Gordon Parks’ Harlem Hiphop Shoot, XXL 1998

Two-thirty P.M. Tuesday, September 28, 1998: Approaching the twenty-first century, Harlem remains the capital of black America. Barely three weeks after the polemical Million Youth March spearheaded by Minister Khallid Muhammad, Uptown adds another historical event to her lifespan this sunlit afternoon. Within the next five minutes, at 17 East One Hundred Twenty-sixth Street, a momentous portrait for the posterity of hiphop culture will be captured for the ages to come.

Excitement and expectancy brew on this barricaded block between Madison and Fifth Avenue a.k.a. National Black Theatre Way. Hiphop dignitaries like Kool DJ Herc, the Goodie Mob, Rakim, Eightball & MJG, and E-40 take their places on the steps of three brownstones, two stately edifices bracketing the dilapidated stoop in the center. “Out of respect for Mr. Parks, if you’re not an artist, would you please step away from the shoot?” asks Def Jam Recordings cofounder Russell Simmons, dressed in a sleeveless argyle Phat Farm sweater with sweatpants and backwards baseball cap, speaking through a megaphone. Having lent an impromptu organizational helping hand, he returns the bullhorn to XXL magazine publisher Dennis Page, who continues to impose order on the proceedings. Legendary octogenarian photojournalist Gordon Parks lingers across the street between two tripod-supported cameras; he soft-spokenly commands a small crew of assistants. Directed by his pipe-wielding right hand, the amorphous assortment of over one hundred hiphop personalities takes shape. “It’d be nice if they put some music with it,” says an onlooking middle-aged female Harlem resident, leaning out a window. Shots are taken, history is made.

Then, slowly approaching the yearbook photo-styled congregation from stage left, the right man arrives at the right time. The crowd, which already includes such hiphop heavy-hitters as Grandmaster Flash, Slick Rick, and DJ Hollywood, breaks out into resounding applause. Coasting on his fat-laced Adidas, dipped in a black Phat Farm sweatshirt and jeans with a fedora, is none other than Joseph “Run” Simmons, who briskly takes his place in the center of the throng beside his older brother Russell. A classic hiphop moment.

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Forty years ago, eccentric jazz pianist Thelonious Monk exhausted over an hour deciding what to wear to a noonish photo shoot in Harlem, organized by Esquire art director Art Kane. Eventually electing to go with a light-colored sports jacket (so as to better stand out in a crowd of dark-colored suits), Monk cabbed a ride with alto saxophonist Gigi Gryce and Riverside Records publicist Robert Altshular. The late Art Kane’s concept was to assemble the most notable jazz musicians of the day to pose for the January 1959 issue of Esquire on the steps of a brownstone on One Hundred Twenty-sixth Street. Through a combination of considered orchestration and word of mouth, fifty-seven players—including Charles Mingus, Count Basie, and Dizzy Gillespie—showed for the historic gathering that resulted in Jazz Portrait, a photo hanging in black neighborhood barbershops and numbers spots to this day. “In the jazz age,” says Fugee founding father Wyclef Jean, “you had Thelonious Monk, Charlie Parker. In the hiphop age, you got Wu-Tang Clan, Fugees, Master P. What those musics have in common is freedom of expression. In its rawest form, it wasn’t meant to be sold. It was made just to be heard as a feeling. Like you have a Canibus or a Nas. That’s equivalent to Charlie Parker doing his chops on the sax. It’s just a new era.”

The era captured in Jazz Portrait was fleshed out in that same issue of Esquire in an essay written by John Clellon Holmes. In his 1952 novel Go, Holmes captured the flavor of the Beat generation—whose preoccupations were directly guided by jazz and the fifties black aesthetic—five years before writer Jack Kerouac defined the movement with On the Road. Holmes used his position as a precursor to the Beats to assume the role of their chief chronicler. According to his Esquire article, three things are necessary to constitute a golden age: an audience, a tradition, and an aesthetic. Though the golden age of hiphop culture is generally presumed to have taken place somewhere between Run-DMC’s 1984 self-titled début and Dr. Dre’s 1992 The Chronic, the modern climate of 1998 is rife with evidence of resurgence. “This is the biggest year of Def Jam, or the biggest year of rap,” says Russell Simmons. “I’m sure the numbers at the end of the year will tally up and be bigger than they were ever before, and every year it’s been doing that pretty much. Peaking.”

Hiphop as a culture, at the crest of the twenty-first century, is widely considered a given. In the fifties, declaring jazz an art form seemed a rather audacious statement for a mainstream American publication to make. “Never in the history of man’s need to express himself in song has half a century sufficed to transform a folk music into an art music,” wrote Holmes. During the past forty years, however, the rapid pace of change has accelerated this process. Would anyone argue against the lasting significance of rock, punk, or reggae music? Back before the commercial breakthrough of the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” the audience for hiphop was confined to New York City and its immediate environs. Over twenty years later, hiphop is an international force, with MCs like Takagi Kan from Japan and France’s MC Solaar representing well. Hiphop has long since expanded its following, from packing the local Bronx nightclubs of the Funhouse and the Disco Fever to selling out stadiums like Madison Square Garden and the Pontiac Silverdome.

“The thing I believe separates hiphop culture from the jazz is that twenty years later, it’s still being solidified and reaffirmed as a youth culture,” observes Russell Simmons. “Instead of hiphop music growing up with its audience, it splintered off. It’s still about rebelling; it’s still about changing society. That’s what gives rap an even longer foothold in the mainstream, in terms of sales. The jazz guys were cool, [but] they never change. The thing is, when you get the politicians twenty years later still making comments about how obscene, aggressive, or counterculture these artists are, it just keeps affirming its presence as the voice of the youth. And that’s what makes it special.”

The most striking observation, especially in the wake of the deaths of 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G., is the current all-world nature of the hiphop audience. Millions of listeners nationwide get excited by Georgia’s OutKast, Missouri’s Nelly, and Eminem of Michigan. Whereas allegiances once bandied strictly between New York and California—with an occasional Geto Boys (Texas) or 2 Live Crew (Florida) getting love—the hiphop audience has now become as nonpartisan as ever, at a time when the hiphop nation is at its most unified. Solidarity in hiphop was the major impetus for XXL celebrating the fortieth anniversary of Jazz Portrait with a coming together of hiphop’s major cultural icons. “This little function right here is showing the fact that everybody’s cool with everybody,” says Jermaine Dupri, hours before the photo is taken. “It’s starting to look like the same thing [as the jazz age], just done in a younger, youthful type of fashion.”

In 1995, shots rang out over video production trailers in Red Hook, Brooklyn, on the set of Tha Dogg Pound’s “New York, New York” video. Snoop Dogg, Daz Dillinger, and Kurupt took the hint and swiftly broke camp back to Long Beach, California. Now signing autographs on the steps of the Metropolitan Community Methodist Church three years later—one week before his solo double-album Kuruption débuted in the pop Top Ten of the Billboard magazine chart—Kurupt bathes in completely different vibes. “Nigga’s kill over hiphop,” he explains. “They’ll argue and damn near fight over who they think is the best and who’s not, so you know it’s from the heart. And with jazz, it’s from their hearts. We’ve been at this struggle for a long time. Hiphop is like a race. Like the fight blacks had to get in the level they are, that’s the fight that we had to get where we are.”

Crowds for the House of Blues-sponsored Smokin Grooves tour (in which Gang Starr, Public Enemy, and the Refugee Allstars took it to the stage), in addition to A Tribe Called Quest’s farewell outing with the Beastie Boys, reinforce the viability of the hiphop audience and recall concert packages that hearken back to the Fresh Festival and Run-DMC/Beastie Boys bills of old. Grassroots hiphop purist artists like Mos Def and Talib Kweli have also been able to maximize their underground buzz by hitting the nightclub circuit for successful one-nighters.

If international eminence, nationwide style pollination, and reaching the concert masses all indicate that hiphop commands its most eager audience ever, recent bids to court an even wider mainstream America cannot be ignored. P. Diddy featuring former Led Zeppelin guitarist Jimmy Page on “Come with Me”? Method Man with Limp Bizkit on “N 2 Gether Now”? The lengthy list also includes “The Omen” with DMX and Marilyn Manson. Such alliances go back as far as Afrika Bambaataa’s 1984 “World Destruction” collaboration with John Lydon, but these developments say as much about the expanded hiphop fanbase as do the magazines devoted entirely to hiphop. The culture now reaches millions more than during its previous golden age.

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Ever hear Wu-Tang Clan flip Run-DMC’s “Sucker MC’s (Krush-Groove 1)” from In the Beginning…There Was Rap? How about Foxy Brown’s “Rock the Bells” rendition (originally recorded by LL Cool J), “Foxy’s Bells,” or that N.W.A tribute cover album? All these efforts are evidence of a respect for the past and an emerging sense of tradition, John Clellon Holmes’s second attribute of a golden age. “A lot of artists just skip over hiphop and go to rap,” says the Jungle Brothers’ Afrika Baby Bam, discussing the nuances of hiphop traditionalism. “It’s been dissected. Rap is just the commercial part that the industry uses to sell the product. The hiphop aspect of it started fifteen, twenty years ago. And that’s like a tidal wave. If you wasn’t there when it was getting ready to rise and groom you, then you just missed when it splashed and went back to sea. And now, what you have is just the sand—you just have rap. A lot of artists come up and they don’t even have their feet wet.”

With the nostalgic popularity of tracks like the Def Squad’s “Rapper’s Delight,” connecting the dots between old school (Disco King Mario) and new school (DJ Q-bert) has gotten easier. “[Hiphoppers] have the opportunity to jump into the water, study it, and learn what it is,” continues Afrika Baby Bam. “What’s the tangible thing that makes them an artist, and what makes their art form a craft? All that is out there to get access to. For the most part, I think jazz artists stayed more into their culture because there’s less of a commercial inclination.”

Many in hiphop circa 1993 were damn near disturbed to hear Snoop Dogg’s inimitable drawl interpreting Slick Rick’s 1985 classic “La Di Da Di.” Covering rap material took nearly twenty years to become acceptable, partly because of the very personal creative process involved in emceeing (poet Jessica care Moore would not recite verses by Ursula Rucker, or vice versa), but also because in hiphop, time and knowledge have just recently melded enough to constitute tradition. Rap is now replete with the likes of Buckshot’s “I Ain’t No Joke” (Rakim), Snoop Dogg’s “Vapors” (Biz Markie), and Rampage’s “Flipmode Enemy #1” (Public Enemy), all testaments to a respect for the past. With the release of Rhino Records compilations like Fat Beats & Brastraps and Kurtis Blow Presents Hip-Hop Classics, younger MCs can profit from exposure to the tradition they will inherit. A greater awareness allows for an up-and-coming rapper like Harlem’s Cardan to find and flaunt the latent Southern booty boogie bounce in Newcleus’s “Jam on It.”

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The hiphop aesthetic—principles of the culture adhered to at a given time—is open to a widening of possibilities, powered by the questionable prominence of materialism. “Jazz players, most of them wasn’t getting money like that,” remarks Fat Joe. “It wasn’t a money thing. It was more [about] the art. They wanted to express themselves through their music. As far as hiphop, it’s turned into a moneymaking machine where people are more interested in the monies they could make. You still have certain people preserving the hiphop culture. It’s not a bad thing, ’cause it means more black people getting money.” Wyclef Jean adds, “Rappers get paid. Most jazz musicians died broke.”

The aesthetic revolution to transform hiphop most dramatically was the dual financial and artistic success of Death Row Records in the early nineties. Though Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters and Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue stand as the only multiplatinum releases in jazz history, hiphop albums were now expected to sell competitively with pop music in the wake of consistent platinum-plus creations like The Chronic, Doggystyle, and Above the Rim. This dubious expectation has inevitably resulted in many sacrifices of artistry for commerce—as it does in pop—but also opens doors for hiphop experimentalists who would not have been blessed with record deals at an earlier stage. Experimental artists like Tricky, DJ Spooky, Goldie, even the more traditional RZA and the Roots, are all beneficiaries of the modern hiphop aesthetic, where creative improvisation has been given a forum due partially to the financial success of mainstream hiphop. “Everybody don’t have to rhyme the same way to blow or talk about the same thing to get recognition,” says microphone legend Rakim. “You’ll find brothers coming out doing that abstract, crazy [material]. People are scared to go left, but myself, I’ma do it anyway. I came out and went against the grain.”

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New possibilities and new opportunities exist in this hiphop renaissance and, paraphrasing John Clellon Holmes’s 1958 prediction for jazz, the next twenty years are certain to be more incredible than the last. “Today, I think, was the day hiphop was seriously validated,” says the Roots’ drummer Ahmir Thompson in September 1998, recording the manic activity on One Hundred Twenty-sixth Street with a handheld camcorder. Last night the Roots completed mastering on Things Fall Apart; today, they partake in what XXL’s cover tagline calls “hiphop on a higher level.” “More than anything, it’s like the Million Man Hiphoppers. I just got overwhelmed. From me not even having to introduce myself to Rakim to seeing Deborah Harry, Kool Herc, Kangol from UTFO. Everyone knows how gung-ho crazy I am about hiphop just in general. I’m a kid in a candy store.”

So many stories, so many surreal tableaux. Jermaine Dupri and Grandmaster Flash. Pee Wee Dance and Busta Rhymes. Fab 5 Freddy and Special K. DJ Jazzy Jeff and Q-Tip. The Jungle Brothers and De La Soul. D’Angelo administering handclasps to the hiphop cognoscenti while singer Angie Stone (p.k.a. MC Angie B of Sequence) cradles their cornrowed one-year-old son Michael D’Angelo Archer II across the street. Come three forty-five, the police insist on dispersing the hundreds gathered, but the positive vibes extend throughout the afternoon. “I’m just happy to be here to be a part of this,” reflects De La Soul’s Pos, wiping sweat from his brow. “Us being youths, doing our thing, and just trying to create all types of levels of music from all different backgrounds is the same way jazz did. We’re collaging our feelings with understanding where we come from. There’s definitely a parallel.”

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