James Bernard, a Founding Editor of a Hip-Hop ‘Bible,’ Dies at 58

One of the most influential voices of the seminal magazine The Source, he chronicled rap’s rise and its explosion into the cultural mainstream.

James Bernard, a founding editor and star writer of the seminal hip-hop magazine The Source who chronicled, with depth and nuance, rap’s rise during the late 1980s and 1990s as the genre exploded into a cultural force and thundered into the mainstream, has died. He was 58.

His sister, Emily Bernard, who confirmed the death, said he died by suicide. His body was discovered on Dec. 29 in a wooded area in Pemberton Township, N.J., near his home.

Mr. Bernard is believed to have died around the time he was reported missing, in March 2024. He would have turned 60 last August.

A classmate of former President Barack Obama’s at Harvard Law School, Mr. Bernard was an unlikely arbiter of an art form that traces its origins to block parties in the rubble-strewn South Bronx of the 1970s.

But he became a powerful voice as a marquee writer for The Source — his contributions included the influential Doin’ the Knowledge column, which addressed the interplay between rap and Black politics and identity — as well as a co-owner of the magazine and, for a period, its co-editor in chief.

“James helped shepherd hip-hop from skepticism to seriousness, from novelty to culture,” Questlove, the Grammy-winning musician and producer, wrote in a social media post following the announcement of Mr. Bernard’s death.

The Source was founded in 1988 by two white Harvard undergraduates, David Mays and Jonathan Shecter, as a newsletter accompanying their rap program on the university’s student-run radio station, WHRB. Mr. Bernard, then in law school, and another Black Harvard student, Edward Young, an undergraduate, soon joined them.

The operation moved to New York City in 1990 and grew into a nationally distributed glossy that no less an authority than Chuck D, the Public Enemy frontman, called “the bible of the hip-hop industry.”

Unlike teen-focused magazines like Word Up!, The Source drew inspiration from the work of foundational, sophisticated hip-hop chroniclers like Greg Tate and Harry Allen, digging beneath chart success and its gilded rewards to focus on the artistry and cultural meaning of the music.

“I’ve always thought that a hip-hop magazine should be smart,” Mr. Bernard said in a 1997 interview with the financial site CNNfn. “A hip-hop magazine shouldn’t pander to its audience.”

The Source emerged at a time when Public Enemy, KRS-One and other artists were rapping about topics like Malcolm X and Marcus Garvey, the early-20th-century Black nationalist and Pan-Africanist.

“This is where James fit in,” Reginald C. Dennis, the magazine’s longtime music editor, said in an interview. “He knew all of the history of the struggle. James would just sit down and read James Baldwin for fun.”

Mr. Bernard used his platform to speak out against what often seemed, in those years, like a widespread campaign to disparage and silence hip-hop. Among other confrontations with the law, the Federal Bureau of Investigation in 1989 took aim at the pioneering gangster rap group N.W.A., alleging that its music “encourages violence against and disrespect for the law enforcement officer.”

“Media coverage up until that point was very one-sided,” Mr. Bernard recalled in a 2020 podcast episode hosted by Jon Caramanica, the pop music critic for The New York Times, “and often negative toward hip-hop and toward the people involved.”

Mr. Bernard and The Source provided a stark alternative. In 1992, as racial tensions seemed to be spinning out of control in New York, Los Angeles and elsewhere, he wrote, “Only hip-hop has had the courage to face this new reality head on.”

His voice was amplified by the broadening reach of The Source within the hip-hop world. As the music site Pitchfork observed in 2018, “No single rap publication ever had the same clout, and it’s impossible to think any ever will again.”

The magazine’s Unsigned Hype column helped break countless stars, including the Notorious B.I.G. and Eminem, and its five-mic reviews — The Source used microphones for its ratings instead of stars — could, Pitchfork said, “instantly elevate a new album to classic status.”

Mr. Bernard and his colleagues certainly did not lack for ambition. “We used to say every issue was like an album,” he told Pitchfork. “We saw it as a work of art.”

Harold James Bernard was born on Aug. 5, 1965, in Nashville, the eldest of three children of Harold Oswald Bernard, an obstetrician and gynecologist, and Clara Jean (Jefferson) Bernard, a medical technician and published poet.

After graduating from Hillsboro High School in Nashville in 1983, he enrolled at Brown University, where he received a bachelor’s degree in public policy in 1987.

He was working for a law firm in Berkeley, Calif., during the summer before starting law school when he first came across The Source. He immediately wrote to Mr. Shecter, offering to help, according to the 2010 book “The Big Payback: The History of the Business of Hip-Hop” by Dan Charnas, a frequent Source contributor.

After receiving his law degree in 1991, Mr. Bernard pivoted to journalism full time. Along with his work at The Source, he wrote for The New York Times, decoding the Beastie Boys, rap’s crossover into Hollywood and the confounding rise of Vanilla Ice.

His career at The Source unraveled in 1994, when he and other staff members organized a walkout after Mr. Mays published a laudatory article about the little-known group Almighty RSO, with which he was close, without consulting other editors. When calls for Mr. Mays’s resignation went nowhere, Mr. Bernard and others left the magazine.

In 1997, he and Mr. Dennis started a rival magazine, XXL. The founders conceived the quarterly as both a hip-hop tastemaker and a broader lifestyle magazine, like Playboy in its 1960s and ’70s heyday.

“You knew who the Playboy man was,” Mr. Dennis said. “He was like Sean Connery. The XXL man was going to be a smooth, aspirational man from the ghetto who avoided the traps.”

Unable to hammer out a long-term deal with the magazine’s owners, Mr. Bernard and Mr. Dennis left after two issues, and XXL went on to considerable success.

In addition to his magazine work, Mr. Bernard partnered with the rock critic Dave Marsh to publish “The New Book of Rock Lists” in 1994. He also served on the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame nominating committee and, starting in 2018, was a senior director for New York City’s Department of Youth and Community Development.

In addition to his sister, Mr. Bernard is survived by his wife, Margarita; a brother, Warren; his sons, Jefferson and Hayden; and a daughter, Myla Bernard.

One of the cornerstones of Mr. Bernard’s legacy remains his coverage for The Source of the aftermath of the Rodney King verdict in 1992. After racing to Los Angeles from New York, Mr. Bernard embedded himself among locals in South Central, including, he later said, a “midlevel Crip” gang member.

While traditional media outlets focused on the more than 60 people killed, as well as the widespread arson and looting, Mr. Bernard had another view. As he told The Times on its podcast, “We thought this was the revolution.”

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