of the page, anyway. The American interviews were a major reason to buy HHC, but you could also find lots of homegrown reviews - which was evidence that somebody closer to home was getting heard.
A mention meant something when there were fewer places to get one. You could not put a song online back then, you couldn't send a link round and have people listening to your track within minutes. Getting music beyond your immediate circle involved a lot of effort & dedication. tapes, postage, record shops, radio shows and quite a lot of waiting.
That is why a small amount of magazine space could carry so much weight. A crew from another town stopped being just a name somebody had mentioned. There they were in print, in the same magazine covering the records you were saving up to buy.
HHC deserves credit for making room for that. It is also fair to wish it had made more. British hip hop had enough talent, disagreements and local stories to fill far more pages than it usually received.
The readers had their own opinions about what deserved attention, and the magazine preserved those too. In its March 2000 readers’ poll of the 100 best albums, Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back finished first. Enter the Wu Tang (36 Chambers) came second and Nas’s Illmatic third.
There were British records further down the list, including Gunshot’s Patriot Games at number 52 and Blak Twang’s 19 Longtime at number 96. Old polls are revealing because they show what readers valued then, before another quarter of a century of anniversary features and revised verdicts.
HHC reached its 200th edition in April 2006, marking the occasion by revisiting interviews from its history. Its final print issue was number 232, published in 2009.
That left an archive stretching from the late 1980s into the internet age. Alongside the famous interviews were the smaller details that become more interesting with time: advertisements, release announcements, unfamiliar names and reviews written before anyone knew which albums would last.
The August 1997 issue of Hip Hop Connection at Old’s Cool includes Boot Camp Click, Wu Tang Clan, DJ Kool Herc and Capone and Noreaga. It brings together the music’s foundations and the artists commanding attention that summer.
https://olds-cool.co.uk/products/hip-hop-connection-magazine-august-1997
For anyone who read HHC at the time, an old copy also brings back the business of following hip hop before everything was immediately available. Reading about a record was not the same as hearing it. Sometimes you had to go and find it.
And if you were making your own music, you kept checking those pages.
Somebody had to get their name in there, big shout out to Barry Sugarman.