Notes Of A Hip Hop Head
by Kevin Powell
Dissident Voice
December 16,
2002
This thing, this
energy, ghetto angels christened "hiphop" in the days of way back is
the dominant cultural expression in America, and on the planet, today. You think not, then ask yourself why
business interests as diverse as McDonald's, Ralph Lauren, Sprite, Nike, and
the National Basketball Association have all, during the course of the past
decade and a half, bear-hugged the language, the fashion, the attitude of
hiphop to authenticate and sell their products. Or why, if you are a parent, your child, be you a resident of the
Fifth Wardin Houston or an inhabitant of Beverly Hills, routinely strikes a
hiphop pose and dons mad baggy clothes when leaving home for school on the
daily, or when cruising a mall on the weekends. The rapper Ice-T said it best near the beginning of the 1990s:
"Hiphop is simply the latest form of a 'home invasion' into the hearts and
minds of young people, including a lot of White youth." Ice-T should be crowned a prophet for that
proclamation. Sure, hiphop still rocks
the boulevards but it is so much a part of American culture-hell, it is
American culture, with all the positives and negatives attached to that
reality-that even the bourgeois reach for it and stake claims to it nowadays.
Therefore we can
comfortably say that hiphop is bigger than ever. (If bigger is better is another essay altogether.) Just as we
have witnessed the globalization of the economy, hiphop is global, making heads
nod from Cleveland to Tokyo to Paris to Havana to Capetown, South Africa. Who knew that this thing, this energy,
started on the streets, in the parks, of New York City, circa the late 1960s
through the decadence of the 1970s, by working-class African Americans, West
Indians, and Latinos, would surpass jazz, rock 'n' roll, and R&B in
popularity and come to be the gritty, in-your-face soundtrack of a generation,
of an era? From where did hiphop
emerge? Think institutionalized White
racism as the midwife for poor neighborhoods, poor school systems, poor health
care, poor community resources, and poor life prospects. Think the United States government's slow
but sure abandonment of its "war on poverty" programs (sending more
money, instead, to that war in Vietnam) as the Civil Rights Movement came to a
screeching halt. Think the material and
spiritual failures of that Civil Rights Movement: the disappearing acts of
leaders of color, the fragmentation of communities of color due to integration,
lost industrial jobs and new migration patterns, and colored middle-class folk
jetting from the 'hood for good. Think
the New York City fiscal crisis of the early to mid-1970s, and the effects of
that money crunch on impoverished residents of color in the Bronx, Harlem, and
other parts of the metropolitan New York City area. Think of slashed art, music, dance, and other recreational
programs in inner-city areas due to that fiscal crisis-homies had to make due
with what they had, for real. Add these
factors together, multiply by, um, field hollers, work songs, the blues, Cab
Calloway, zoot suiters, bebop, jitterbuggers, low-riders, doo-wop harmonizers,
jump-rope rhymers, lyrical assassins like the Last Poets and Muhammad Ali,
Nuyorican salsa and soul, Jamaican dub poetry, Afro-Southern sonic calls and
responses in the form of James Brown, the wall carvings and murals of Africans,
Latinos, Native Americans, and the drum, the conga, the pots and pans, being
beat beat beaten here there everywhere and it all equals hiphop. Part of a continuum: magical, spiritual, a
miracle sprung from the heavy bags and hand-me-down rags of those deferred
dreams Langston Hughes had sung about years before.
Maybe it is no
coincidence, then, that 1967 is not only the year that Langston Hughes, the
great documentarian of ghetto life, died, but also the year that Clive
Campbell, aka Kool Herc, came from Jamaica to New York City, to become widely
regarded as a trailblazing DJ and one of the founding fathers of hiphop. Maybe it is no coincidence that the last
political act Martin Luther King Jr. attempted-his famed "Poor People's
Campaign," which essentially ended when he was murdered on April 4,
1968-was aimed at the same subgroup-and their children-who would ultimately
drive hiphop culture. Maybe it is no
coincidence that when Marvin Gaye asked the question on his landmark 1971 album
What's Going On "Who really cares?"
and, later, pleads "Save the children" he was talking about,
well, these forgotten children, the "throwaways" of post-Civil Rights
America, who would merely need courage, imagination, one mic, two turntables,
spraypaint and magic markers, and cardboard or the linoleum from their momma's
kitchen floors, to not only make a new art, but a cultural revolution fueled by
four core elements, in no particular order: the DJ, the MC, the dance
component, and the graffiti writing.
Accordingly, we have not been able to avoid dreaming of a hiphop America since, nor the ubiquitous image of a b-boy standing in a b-boy stance. Ain't no secret that hiphop is a boys' club. No denying, either, that the ladies have been in the house from jump. Pioneers include graf legend Lady Pink, Sha Rock (from the seminal rap group Funky Four Plus One More), the Mercedes Ladies, and entrepreneur Sylvia Robinson, whose Sugar Hill Records label scored hiphop's first commercial hit with the Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" in 1979. And, yup, gotta speak it as I see it: "Rapper's Delight" shamelessly borrowed Chic's "Good Times" rhythms and straight jacked the Cold Crush Brothers for lyrics. So while a momentous disc, not mad original. And the rest, as they say, is a very short herstory, with names like MC Lyte, Dee Barnes, Lauryn Hill, Fatima Robinson, Gangsta Boo, DJ Kuttin Kandi, and Missy Elliott. Exceptions to the rules, these women have been blips on the testosterone screen. It be like that this go-round because, I submit, there is a direct link between '60s souls on ice like Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, H. Rap Brown, Huey Newton, and Eldridge Cleaver, and all that posturing by brothers around the way-the afros, the dark shades, the black turtlenecks and black leather jackets worn, even in the summer, for the right mix of rage and cool-at hiphop's break of dawn. In fact I think it kinda deep that the 1960s marked the first time that rank-and-file Black people, especially Black men, used the word to tell it like it is, holding back nothing. Replicate Nat Turner by thousands of suddenly fearless coloreds and you begin to understand them was some angry, signifying Negroes.
Kinda deep,
again, that the Civil Rights era literally overlaps with hiphop 's first
boom-baps and public-surface scrawlings.
Might it be possible that them brothers scared White America so bad that
as the movement was ending it was them same brothers who were
disproportionately left behind? I'm not
declaring brothers got it worse than sisters-nope, not me; we got it bad
equally, just differently-but I am declaring that it is wild, when you really
stop to ponder this, that Blackbrownbeigebutterpecan men, principally the
younger ones, have always been viewed as dangerous by this country and that a
concentrated effort to hush these cats through police force and a whole bunch
of other things you can find in those FBI files did leave a whole bunch of
Black cats, and their Latino brethren, invisible, unseen, gone, with the sounds
of silence clanging in the air. So
hiphop, to me, is about these males, with names like Lee Quinones, Seen, Crazy
Legs, Dondi, Afrika Bambaataa, Cowboy, and Pete DJ Jones, shining light on
their invisibility. Think a merger of
Ellison's Invisible Man, Wright's Native Son, and Thomas's Down These Mean
Streets and you begin to get the complexities of the heads who have populated the
hiphop nation.
So, yeah, no
question, hiphop owes a debt to the best and worst of being so
dude-centered. On the upside it is
about male-bonding, autobiographical vulnerability, reportage you don't see on
your local news, and, if you are truly willing to listen, some of the best
speak-to-the-times poetry this side of Shakespeare, the Beats, and Sonia
Sanchez. I cannot tell you how many
White devotees have told me they knew nothing about Blacks and Latinos until
they began absorbing hiphop culture. Nor
have I ignored the throngs of Asian hiphoppers who assiduously study and
manifest the culture better than the Black and Latino folks who birthed
it. It is an organic cultural (self)
education for insiders and outsiders and self-empowerment in the face of
impossible odds. At its worst hiphop
serves up some of the most destructive and myopic definitions of manhood this
side of all the caveman-like things Mick Jagger, Sid Vicious, and other
drugged-up and oversexed rockers said and did in their prime. Indeed, like rock 'n' roll, hiphop sometimes
makes you think we men don't like women much at all, except to objectify them
as trophy pieces or, as contemporary vernacular mandates, as "baby
mommas," "chickenheads," or "bitches." But just as it
was unfair to demonize men of color in the '60s solely
as wild-eyed
radicals when what they wanted, amidst their fury, was a little freedom and a
little power, today it is wrong to categorically dismiss hiphop without taking
into serious consideration the socioeconomic conditions (and the many record
labels that eagerly exploit and benefit from the ignorance of many of these
young artists) that have led to the current state of affairs. Or, to paraphrase the late Tupac Shakur, we were
given this world, we did not make it. Which means hiphop did not breed ghettos,
poverty, single mothers, fatherlessness, rotten school systems, immorality,
materialism, self-hatred, racism, sexism, and the prison-industrial complex
that is capturing literally thousands of young Black and Latino males and
females each year.
What hiphop has
spawned is a way of winning on our own terms, of us making something out of
nothing. Hiphop is a mirror for the
world to look at itself, for America to take a good look at the children it has
neglected, to see the misery it has been avoiding or covering up. And, no, it
is not pretty nor pristine. Hiphop is
the ghetto blues, urban folk art, a cry out for help. The same cries that once emanated from the mouths of a Bessie
Smith, a Robert Johnson, a Billie Holiday, a Big Momma Thornton, a Muddy
Waters. Hiphop is rooted, to a large
extent, in traditional African cultures and the Black American musical
journey. Thus, no big surprise that the
face of hiphop's songs has mainly been Black, although others have grabbed the
mic as well. Hiphop is an unabashed embrace of the past, sampling any and
everything at its disposal, the world clearly its altar of worship. Booker
T. Washington once urged his peeps to
cast their buckets where they were.
Hiphop, in its purest form, is about ghetto youth casting their buckets
into dirty sewer water and coming up with hope, new identities, fly names, def
jams, acrobatic dance moves, cutting-edge art, and, if we are lucky enough,
something other than lint in our pockets, anger and confusion on our brows, and
hunger in our bellies.
Given the mass
appeal and multiple layers of hiphop, you can understand why the images of
Ernie Paniccioli are so incredibly vital. I call Paniccioli the dean of hiphop photographers
because I don't know of any other person who is as uniquely qualified-and
positioned-to dramatize the culture as Paniccioli is. Nor do I know of any other photographer who has single-handedly
built a visual vocabulary for hiphop as Ernie Paniccioli has. Recall James Van Der Zee's majestic
portraits of Harlem in the 1920s and you begin to sense the breadth of
Paniccioli's life-calling. We cannot
think of that Harlem without thinking of Van Der Zee, and we cannot think of
the first three decades of hiphop history without referencing an Ernie
Paniccioli print. His art and his
personal saga are that intertwined with hiphop's evolution.
For here is a
man spit from the pig guts of New York City in 1947, predating hiphop by twenty
years; a man who was not supposed to have had much of a life because of the
price of the ticket given to him; a man who learned the art of war, during his
formative years, on the concrete floors, in the libraries and museums, during
his socialization amongst hustlers and musicians, gang members and street
dancers, and as a sailor in the United States Navy. That Paniccioli is Native American, yea, suggests he understood,
the moment he could decipher the world, what it meant to be marginalized and an
outsider in his own country.
It is this
outsider status that has propelled Paniccioli's craft-first his sketches and
collages while in the navy during the 1960s, then his photography beginning in
the early 1970s. We know that some of
America's greatest artists-Zora Neale Hurston, Thornton Dial Sr., Prince Paul,
to name three of thousands-have been folks beyond the margins for much, if not
all, of their natural lives. That
marginalization is a wide canvas on which they interpret their realities and
conceive new possibilities. An artist
cannot do this if he/she ain't got what painter Radcliffe Bailey labels
"grit." And an artist cannot
do this if he/she has not been touched, cosmically, by ancestral hands, to
feel, to see, to be, freely. Amiri
Baraka said it best: All important art is self-taught and the most significant
artist is the one who feels he/she has nothing to lose and everything to gain
from a relationship with the soul, with the community, with the universe. By self-taught I only mean that Paniccioli
is an eternal student of politics, the visual arts, literature, religion and
spirituality, science and mathematics, the JFK assassination, music, love,
peace, and war. Academia could not have
molded an Ernie Paniccioli just as no university molded Gordon Parks. There are artists who do it because they are
told to do so by an instructor; and there are artists, like Parks and
Paniccioli, who do it, and have done it, because their work is blood, bone,
breath, to them. Or: more often than
not school trains us to be something for someone else. Self-education demands
we train ourselves for ourselves and for the people. Hiphop is a self-taught art because the MCs, the DJs, the
graffiti writers, and the dancers nurtured themselves, and each other.
So as Paniccioli
was learning how to use a camera, he found himself recording the biggest
cultural phenomenon since rock 'n' roll. Paniccioli knew it intuitively because
he had seen Little Richard, Chuck Berry, Bob Dylan, live. It was the same power, the same passion, the
same rebels without a pause. And like
the pioneering hiphoppers, Paniccioli's work was not sanitized. When you look at his photographs you see
warmth, camaraderie, texture, detailed composition, an insider's raw,
painstaking truth. Just as Edward
Curtis's iconic offerings of Native Americans presented them as regal, proud,
defiant, so too does Paniccioli's work portray hiphop society as human,
dignified, remarkable, as survivors, winners, and losers, all of it brewed as
uncut funk. It does not matter if a
shot is at the dance club or in an alley, at a video shoot or in a studio,
Paniccioli's pictures are murals, snapshots of history, reflections on urban
American fashion trends, and love-soaked tributes to this thing, this energy,
called hiphop. No matter how much
bigger hiphop gets, or if it one day returns to the margins, like the blues and
jazz before it, we will always have the photography of Ernie Paniccioli as a
reminder of what it was we created and what it was like for us hiphop heads to
dream our own worlds.
Kevin Powell is a writer, poet and cultural critic. He is the editor of Who Shot Ya? Three Decades of Hiphop Photography (Photographs by Ernie Paniccioli), and
author of Keepin' It Real: Post-Mtv Reflections on Race, Sex, and
Politics.
Kevin Powell can be reached at kevinpowe@aol.com. Ernie Paniccioli can be reached at rapphotos@hotmail.com