From KCRW, Santa Monica and KCRW.com, this is The Treatment.

Welcome to The Treatment. I'm Elvis Mitchell. You can also hear the show at KCRW.com.

Well, like all great ideas, what Wax Poetic Magazine did when it started 10 years ago

was fill in a gap.

No magazine had ever treated hip hop and the forms that led to hip hop from funk to R&B to jazz

to salsa thoughtfully.

Its creator and editor-in-chief, Andre Torres, was among the first to do that with his

magazine, celebrating 10 years.

I'm thrilled to have him here sitting across me.

Andre, thanks so much for being here.

Elvis, thank you for having me.

I'm honored.

One of the things that the magazine really does is treat hip-hop culture thoughtfully, because

there tends to be two kinds of magazines that went to extremes, either the rough and

ready stuff like the source in the early days or double XL or people that would treat so

much so scholarly that it seemed almost condescending. And what you really do with the magazine

is getting to the roots and the guts of it and all these influences from people like

Al Cooper to Oliver Sane. I mean, it's a wide expanse of people who fed into what hip-hop culture

is. Yeah. You know, when we started, I definitely saw a void. You know, I grew up listening

to hip-hop and, you know, I was one of the first of that generation who really saw it as our music.

And when I looked at the magazines, I didn't see, it almost appeared as if hip hop occurred in a vacuum.

There was no cultural connection to anything else that had happened previously.

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