After helping to launch ego trip, Elliott "YN" Wilson served as music editor for The Source before taking over as Editor-in-Chief of XXL Magazine where he reigned supreme for 87 issues. Wilson currently serves alongside the rest of the ego trip collective as executive producer of Vh1's "Miss Rap Supreme." This week YN weighs in with his favorite moments in the media as well as advice for aspiring hip-hop journalists.

Stay Inspired
It’s important to stay inspired when you are in a business where you are a journalist. A lot of times your job is to be critical and you can sometimes lose your desire and start thinking everything is all horrible and hip hop is dead. Even with ego trip in the mid-90’s we were talking about hip hop was dead, because we didn’t feel the music of '95 was as good as the music of 1994. You’re gonna feel that way at times, that you’re just not into this or there is just not enough good music or another album came out that really disappointed you from your favorite group. So it’s important to find what inspires you and just stay inspired. Whether its in the music itself or whether it’s just the album of some obscure group that isn’t going to go platinum, but you just really like the album, or maybe it’s not even the greatest album, maybe it’s just a good album, but for whatever reason it connects to you. You need to keep those things close and stay inspired. Staying inspired is very important. In this business more and more that gets even more of a challenge to stay in this and stay inspired. I get that old people complex sometimes like 'it’s not how it used to be blah blah blah,' but it's important to accept the situation and find what you like so you can stay inspired.

Greatest Moments in YN History:

I had left the Source, not under the best circumstances as everyone knows… I was the only one at ego trip that didn’t have a freelance gig, everyone else was either a writer at large at The Source or Vibe or working there, so I just threw myself into ego trip and worked on this "Book of Rap Lists" with my partners. Back then it was just five guys trying to find a way to talk about hip hop through funny lists and our memories and reflections. We didn’t have YouTube back then like ‘yo remember that episode on YO!MTV Raps?’ but nowadays you can hopefully find that on YouTube or other technology now. In some ways it makes it even more special because of the way the world and culture moved after the book came out. Quality wise I think the book still holds up, it is the best rap book, at least until I have the chance to do another one. Wee did it because there was no real guide to stuff, like how do you spell ‘Amerikkka’s Most Wanted’. It’s funny because when we put the book out it made a little noise and we’d go up to the magazines to freelance and every research person, copy chief, fact checker, had it on their desk. It was like ‘See, we’re making everyone else better!’ now they can fact check whether Too Short has a $ in the S or not. We didn’t look at it as a charitable thing helping people but it had a lot of use back then because the internet wasn’t what it is now. The book has ended up having a lot of different meaning to people which is what makes it a great accomplishment.