Good news for fans of O.G. rap publication Murder Dog: the seminal magazine will soon make the leap to book form. A retrospective collection, Murder Dog: The Covers, Volume 1, is due to be released in the first quarter of 2015 and will hopefully bring a whole new audience to the realest rap magazine that ever did it.Murder Dog the magazine was published by an mysterious and elusive man known as Black Dog Bone, a Sri Lankan born visionary who came up with the idea while a student at the Art Institute in San Francisco in the early Nineties. After finishing school, Black Dog Bone kept up the magazine and moved to nearby Vallejo, the stomping grounds of Bay Area rap legends E-40 and Mac Dre. Besides championing those two artists, Murder Dog was an early support to stars like Lil Wayne, 50 Cent, Outkast, Young Jeezy and Rick Ross, giving many their first cover story."Back when Travis O'Guin and I first started Strange, it was hard for underground cats like me to get exposure in the press," says rapper Tech N9ne of his now successful independent record label. "Not a lot of magazines were covering the Midwest rap scene or underground music at all. Black Dog Bone and everyone else at Murder Dog were the exception; they probably put me on that cover a dozen times. I got major love from the streets, the penitentiary, overseas—anywhere there is a ghetto, they were reading about Tech N9ne in Murder Dog."
Unlike The Source, which was the major commercial rap magazine at the time, Murder Dog didn't overtly chase star power, and it never glossed over anything. Rappers posed on the cover holding guns or throwing gang signs. Inside, one would find articles about tribal music and social revolutionaries alongside the rap coverage. Stories were raw and often unedited, often running so long they made New Yorker articles look demure."The number one mission was to bring a voice to the voiceless," says Matt Sonzala, who was one of the magazine's lead contributors for years. "That's all, that's it.""I have done African rap, Sri Lankan rap, Middle Eastern rap, English rap," Black Dog Bone said in a compelling story for Red Bull Music Academy last year. "I have interviewed shamans in Murder Dog. I've interviewed David Wolfe, the raw food guy. I'm into raw food, I'm into health. I run every day, I'm a vegetarian. I don't eat meat or fish or anything for years. I'm pretty much a raw foodist. I eat everything raw. I'm extreme about it. Murder Dog comes from extreme things."The Red Bull story was picked up by Gawker (under the appropriately Gawker-ish headline "How a Punk from the Jungle Started a Legendary Hardcore Rap Magazine") and there it caught the eye of Paul Stewart, publisher of Over The Edge Books. Stewart, a music industry vet who has been instrumental to the careers of acts such as The Pharcyde, House of Pain and Warren G, bills his independent publishing house as "not your momma's book company," and has put out a diverse and adventurous collection of books over the past three years. He made a deal with Black Dog Bone to publish two Murder Dog books, and helped him choose the covers for the first book. The second volume will delve deeper into content and interviews from the archives, which holds a goldmine of underground regional rap."My favorite memory working with Murder Dog was when I got to go to Honolulu and interviewed a bunch of Hawaiian rappers," says Sonzala. "It was incredible to hear their stories and get their perspectives. They were just like anyone else in rap on some levels, but their respect for nature and the sea blew my mind. They all had so many levels to who they were and what they did."Going to Minneapolis to do a series of interviews was incredible too, because I was riding around with Crips to Blood neighborhoods, and riding around with a couple Bloods and going to Crip neighborhoods. Everyone was shaking hands and talking about how monumental it was to all come together for the music and to promote the city. I heard maybe twenty times in those three or four days how much of a difference it was making having Murder Dog come out and really kind of inspire people to sit together who otherwise wouldn't have. We definitely didn't stop anything or make any major changes but we definitely helped some folks sit down and think about what they were doing and who they were. It was a great feeling."And that's what I loved most about Murder Dog, I went everywhere and met so many incredible people. From Greenwood, South Carolina to Pittsburgh to Dallas to Gary, Indiana to Honolulu and then some, I met so many independent-minded people working under the banner of independent rap, often oblivious to what was going on anywhere else. I got to enter into so many worlds through this music and specifically through Murder Dog. And I made a lot of lifelong friends."Murder Dog continues to put out the occasional online edition, while Black Dog Bone is immersed in an inspiring new environment. He's living in East Africa, where he's documenting the rap scene for a future book."It's real hardcore street rap, real ghetto, but it's very conscious, political rap," he explains. "It's not gangster rap or the bling bling type of rap. It's also very much tribal and African rap. The rappers all rap in their own tribal languages."There's a big movement going on," he says. "It's real exciting to be here at this time to see it all happen."
Tamara Palmer is on Twitter.
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