Source Ads

When I was in high school I subscribed to The Source Magazine and I had a couple dozen issues from 1990 to 1993, when I lost interest in the magazine.

I dragged these issues from place to place throughout the years and one day in 2014 when I was in between employers I got the idea to scan them in.

There’s a lot of great stuff in those magazines like interviews with long gone artists and articles by up and coming writers, comics and illustrations, and of course record reviews. But I decided to focus on the ads. Partially this is because copying advertising is considered fair use in most cases, and I didn’t want some lawyer tracking me down.

My process was to scan in every ad in every issue regardless of its content. I only skipped it if it was identical to an ad in a previous issue. Then I’d tag the post with the name of the artists and the name of the label or vendor. The only text was the month and year that the magazine was issued.

I didn’t want to add any critical comments. I thought it was best to let the ads speak for themselves. As a white man I try to let black culture speak for itself.

I didn’t anticipate that the blog would get as popular as it did, but word spread and for a while I was getting inundated with comments and reblogs. People still like and share the ads today, which is nice. I’m especially happy to see when an ad is shared by people who clearly weren’t alive at the time.

Anyway three years, two scanners, and a stack of magazines later I stopped updating the blog in 2017. Last year I reblogged a bunch of older ads for people that started following later, but I’m not sure I’ll do that again. I recently downsized from a 2br house to a 1br apartment and the magazines ended up going to a friend of mine. So it’s safe to say the blog is done.

But the ads live on as long as tumblr lives on, and I hope they bring joy and understanding to people for a long time.