Straight from the Source

Book excerpt: Kim Osorio had a front-row seat for the biggest beefs, battles, and blow-ups in hip-hop. As the first female editor-in-chief of The Source, she had come up. From her corner office, Kim got the goods on hip-hop's hottest names: Jay-Z, Nas, 50 Cent, Lil' Kim. She developed close -- sometimes intimate -- relationships with the artists she exposed to the public. But The Source couldn't hide its own dirty laundry for long. Behind the scenes, the magazine's volatile owners puppeteered every issue -- even coveted honors like the 5-mic album rating and the Power 30 list of industry heavy-hitters. Then The Source declared war on Eminem and began the notorious assault that would send the magazine into swift decline. In a culture dominated by men, Kim rose to the top, and after years in the magazine's pressure cooker, she hit "send" on a two-sentence e-mail that would thrust her from the sidelines of the scandalous world she reported on to the center of one of the most explosive scandals in hip-hop history. Straight From the Source is the Book of Kim, the tell-all memoir only she could write about her influential years at the Bible of Hip-Hop.