Dedication
This book is dedicated to my mother, Julia, who taught me strength, knowledge, wisdom, and
understanding, a love for revolution, and to fight against ignorance, oppression, and hatred in all
forms; my wife and daughter, who taught me patience; and my son, who gave me a grandson to pass on
these lessons.
—E.P.
For Harry Allen and Charlie Braxton: my big brothers and guides through the world of hiphop writing
and thinking.
—K.P.
And to the memories of Tupac Shakur, The Notorious B.I.G., Big Pun, Aaliyah, and Lisa “Left Eye”
Lopes.
—E.P. and K.P.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to all the women who nurtured me, loved me, taught me, and tolerated me. Thanks also to
Richie Havens, Chuck D, Jamel Shabazz, Charlotte Sutton (the Apollo Theater), KRS-One, Doug E.
Fresh (peacemaker), Afrika Bambaataa and Zulu, AIM (“Free Leonard Peltier”), NOI, Crazy Legs,
Aaliyah, Big Pun (my good friend), LL Cool J, Flavor Flav, Jane Canonizado (who helped me raise my
son clean and strong), Bro. William Dabney (a warrior), Grace Heck, Angela Thomas, Mary Moore,
Duane Pyous, Manny Martinez, Chi Cheng, Miguel Baguer, Gwen Quinn, Scott Figman (publisher of
Word Up! magazine, who made sure my family always had food on the table), Nancy E.Wolff, Kate,
Gerrie and Maryanne (editors of Word Up!), Naughty by Nature, Tim Dog, Public Enemy, Salt-N-Pepa
(the hardest working women in rap, ever), Kid ’ N Play, Roxanne Shante, Lauryn Hill (respect), and
YoYo. Also to Ralph Mc Daniels, who was pumping hiphop videos long before BET or MTV or anyone
else. And all of the publicists, magazines, and record labels that gave me work. My six brothers and
my sister and my brothers and sisters in the struggle. Special thanks to Charles Harris, Dawn Davis,
Carie Freimuth, and Kevin Powell for making my dream of doing a book a reality.
—Ernie Paniccioli
Thanks to Charles Harris, Dawn Davis, Carie Freimuth, Sarah Wharton, Tara Brown, Rockelle
Henderson, Kelli Bagley, John Jusino, Betty Lew, and everyone at HarperCollins for helping to make
this book— and Ernie’ s dream— a reality. Thanks also to Jeff Posternak and the Wylie Agency,
Davey D, Lauren Summers, Jocelyn Womack, Laylah Amatullah Barrayn, April Silver, Nikki
“Cynical” Smith, Michael Jones, Bahia Ramos, and hiphop pioneers and hiphop heads everywhere.
Thank-yous, too, to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and the Brooklyn Museum of Art for
the very first hiphop exhibits on the planet in 1999 and 2000 respectively. It was through this historic
showcase that Ernie and I first connected. And thank you to Ernie Paniccioli.
—Kevin Powell
“The torch has been passed to a new generation.”
—President John Fitzgerald Kennedy, inaugural address, January 20, 1961
“My beloved let’ s get down to business / Mental self-defensive fitness.”
—Public Enemy, “Fight the Power,” 1989
Contents
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes of a HIPHOP HEAD
The Roots: 1970s–1986
The Golden Era: 1987–1992
POP . . . Goes the Culture: 1992–Present
In My Life time: The Story of Ernie Paniccioli
Selected Bibliography of Ernie Paniccioli Photographs
Chronology of Ernie Paniccioli’s Life and Work
About Kevin Powell
Props for Who Shot Ya?
Copyright
About the Publisher
Notes of a HIPHOP HEAD
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 Ward in 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
April 24, 2002
New York City
The Roots 1970s–1986
Africa Bambaataa and Kool Herc
Grandmaster Flash
James Brown
PeeWee Dance
Crazy Legs
Cold Crush Brothers
Beat Street Dancers
Melissa Paniccioli