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. In the time since, all but two, Sonny Rollins and Benny Golson, have also passed away. That was age. That was history. Three years later, on September 29, 1998—a Tuesday again—it was youth and it was history again. Parks put out the call for hip-hop stars, and they responded in force. Hip-hop more than tripled the original jazz head count, with 177 artists showing up for the photo shoot. The Metropolitan Community Methodist Church served as a kind of greenroom, which meant that whoever came to be photographed was also able to rub elbows, say hello to familiar artists, meet unfamiliar ones. Depending on when you marked the birth, this was a celebration of at least two decades of hip-hop. If you accepted the Kool Herc back-to-school party as the genesis of the art form, it was almost exactly twenty-five years.