Hip-Hop Is History by Questlove

Author:Questlove
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

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Things were coming apart but you had to pretend they were still together. And though shots ruined this era, they also made it. There is a famous photo that many Americans have seen, shot by Art Kane for Esquire magazine in 1958, more than a half century before now, more than a decade before I was born. The point of the photo was to pay tribute to jazz, a uniquely American and largely African American art form that sprang up new in the New World in the twentieth century. Sound familiar? Kane and the Esquire editors made a wish list of subjects and most of their wishes came true. They got everyone from giants of the genre (Roy Eldridge, Dizzy Gillespie, Coleman Hawkins, Thelonious Monk, Gerry Mulligan, Sonny Rollins, Horace Silver, Mary Lou Williams, and Lester Young) to lesser-known artists (most casual jazz fans don’t know Zutty Singleton or Bill Crump except for their appearance in the photo). Fifty-seven people in all showed up at 17 East 126th Street on August 12, a Tuesday, so Kane could set up and record the group portrait that came to be known as A Great Day in Harlem. There is so much backstory to the photo, from how he invited the musicians (it was nothing formal—he just sent out word along the grapevine) to how the location was selected (Harlem had been the epicenter of jazz at one point in time, but by the late fifties the scene had moved down to midtown, with Fifty-Second Street as the genre’s main artery). Still, the picture became iconic over time for the way it brought together so many inspiring artists.

Hip-hop was entirely different than jazz, of course, but it shared some important qualities. It was predominantly African American. It was not always accepted by the dominant culture, in part because it sometimes explicitly set itself against the dominant, turning art into a form of protest, and that lack of acceptance sometimes took the form of demeaning the music as unskilled, made for a brute body rather than a refined mind. It wasn’t true for jazz in its time, of course, and it wasn’t true for hip-hop later, but people in positions of cultural power can be stubborn.

Hip-hop, sharing some important qualities with jazz, evolved to the point where it seemed to call for its own group portrait. This was in 1998, forty years after A Great Day in Harlem. Art Kane had died in 1995, and it’s not clear that he would have been the best man for the job anyway. Sheena Lester at XXL magazine, then in its infancy, came up with the idea. She hired Gordon Parks, a pioneering photographer in his own right. Parks had already followed in Kane’s footsteps. The same year that Kane died, Parks returned to the Harlem brownstone for a group portrait of the players who were still alive. There were a dozen survivors at that point. He got ten, as two were unavailable due to travel or touring commitments.

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