The NY Times’ Felicia R. Lee updates the Rap-Up magazine story with a look at the young, white, male, suburban, entrepreneurial owners and founders who are also brothers, Devin and Cameron Lazerine. You know, there are multiple angles here and they all seem kind of hackneyed but maybe I’m just feeling a bit jaded today.

I find it most interesting that Rap-Up started as a website created by Devin Lazerine when he was 15. He’s also the brother most often photographed for features about Rap-Up. Apparently the magazine went through various permutations and waves of media coverage before the current self-funded version launched as a quarterly in March.

The first time out, H&S Media “agreed to launch Rap-Up as an ad-free bimonthly in the summer of 2001, and handed Devin, then 16, free rein over the edit.” But something happened with H&S and they had to sell off their magazines to Kappa Publishing who dumped Rap-Up, which had only published one issue.

According to The Times, Rap-Up “was resurrected in 2003 as an insert in the magazine Urban Teen Scene and attracted media attention – often because of the brothers’ age and race – in places like USA Today and The Los Angeles Times.” That was also a one issue endeavor.

So now Rap-Up is back as a project of the Lazerine brothers, with the first issue funded by $35k from savings and a mom-grant, typical sources of funding for startups. Having beaten their prior record by putting out a second issue, they are now working on the third.

Lee reports that, “Rap-Up is not audited, but the brothers say that the magazine is already being sold in more than 20 countries and its outlets include Wal-Mart, Barnes & Noble, Borders and Tower Records. The spring issue had a circulation of 42,000, according to reports from their distributors and wholesalers. The summer issue circulation jumped to 80,000, they said.”

Oddly enough, though they describe their family as entrepreneurial and brother Cameron says that the “ultimate goal is to keep doing it after we graduate”, Devin the originator states, “We did not start this to make money off of hip-hop.”

I’m not sure what that means coming from a college kid who was already saying at 18 in Entrepreneur:
“My ultimate goal . . . is to become a music mogul/entrepreneur, which includes becoming a producer, owning my own recording label, clothing line and magazines.”

I guess it’s one of those things that business people learn to say as they get older in order to demonstrate their purity as they rake in the dough.

Official Site: Rap-Up

Update: Hashim Warren cuts to the chase and points out that white people in hip hop just isn’t really something to be astonished by anymore. Plus, he raises an important question:
“So why does there mag deserve to be profiled in the NY Times over let’s say Bridgez Mag, which has founders who are the same age as Rap Up, only they’re Latino, not White?”

Official Site: Bridgez Mag

Update 2: The anonymous author of Music Filter confirms what many must have thought when reading Lee’s comments that Rap-Up “tends to read like a hip-hop-drenched People magazine, with Barbara Walters-like questions. For instance, in an interview that ran under the title ‘The Ultimate Hustla,’ the singer Cassidy is asked if he could battle anyone, living or dead, who would it be? What is the one thing people don’t know about him that he’d like them to know? And does he prefer the Sony PlayStation Portable or Game Boy Advance SP?”

As MF puts it:
“the softball interview questions cited above could have just as easily appeared in most of the mainstream music publications currently out there (not just rap-related).”