Steve Powers and Ari Forman

Another interview from the Megawords magazine archives. This time we have artist Steve Powers and NYC media mogul Ari Forman, the founders of the now out of print magazine On the Go. Originally published in issue 7 of Megawords.

Interview by Anthony Smyrski and Dan Murphy
Photo courtesy of ON THE GO

How long after you guys met did On the Go magazine start?
Espo: It was immediately, I think.

Ari: No, no, it was years of just bumping into each other. We would keep in touch.

When you say keep in touch did you write together?
Ari: No, never.

Espo: No, we never did anything together. We just bumped into each other, literally. I must have squeezed out one or two issues on my own of On the Go. And then Ari saw it, was like, “You need to get your shit together. And I can help you with that.”

Ari: I remember him calling me up and being like, “Yo, what's your address.” The last thing you want is to give a writer your address. But he was one of the dudes for whom graffiti wasn't a segue to being a drug addict criminal.

Espo: That is a crucial, crucial nexus with me and him. There's like fifteen dudes that I would put down, dudes that were just into graffiti for the experience of meeting other people and getting to other places and exploring the world.

Ari: The other thing is adventure.

Espo: There were a lot of dudes who were writing graffiti in Philly who were like, “Wow! Graffiti has exposed me to a whole new segment of victims that I can victimize.” And then once in a while you met a dude who was like, “Wow! What do you do? Where are you from? Really? There's no way I would interact with a person like you from Girard Estates, not in a million years. But thanks to graffiti, we've having a conversation. It's great.”

Ari: Graffiti is to a criminal what weed is to a drug addict. It's the gate. For me, it was the thrill factor minus the desire to be a fucking career criminal. And for him, it was art. And to me, to this day, I don't want to see graffiti on a canvas. I don't want legal pieces. I don't even understand why graffiti exists outside criminal activity. To me—it's thrilling. Graffiti was always an adventure. You don't know what's in store.

It appeals to a certain intellectual curiosity.
Ari: It did, actually.

Espo: Whatever neighborhood it was coming from, whatever your mind set was, the only reason you wrote graffiti was because it wasn't sticking up people. There are faster, easier ways to make money. There's faster, better ways to hurt people. But graffiti was like a great compromise between all these different crimes.

Ari: I remember him calling me up wanting my address to send me the first issue of On the Go. It was exciting because graffiti didn't arrive at my door ever before. I had to go get on the El, had to go get on the Broad Street Line, had to start looking around. I was happy to see a new tag anywhere, a new piece or something. For that shit to come to my door as a newsletter, you know—when he was starting he had hardcore stuff in there.

Where did your motivation to make the magazine come from?
Espo: You know I saw IGT (International Graffiti Time) in New York and it obviously jumped off the page. IGT was just really awesome. It's not even a fanzine. For me, graffiti is one of the most beautiful words in the English language, so cool sounding. In spite of the connotations of it, and people saying, “It's not our word,” and, “We do this thing, it's like art.” I don't feel like we do a thing called art. We're doing graffiti.

When you first started, the magazine was just graffiti?
Espo: Yeah, it was just four pages.

Ari: You had music, too.

Espo: No, no, the first issue was four or five pages. And then the second issue, I think the first thing I did—and it's important to note—I reviewed the NWA record. Somebody gave me a tape of it and I thought, “Wow, this is so fucking crazy. This is the craziest thing I ever heard. I'm inspired, I'm just gonna write a review of this record.” As it went on, we started incorporating [more] music into [the magazine].

Were you just looking at Philly as far as distribution?
Espo: Yeah. I think I printed fifty of the first one.

Ari: You were just mailing it to people's houses.

Espo: I sent one to IGT.

How were people reacting to it?
Espo: They were very polite but, you know, they wanted to encourage but they didn't want to pay the two dollars for it. You printed up a bunch of copies. You begged your friends to buy it and you felt bad asking them for money. And it just set up a chain reaction where you wanted to print up enough so you could give all you wanted away and just dump the rest on the market.

So how did it get to the next level—to go outside of Philadelphia?
Espo: I was actually working in a copy shop—and this is the insanity of it—it was like an addiction where if I actually worked at the copy shop, I could minimize the cost of it. I ended up getting fired from copy shops because they caught me making color Xeroxes and doing shit like that. We pulled all types of scams. And then Ari came along. It was bad enough when it was just me, by myself but when Ari got involved with this and Ari started designing shit—then it just went from petty crime to felony.

Ari: I had just graduated art school. I had four years of design school. I taught myself computers while I was in school because we still didn't have a computer program in school. By the time I graduated, there were three of us that had digital portfolios out of the whole school. I had that ability to make a magazine. But even when we made the first color issue—we were taking color pictures and stuff and we would print that out and lay it out on an 11x17 spread and then we'd just make color copies of that. The second one, everything was scanned.

How many issues into this were you starting to offset?
Espo: Issue 6 we started to offset.

Ari: It was the second color one.

Espo: It was starting to take the form of what On the Go became—reviewing rappers that we loved.

But at this point it becomes more than just a graffiti magazine, it's also a hip-hop magazine. Was that a conscious decision?
Ari: Espo was like, “I want to turn this thing into a real magazine.” There was only one thing to measure it to at that point and that was The Source.

Espo: The Source was a great model to emulate but more than that—it was a great thing to destroy. The Source was pathetic even then, I remember. [It] was okay for a little while and then there was an issue they put out with TLC on the cover. Anyone will tell you it was a watershed moment. They had credibility and then lost it in one issue… All of a sudden, were able to get—not much—but we got some advertising. We would have had more but we had competition. We had Ego Trip [and others] that were trying to do the same thing we were. But at least, because The Source fucked up like that, we were able to get enough money to run the next six or seven issues, easily. I think that because of that one editorial decision, we were able to live for another two or three years.

Why?
Espo: Because a lot of record labels that were advertising with The Source exclusively and giving The Source all their money… they were spreading their dough around to other smaller publications, because they saw these guys could lose this any second now, so “we might as well diversify while we can.” This was, like, ’93, ’94.

And how many issues did you guys do?
Espo: We did eighteen. We did actually nineteen and eighteen got out. This was an eight-year period. It was from '88 to '96.

Ari: Some kid just made a T-shirt off of one of our articles. He did it and then realized that he knew me and didn't know that I was involved with the magazine. It was so awkward and I was just like—

What was it?
Ari: It was the Redman issue. He took a Redman quote, and the pattern, and the colors, and just made it a T-shirt. First I was like, “Uh,” but then I thought, “Yeah, that's fine.”

Espo: And that's how we treat On the Go at this point. It was a really wonderful chapter that made us no money but it made us who we are. It gave us a lot of ideas [about] how the world works.

And publishing changed, as well.

Espo: What we created, other publications were able to follow up on, mainly Mass Appeal. Which is great, because I can look at [that] as the measure of where we would be. We created niche marketing. Early On the Go media kits were saying, “We don’t talk to 2,000 or 20,000, 100,000 people. We talk to 200 or 500. We talk to the core constituency of who you’re looking for. You’re not going to reach everybody, you’re just going to reach the smartest, hippest people [who] are inside the circle.” It was a great idea. It was just four or five years too early.

Early On the Go media kits were saying, “We don’t talk to 2,000 or 20,000, 100,000 people. We talk to 200 or 500. We talk to the core constituency of who you’re looking for. You’re not going to reach everybody, you’re just going to reach the smartest, hippest people [who] are inside the circle.”

Ari: Media is changing across the board. There was a time when there were the solid two newspapers in every city. There were three channels you could depend on—CBS, NBC and ABC. And there was radio. You had your top publications. There was room for one. It's like, Playboy was number one and Penthouse was number two when you were talking about “Men” as the category. When you're looking at hip-hop, which was still kind of microscopic in the business world—it was like, “There's one publication and that's all we need to hit because everybody reads that.” Right around that time is when people our age were coming into the position of being able to buy the media, to say, “Hey, there's a new audience. The Internet is opening up. Desktop publishing's opening up.” And people were being able to say, “I think we should spend our twenty grand over here with The Source but we should have a ten grand budget to spread around.” And that created Mass Appeal, Fader, you know, weird publications like Urb.

So, you’re making this magazine and it’s 100% for the love of making a magazine. Then, you get to this point where to keep the magazine functioning, you have to compromise or cater to advertisers.
Espo: Ah, but that’s where you’re wrong. The reason why we didn’t, was I was really dead set on having at least 20 pages of graffiti in every issue.

But wasn’t that part of your media kit?
Espo: It wasn’t. We were honestly trying to get money from people that wanted nothing to do with graffiti. What’s really fascinating about that time, was going to meetings and having to justify or explain what the graffiti was about.

Ari: They wanted nothing to do with it. “Criminal element.”

Espo: They were like, “That shit’s on my block.”

Ari: It’s the 40-year-olds [who] are now in the position to say, “I understand these things. They’re relevant.” But we had to wait out the last group of motherfuckers.

Espo: We were so good at emulating The Source and beating The Source at its own game. Because they were the first magazine of their kind to address this group of people, they got major buy-ins from labels and they got money from distributors and they got all types of favors and benefits that would have kept us alive. But The Source burned every bridge. Every person they got money from, they fucked over. Some of it was just business. Some of it was just, “You know what? I’m not trying to cover your artist. I’m not trying to put your Tommy Boy artist on the cover.” Up until the TLC cover, I think they were flawless in their execution. But it fucked us over because nobody would give us deals. All these advances that were offered to The Source were not extended to us because they had been burned by The Source.

Ari: They were just like, “We’re not gambling with these urban guys. We’re going to make them perform first.” We were at a point where all options had been exhausted.

Espo: [But] it was a fully satisfying thing because I was being really creative. I was exercising this whole muscle that I didn’t even know I had in terms of writing. I was writing at least 50% of every issue, if not 75. And really enjoying the shit out of it. It paid off when I did The Art of Getting Over.

Ari: He told me way back in the day, before we were ever doing the magazine, “I’m going to write a book. That’s my fucking goal.”

Espo: There was a rumor that Rolling Stone was going to buy The Source for 100 million dollars.

Ari: It was crazy. We were looking for someone to get in bed with, someone who could take us to the next level. We did what we knew we could do, we needed somebody to help us graduate. So, an opportunity came up with Harris Publications. They came to us and said, “We want a publication to go up against The Source. We like what you’re doing.” That was their business. They understood the value of niche publications. They didn’t look at it like Conde Naste looks at publications—if it has less than a million circs, it's a failure… Initially it sounded like this could be an opportunity. Then, this motherfucker says, “Look, you got to be tired of being broke.” And we’re like, “Hell yea.” And he said, “What we want you to do is stop On the Go. We’re going to buy On the Go. You’re going to get a little something out of it, but then we’re going to start this new magazine that you guys are going to run and head. And you’re going to have a salary.” But we weren’t going to own any of it. We were like, “Well, that doesn’t sound so good… We’re not really sure about it.” He starts to get a little agitated, we’re going back and forth, and this is what this guy says to us: “You got to look at it like this, after telling us about being broke and you need us—we’re the pimps and you’re the whores.” That’s what he said. He either said “whores” or “prostitutes.” He said, “Basically, you create this thing, you build it for us, and you can have a great job.” Not even sharing profits. We were just like, “On that note, peace!” And that was it. On the Go was dead after that. We were so exhausted from the struggle.

Espo: And they say to you, “You’ll never make it in business.” And I was like, “I’ll be my own man.” And you know what, my friend is currently the editor-in-chief of XXL, and I see the compromises that guy makes on a month-to-month basis. That guy was doing an overview of underground hip-hop graffiti publications in New York, and he left us out. I asked him about it, and he said, “Oh, I just forgot.” I won’t even be duplicitous about it. I’ll say, “Look, man, you took your shot. You got the house in the hills somewhere.” He publishes XXL for Harris Publications. It’s a fine publication but at the end of the day, every time I read that magazine, there’s always an article like, “MC Shithead has to come up with a second album. How is he gonna overcome the sophomore slump?”

Ari: Orthodox. Main media is like that.

Espo: The only magazine that I saw in the entire time that we were doing On the Go was Vice magazine. I saw Vice when it was the Montreal Boys. I was like, “This shit is fucking hilarious. These guys deserve to do better.” A few years later they became Vice and I saw them out in Las Vegas. They were like, “Shit, we remember On the Go.” That’s you’re royalty. That’s your prize. That’s all you’re going to get. The next guy that comes around with a great magazine might give you a shout out.

It was powerful because we wanted to do it… Ending it the way it did, and when it did—it’s kind of like folklore. It gave us a certain amount of legend in that industry... If we had to become The Source and endure what they had to endure? Our pockets would have been lined, but it’s a catch-22. It’s the money versus the credibility.

Ari: Steve was ready to go do other things. It had been stretched to the limit financially, mentally, the friendship—everything was just at that point. If we knew we were two years away from that publishing boom—I’m not saying these little publications are making any money. What they are doing is making peripheral money off of marketing, PR, events, all these little things. That’s where the money is, in publications. For us, we couldn’t stay afloat. It was costing us more and more. Then, when these guys stepped to us about [starting] a magazine to go against The Source—it was a fucking dream opportunity. But it was from the biggest scumbags in the industry. So it wasn’t an opportunity at all. And a year alter, there was XXL.

Espo: To be fair, they spoke to us, they spoke to Ego Trip and [others] and they offered the same terms. And everybody turned it down. They started XXL on their own.

Let me just say this. The amazing thing about On the Go was that the motivations we had in creating it were from the heart—just doing shit that interested us.

Ari: It was powerful because we wanted to do it… Ending it the way it did, and when it did—it’s kind of like folklore. It gave us a certain amount of legend in that industry... If we had to become The Source and endure what they had to endure? Our pockets would have been lined, but it’s a catch-22. It’s the money versus the credibility.