Maybe my years as editor-in-chief of Rap Pages had inured me to the idea of an impossible cover. Difficult? Sure. Impossible? Nope. There was nary a cover concept, no matter how odd or unlikely, that Rap Pages’ wildly imaginative edit squad couldn’t somehow massage into viability, then, ultimately, reality. We snuck onto government land to shoot Goodie Mob immersed in a dank pond where snakes swam almost as freely as fish. We talked Lauryn Hill into being slathered in sky blue body paint from her ears to her ankles. We even persuaded a lovely young model named Shonda Santiago to let Ol’ Dirty Bastard cup her bare breasts to playfully kick Rolling Stone’s infamous 1994 Janet Jackson cover in its shins. Gathering as many hip-hop artists we could on the same Harlem stoop beloved jazz visionaries like Count Basie, Dizzy Gillespie, Thelonious Monk, Charles Mingus, Art Blakey and their ingenious ilk once famously posed for Esquire? Hell, what was so hard about that? Granted, recreating Kane’s seminal image wouldn’t be easy. But, so what?

If there was ever a creative crew outside the Rap Pages squad that could do it, this was the one. Larry “The Blackspot” Hester had left Vibe with me to run XXL as the consummate lieutenant to my captain; we were clearly on a mission to tread some new and exciting territory. Everyone was. The skeletal staff at SLAM, Harris Publications’ wonderfully raw basketball magazine, had become its hip-hop cousin’s editorial girders by default after its original leaders’ departure: the wise and wily Tony Gervino, shit-talker extraordinaire Scoop Jackson, razor-witted Russ Bengston, mercurial design man Don Morris, deadline regulator Anna Gebbie and Ben Osborne, the young Wonder Twin opposite XXL’s zealous Datwon Thomas, the two our pack’s hungry, playful cubs, eager to learn and mature at their protective elders’ sides.

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