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Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

Esther Bejarano, 96, Dies; Auschwitz Survivor Fought Hate With Hip-Hop

After the war, she restarted her life in what would become Israel. She studied singing, joined a choir, gave music lessons and in 1950 married Nissim Bejarano, a truck driver, with whom she had two children, Joram, a son, and Edna, a daughter. In 1960, she returned to Germany, settling in Hamburg, and ran a laundry service with her husband.

She is survived by her children, two grandsons and four great-grandchildren.

She found it difficult to discuss the Holocaust with anyone until the 1970s, when she watched German police officers shield right-wing extremists against protesters. The incident turned her into an activist, and she joined the Association of the Persecutees of the Nazi Regime. She began to tell her story in schools, delivered protest speeches and sang with Coincidence, the band that she formed with her children in 1989.

“I use music to act against fascism,” she told The Times. “Music is everything to me.”

Around 2009, when she was in her 80s, Mrs. Bejarano’s musical career took an unexpected turn. She was asked to join Microphone Mafia, a German hip-hop group, with whom she continued to spread her message against fascism and intolerance to young audiences in Germany and abroad, from Istanbul to Vancouver.

Onstage with the group’s Kutlu Yurtseven and Rossi Pennino, Mrs. Bejarano was an unusual figure: a tiny woman with a snow-white pixie haircut, singing in Yiddish, Hebrew and Italian.

Hip-hop was not her preferred musical genre. She joked that she persuaded her bandmates to lower their volume and stop jumping around onstage so much. She believed that hip-hop’s influence on young people could help her counter a rise in intolerance.

“Twelve years together and almost 900 concerts together, and all this thanks to your strength,” Microphone Mafia wrote on its website after Mrs. Bejarano’s death. “Your laughter, your courage, your determination, your loving manner, your understanding, your fighting heart.”

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Chi Modu, Photographer Who Outlined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

Chi Modu, Photographer Who Defined 1990s Hip-Hop, Dies at 54

The Notorious B.I.G., stoic and resplendent in front of the twin towers. Tupac Shakur, eyes closed and arms in the air, tendrils of smoke wafting up from his lips. Eazy-E, perched atop his lowrider, using it as a throne. Mobb Deep, huddled with friends on the rooftop of a Queensbridge housing project. Nas, reflective in his childhood bedroom. Members of the Wu-Tang Clan, gathered in a circle and staring down at the camera, sharpness in their eyes.

For the essential rap stars of the 1990s, odds are that their defining images — the ones imprinted for decades on the popular consciousness — were all taken by one person: Chi Modu.

In the early and mid-1990s, working primarily for The Source magazine, at the time the definitive digest of hip-hop’s commercial and creative ascendance, Mr. Modu was the go-to photographer. An empathetic documentarian with a talent for capturing easeful moments in often extraordinary circumstances, he helped set the visual template for dozens of hip-hop stars. The Source was minting a new generation of superheroes, and Mr. Modu was capturing them as they took flight.

Mr. Modu died on May 19 in Summit, N.J. He was 54. His wife, Sophia, said the cause was cancer.

When hip-hop was still gaining its footing in pop culture and the mainstream media hadn’t quite caught up, The Source stepped into that void. So did Mr. Modu, who was frequently the first professional photojournalist his subjects encountered.

“My focus coming up,” Mr. Modu told BBC Africa in 2018, “was to make sure someone from the hip-hop community was the one responsible for documenting hip-hop artists.”

His photos appeared on the cover of over 30 issues of the magazine. He also photographed the cover of Mobb Deep’s breakthrough 1995 album, “The Infamous…,” and “Doggystyle,” the 1993 debut album from Snoop Doggy Dogg (now Snoop Dogg), as well as Bad Boy Records’ “B.I.G. Mack” promotional campaign, which introduced the rappers the Notorious B.I.G. and Craig Mack.

“We were pretty primitive in our look at that time, and we needed someone like him,” Jonathan Shecter, one of the founders of The Source, said.

Mr. Modu’s personality, he added, was “super cool, no stress, no pressure. He’d just be a cool dude hanging out with the crew. A lot of rappers felt he was someone they could hang around with.”

Mr. Modu’s signature approach was crisp and intimate — he rendered his subjects as heroes, but with an up-close humility. As that generation of emerging stars was learning how to present themselves visually, he helped refine their images. (He had a special rapport with Tupac Shakur, which spanned several years and shoots.)

“When you bring that high level of skill to an arena that didn’t have a high level of skill, you can actually create really important work,” he told Pulse, a Nigerian publication, in 2018.

For Mobb Deep’s album cover, he scheduled time in a photo studio, which yielded the indelibly ice-cold cover portrait of the duo. “A huge part of our success was that cover — he captured a vibe that encapsulated the album,” Mobb Deep’s Havoc said. “To see a young Black brother taking photos of that nature was inspiring.”

But Mr. Modu also spent a day with the duo in Queensbridge, the neighborhood they hailed from, taking photos of them on the subway, by the Queensboro Bridge, on the roof of the housing project building Havoc lived in. “Twenty-five years later they feel almost more important,” Havoc said. “They give you a window into that time.”

In addition to being a nimble photographer — sometimes he shot his images on slide film, with its low margin for error — Mr. Modu was a deft amateur psychologist. “He could flow from New York to Los Angeles and go into every ’hood. There was never a problem, never an issue,” Mr. Shecter said. His wife remembered Mr. Modu leaving a Jamaican vacation to photograph Mike Tyson, only to arrive and learn Mr. Tyson didn’t want to shoot; by the end of the day, via charm and cajoling, Mr. Modu had his shots.

Mr. Modu was also a careful student of the dynamic balance between photographer and subject — the celebrity was the raison d’être for the shoot, but the photographer was the shaper of the image. “The reason I am able to take control is that I am here trying to help you go where you are trying to go,” Mr. Modu told Pulse. “I’m on your team. I’m the one looking at you. You may think you are cool but I have to see you as cool to press my shutter.”

Jonathan Mannion, a friend of Mr. Modu’s and a hip-hop portraitist of the following generation, said Mr. Modu played a crucial role in establishing the presence of sophisticated photography in hip-hop. “He kicked a lot of doors off their hinges for us to walk through,” Mr. Mannion said.

Christopher Chijioke Modu was born on July 7, 1966, in Arondizuogu, Nigeria, to Christopher and Clarice Modu. His father was a measurement statistician, and his mother worked in accounting and computer systems processing. His family emigrated to the United States in 1969, during the Biafran war.

His parents later returned to Nigeria, but Mr. Modu stayed behind and graduated from the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey and received a bachelor’s degree in agribusiness economics from Rutgers University’s Cook College in 1989. He began taking photographs in college — using a camera bought for him as a birthday gift by Sophia Smith, whom he began dating in 1986 and would marry in 2008 — and received a certificate in photojournalism and documentary photography from the International Center of Photography in 1992.

He shot for The Amsterdam News, the Harlem-based newspaper, and became a staff photographer at The Source in 1992 and later the magazine’s director of photography.

After leaving The Source, he consulted on diversity initiatives for advertising and marketing companies and was a founder of a photo sharing website. And he continued to take photos around the world, capturing life in Yemen, Morocco, Cambodia, Sri Lanka and elsewhere.

Is addition to his wife, Mr. Modu, who lived in Jersey City, is survived by his mother; three sisters, Ijeoma, Anaezi and Enechi; a brother, Emmanuel; and a son and daughter.

In the early 2010s, Mr. Modu began efforts to reignite interest in his 1990s hip-hop photography, initially by partnering with a New York billboard company to display his work.

“He felt there were certain gatekeepers, especially in the art world,” Ms. Modu said. “He always said the people are the ones that appreciate the art and want the art that he had. And with the billboard thing, he was taking the art to the people.”

The billboard project, called “Uncategorized,” led to exhibitions in several cities around the world. In 2014 he had a solo show at the Pori Art Museum in Finland. In 2016 he released “Tupac Shakur: Uncategorized,” a book compiling photographs from multiple shoots with the rapper.

Working in an era when the conditions of celebrity photo shoots were far less constrained than they are now, he retained the rights to his photographs. He sold posters and prints of his work, and licensed his photos for collaborations with apparel and action-sports companies. Last year, some of his photos were included in Sotheby’s first hip-hop auction.

Years after his hip-hop picture-taking heyday, Mr. Modu still left an impression on his subjects. DJ Premier of Gang Starr — a duo Mr. Modu photographed for the cover of The Source in 1994 — recalled taking part in a European tour of hip-hop veterans in 2019. During a stop in Berlin, he heard from Mr. Modu, who was in town, and arranged backstage passes for him.

When Mr. Modu arrived, he approached a room where the members of the Wu-Tang Clan were all gathered. DJ Premier recalled the rapturous reception: “As soon as he walked it in, it was almost like a cheer — ‘Chiiiiiiiiiiiiii!’”

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From the Lindy Hop to Hip-Hop in One Improvising Physique

From the Lindy Hop to Hip-Hop in One Improvising Body

If you want to understand the connections between jazz dance and its descendants, you can read a book or take a class. But how much more efficient and fun it is to watch LaTasha Barnes do her thing.

Barnes is a dance scholar in an academic sense who recently earned a Masters degree from New York University. But it is their embodied knowledge that is rarer and more influential. A hard-to-beat master in the club-derived form known as house, without admitting that field, she has also become a leader in Lindy Hop, a form that, despite being originated by black dancers, has long been deficient in black Practitioners.

All of this makes Barnes a bridge between worlds that seldom cross, a connector, or rather a re-connector, as the styles and subcultures she joins encompass much of the world-conquering dance that has historically been used in African American Communities emerged a century or so – are all branches of a family whose members often do not recognize each other.

It is this lack of recognition that Barnes can seemingly mend with ease. To see her dance, especially to jazz music, is to watch the collapse of historical distance. Steps and attitudes separated by epochs flow through her improvising body, not as an intentional amalgamation, but as a single language that she has apparently always known and which she nevertheless creates on the spot. The links are natural, informal, authentic without any reference to the antiquarian. They are active, present, going live. The shock of disclosure can make you laugh out loud.

This Barnes effect is well known in the lindy hop, solo jazz and house scenes as well as in the broader circles of street and club dance. But now, at 40, Barnes could be on the verge of a different kind of recognition. On May 19, her show “The Jazz Continuum” will be premiered at the Guggenheim Museum as part of the future-oriented Works & Process series. In August it goes to the renowned Jacob’s Pillow Dance Festival in the Berkshires.

As the title suggests, “The Jazz Continuum” aims to uncover hidden connections and forgotten continuities. Barnes has put together a cross-generational crew of black dancers, experts in various styles, and puts them in conversation with jazz musicians and a DJ.

“It’s a very personal show,” Barnes said recently from her Brooklyn home. “It’s about each of us expressing our individual understanding of the jazz we have.” The reorientation of jazz towards the project also has a public point. “We want to create more space so that not only the value of these dance forms is recognized,” she said, “but especially so that the black community should turn its gaze back to its beauty and strength.”

In a way, Barnes tries to reproduce her own experience of rediscovery. Their dance began in the womb. Her father was a DJ, and at his parties she said she would ditch her mother’s groove until she got closer to the speakers so Barnes, who was still in the womb, could sync to the music.

Barnes’ childhood in Richmond, Virginia was full of dancing, especially every Sunday at family barbecues. “I would try to do the dances my aunts and uncles did,” she said. “When the song changed on the radio, so did the dances.” She kept up with her grandmother and even her great grandmother, who was born in 1928.

Her mother also took her to formal dance classes, but at the age of 8, discouraged by teachers who told her she had the wrong body type – too short and muscular – she turned to athletics and gymnastics. She never stopped dancing in her teens, but it was mostly at parties after the track meet or at clubs where people snuck in her and her friends because they really got down to it.

She joined the army at 18, another family tradition. She rose through the ranks at an unusual rate, becoming a first class sergeant in about half the usual time. As a satellite communications operator, she spent four years in Europe and then with the White House communications agency (followed by three more years as an independent contractor).

All the while, she was drawn to doing physical tests, joining powerlifting teams, and participating in fitness competitions. When she was recovering from a sports injury in 2004, she was hit by a car and walked away with a broken hip, broken back, and broken wrist. She later helped identify the driver by tucking her body into the dent on his hood. Doctors found that she also had degenerative disc disease. They told her that maybe she would never be athletic again.

After a year of regenerative work, a physical therapist suggested dance therapy. Barnes found a class in pop, the funk style of robotic contraction and isolation. It wasn’t long before a teacher introduced her to Junious Brickhouse.

Brickhouse recently founded Urban Artistry, an organization in Silver Spring, Md. Dedicated to preserving and performing urban dance forms. He taught Barnes the house, which she did as a teenager, without knowing what it was called. But he also required that she knew about various neighboring styles (hip-hop, waacking), studied with mentors and was in line with authors.

According to Brickhouse, the idea of ​​having people train in many styles recently was both about connecting people and promoting versatility. “When you’re just a BMX rider, it’s hard to understand surfers,” he said, “and when you’re all a b-boy or a popper the world seems small. LaTasha welcomed the openness and the idea that where we come from we can inform about where we are going. “

Brickhouse helped Barnes become a teacher and made her known for her highly competitive nature: dance battles. For house dancers, the biggest fight is Juste Debout, a competition in Paris that fills the arenas with fans. In 2011, Barnes and her partner Toyin Sogunro won Category 2 against 2 houses. Barnes quit her job at the White House and devoted herself to dancing.

In her search for a competitive edge, she’d already picked up a touch of jazz dance that had emerged from old footage and found similarities with house. But then Jeff Booth, a white radio musician who took popping classes at Urban Artistry, began to share some of the Lindy Hop he’d learned elsewhere. Trade moves showed more similarities.

Step inside Bobby White, a swing dance champion, teacher, and amateur historian. When he came to Urban Artistry to teach a vintage jazz dance called the Big Apple, he noticed that, first time trying the routine, Barnes looked eerily like one of the least famous dancers of the original Black Lindy’s most famous group Hoppers. Whitey’s.

“I had never seen anyone move like that,” said White. And when Barnes started studying Lindy Hop with him and others, climbing up at her usual rate, he wondered how “she was doing things no one had seen before, which still made sense because it was in the music . “

When Barnes tried to swing out, she thought, “I’ve felt this before.” Her grandmother told her that she had already been taught the dance by her great-grandmother. “And then it became a way of honoring her,” said Barnes. “Every time jazz music comes up, I feel it.”

From White’s point of view, Barnes became an inspiring role model, bringing with him a spirit of jazz dance that the lindy hop scene had missed when they joined a new generation of black dancers devoted to form.

“I’m a black woman,” said Tena Morales-Armstrong, President of the International Lindy Hop Championships. “When I started dancing Lindy 20 years ago, I didn’t even know that black people started it. I could go to many, many events and never see anyone who looks like me. “

Lately this has changed, with the support of groups that Barnes belongs to – the Frankie Manning Foundation, Hella Black Lindy Hop, the Black Lindy Hoppers Fund – organizations that strive to give black dancers better representation and access to education and To enable resources.

Barnes’ influence isn’t just as a black dancer on the Lindy scene, however. Sometimes she demonstrates house at Lindy events. She demonstrates jazz at house events. Your live broadcast is a conduit, especially when what comes out is not either / or both / and.

“In the black community, we let go of a lot of the things we created,” said Michele Byrd-McPhee, founder of Ladies of Hip-Hop and performer of Jazz Continuum. “LaTasha did a great job showing us how to become aware of our history and how to claim it for ourselves.”

Melanie George, associate curator at Jacob’s Pillow and jazz dance expert, sees Barnes as a model for a jazz approach to a dance career: “She is equally interested in all of these forms. She found a way not to have to choose. “Concert dance moderators often expect jazz and hip-hop artists to adapt to their needs, but Barnes” comes in as LaTasha “.

And George added, “What we know about great jazz dancers is the same as what we know about great jazz musicians – it gets richer over time.”

At 40, Barnes is in bloom. And what she has learned about herself may now become apparent to others. “I’ve always seen myself as the eternal outsider,” she said, “without realizing that it was actually the other way around.” She’s inside because the center of American dance is what she knows what she’s doing.

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Shock G, Frontman for Hip-Hop Group Digital Underground, Dies at 57

Shock G, Frontman for Hip-Hop Group Digital Underground, Dies at 57

When it was Mr. Shakur’s turn he quickly released a thoughtful verse about the dangers of success: “Get some fame, people change.”

Mr. Shakur had auditioned for Shock G and was hired as a member of the group’s street crew. He ended up performing and recording with Digital Underground. He appeared in the groups “This Is an EP Release” (Tommy Boy) and “Sons of the P” (Tommy Boy), which were nominated for a Grammy Award.

In 1991, Mr. Shakur started a solo career with the album “2Pacalypse Now” (Interscope), which sold half a million times. It included two humble hits, “Trapped” and “Brenda’s Got a Baby,” a song about the plight of an unmarried teenage mother. Before the album was released, he also began a career as a film actor, playing the violent, unpredictable bishop in the Ernest Dickerson film “Juice”.

Until 1993, Mr. Shakur was a rising star. Shock G and another member of the Digital Underground, Money B, appeared on Mr. Shakur’s album and helped create his first big hit, “I Get Around,” a poolside hymn with a relaxed beat. But now it was Shock G with an Afro T-shirt and an oversized purple T-shirt that said, “Now you can tell from my everyday seizures that I’m not rich man caught in the mix / Tryna makes 15 cents one dollar. “

Shock G was born in Brooklyn on August 25, 1963, and his musical instincts were shaped by a childhood spent moving around the country. His mother, Shirley Kraft, was a television producer; his father, Edward Racker, was a senior executive in computer administration. After the couple divorced, “I spent most of my time in Tampa, but I also lived in New York, Philly, and California,” Shock G told the Times. “I was always interested in music and played in bands when I was 10 or 11 years old.”

His grandmother, Gloria Ali, was a pianist and cabaret singer in Harlem in the 1950s. She taught him how to play Thelonious Monk’s “Round Midnight” on the piano. When hip-hop picked up speed in New York in the late 1970s, Shock G, who lived there at the time, recalled: “All my friends and I sold our instruments to buy mixers and turntables.”

Shock G is survived by his parents; his sister Elizabeth Racker; and his brother Kent Racker.

Shock G saw music as expansive, inclusive, and experimental. “Funk can be rock, funk can be jazz and funk can be soul,” he told the Times. “Most people have a checklist of what makes a good pop song: It has to be three minutes long, have a repeatable chorus, and have a catchy catch. That makes music stale. We say, “Do what feels good.” If you like it for three minutes, you will love it for 30 minutes. “

Christina Morales and Jesus Jiménez contributed to the coverage.

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Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

Ricky Powell, 59, Dies; Chronicled Early Hip-Hop and Downtown New York

Ricky Powell, the zelig from downtown New York who used his camera to document the early years of hip hop’s rise as well as a host of other subcultural scenes and the celebrities and marginalized figures who populated the city, was found dead Monday in his West Village apartment. He was 59 years old.

The death was confirmed by his manager and archivist Tono Radvany, who said a cause was still pending. Mr. Powell learned that he had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease last year and that he had ongoing problems with his heart.

Mr. Powell – often affectionately referred to as “The Lazy Hustler” – exuded New York charm and courage. As a die-hard hiker, he hit the sidewalk with his camera and took photos of everything he liked: superstars, well-dressed passers-by, animals.

Crucially, he was about to form the Beastie Boys, which catapulted him into an unexpected career as a tour photographer and key member of the entourage, earning him a front-row seat in the global hip-hop explosion that began in the mid-1980s.

“Even though Ron Galella was his hero – he was the original paparazzi – I always told Ricky that you had a taste for Weegee, too,” said the once ubiquitous New York street photographer Fab 5 Freddy, the early hip-hop impresario and a longtime friend and photo subject of Powell. “He was always in the inner circle, one of the few – if not the only one – who took photos.”

Mr. Powell’s photographs were intimate and casual, a precursor to the spontaneous hyperdocumentation of the social media era. They often felt completely in the moment and lived it instead of watching it. His subjects were varied: Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat, who were captured on the street before a gallery opening; Francis Ford Coppola and his daughter Sofia at one of their early fashion shows; Run-DMC poses in front of the Eiffel Tower; a pre-superstar Cindy Crawford in a nightclub bathroom; People who sleep on park benches.

“He wasn’t trained, he didn’t know how to compose a recording, he didn’t know what an aperture was,” said Vikki Tobak, editor of the photo anthology “Contact High: A Visual History of Hip-Hop”. (2018) and curator of a traveling exhibition of the same name, which also included the work of Mr. Powell. “But you could feel his curiosity about the people he was photographing, so none of that really mattered. He made people laugh and felt good; you can see all of this in his photos. “

Ricky Powell was born in Brooklyn on November 20, 1961 and grew up primarily in the West Village. He attended LaGuardia Community College in Queens and graduated from Hunter College in Manhattan with a degree in physical education.

His mother, Ruth Powell, was a schoolteacher – he didn’t know his father – but it was mostly a habit of downtown clubs like Max’s Kansas City, which Ricky brought with her when he was a kid. She is its only immediate survivor.

“I grew up fast, dude. Fast, ”Powell says in Ricky Powell: The Individualist, a life documentary that premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival last year but was delayed by the coronavirus pandemic. It is now planned for this year’s festival in June.

Josh Swade, director of the documentary, said Mr. Powell had raw social and cultural intelligence “because he was just out on the streets of New York defending himself in the 60s and 70s”.

Actress Debi Mazar met Mr. Powell while both teenagers were riding bikes around downtown Manhattan. They are “children of the city”. Together they went to the Paradise Garage, the Mudd Club and other hot spots. “Every door opened to Ricky,” said Ms. Mazar. “When we went to a club, we were the cool kids. He had this savoir faire, this electricity. “

Fab 5 Freddy recalled that “New York was a polarized place when we met,” but that Mr. Powell “was comfortable with black kids in a time when people weren’t just going to other places.”

He became a staple of the Fun Gallery, Danceteria, Roxy, and more, alongside graffiti writers, rappers, punk rockers, artists, and other creative eccentrics who populated New York’s vibrant, jagged downtown area. He played on the softball team of graffiti artist Futura 2000, the East Village Espadrilles.

“It was almost like he was invisible too,” said Futura, as he is now called. “He was always looking for a picture to take.”

After graduating from college, Mr. Powell sold ice cream from a street cart for a while and offered to add rum to the treat for an additional dollar. During his shift he photographed people on the street, including stars of the scene like Basquiat. He was already friends with the Beastie Boys, who had just signed a record deal with Def Jam, and one day he bought a plane ticket to accompany them on the street – they opened up to Run-DMC on the Raising Hell Tour – and never looked back.

Mr. Powell became a vital part of the Beastie Boys ecosystem – he partied hard, chased luggage at times, played one of the nerdy protagonists in the video “(You Must) Fight Your Right (To Party!)” And more. He was name checked on “Car Thief,” a track from the group’s 1989 album “Paul’s Boutique,” and was well known enough to have his own groupies.

“When he showed up, the party started,” said Radvany.

As he took photos, they quickly became essential artifacts. Mr. Powell was a documentary filmmaker for a demimonde who was often too busy living aloud to stop and think. Over the years his pictures have appeared in Paper, Ego Trip, Mass Appeal, Animal and other magazines. He also published several books, including “Oh Snap! Ricky Powell’s Rap Photography ”(1998),“ The Rickford Files: Classic New York Photographs ”(2000), and“ Public Access: Ricky Powell Photographs 1985-2005 ”(2005).

“I liked being part of the crew, just hanging out. The entourage itself, but also a photographer who takes relevant pictures at the same time, ”Powell says in the documentary. “I think you have to get a degree in humanistic behavior before you can master the two together.”

Futura said, “He had the gift of being very much a New Yorker. He embodied that for me. I know my own way. “

For several years in the 1990s, Mr. Powell had a public television show called “Rappin ‘With the Rickster,” in which he swapped a still camera for a video camera, but retained the loose, unpredictable energy it both attracted and generated his own. (A DVD of the show’s biggest hits was released in 2010.)

He had been by the Beasties’ side for a decade, but he split with them in 1995 when the group left their old noisy, disruptive, and rude ways behind. “It got ripe,” says Mr. Powell in the documentary. “They did what they did, but I still stayed me.”

After returning to New York, Mr. Powell struggled to find meaning and for a time struggled with drug addiction.

He hadn’t always been sure how to use his crucial archive of an under-documented era. “He could have turned the connections into a profitable operation,” said Swade. “But you have to show up for that.”

Eventually, he began working with Mr. Radvany, who set about organizing his archives, and partnering with brands that licensed his old work or hired him on new projects that channeled his eau de New York energy. He also shared live slide show presentations of his old pictures and told the stories behind the photos.

“When I started with him he was down and I had to help him build an income,” said Mr Radvany. “He loved social media. He was the lazy hustler – he could sit on his futon and sell prints. “

And he never moved out of his little West Village apartment, which was bursting with the vibe of life in the epicenter of the city: contact sheets, sneakers, basketball jerseys, vintage magazines and records, endless memories of the development of contemporary New York creative culture. Even after all these decades, he was one with the scene he was capturing.

“You didn’t see him as a photographer,” said Fab 5 Freddy. “He was a cool kid in the mix who took the camera out, took a few pictures, put it down and said, ‘Pass that joint over here.'”

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Salt-N-Pepa, Hip-Hop Duo That Spoke Up for Girls, Inform Their Personal Story

Salt-N-Pepa, Hip-Hop Duo That Spoke Up for Women, Tell Their Own Story

While selling washing machine warranties from a Sears call center in Queens, friends Cheryl James and Sandra Denton came together as a hip-hop duo called Super Nature with the 1985 staccato track “The Show Stoppa (Is Stupid Fresh)”. When they first heard it on the radio, they were dancing together on a car. It was just the beginning: James became Salt and Denton became Pepa; The group changed their name and scored 10 hits on the Hot 100, including the 80s dance classic “Push It” and the 90s sex anthem “Shoop,” which became one of the few female superstar acts in male-dominated hip -Hop-Golden became epoch.

The two, who have played on the I Love the 90s tour in recent years, tell their story in a new Lifetime biopic, “Salt-N-Pepa,” which was released on Saturday and both the onslaught of world tours and Capturing the conflicts that have erupted, the group’s longtime DJ Spinderella is also a character in the film, but the biopic doesn’t cover their unsuccessful lawsuit against the duo, filed in 2019. The film – which they co-produced with Executive Queen Latifah and others – begins and ends on a note of unity, showing their reunion in 2005 for a VH1 event.

“It was something I and Pep bought,” Salt said. “Pep called and said, ‘Girl, we have to do our film before someone else does it.’” Latifah, an old friend, attended meetings where they met the director (Mario Van Peebles) and the screenwriter (Abdul Williams from “The Bobby” chose Brown Story ”).

The duo-style partnership “Laverne & Shirley” – Salt calm and precise, Pepa relaxed and exuberant – continues despite a dispute with the man who helped them, their start, abuse, divorce and simple old conflicts between Salt and to reach Pepa. “We can tell a 36-year life in two and a half hours,” Pepa said in a group Zoom interview. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

For a film about the journey of two women, your producer and manager Hurby Azor, known as “Luv Bug”, plays a major role as a decisive creative force, especially at the beginning. How much did you come to terms with the decision to emphasize his character?

SALT Well the truth is the truth. And Hurby was our type. He started to be my friend. Being an artist was something that he embodied and transferred to us. My mother took me to all the Broadway plays, and I took singing and dancing lessons, and I did productions for my aunts at home with my cousins. But I didn’t know how to sing. I didn’t play an instrument. When hip hop came along, it was an opportunity to do something that got me excited – and that was through Hurby.

In an early scene, we see Hurby (played by Cleveland Berto) boring Pepa (played by Laila Odom) to rap without her Jamaican accent, and Salt (played by GG Townson) trapped in the middle. How frustrating were those early days?

PEPA For me, hip-hop was a way of life – we had those parking jams where the turntables draw power from the light poles. When Hurby felt that I was who Pepa was going to be, I was thrown into the studio. Hurby had his vision. He wanted it to be said, done – this way and no other way. In the beginning I had a difficult time jumping to the beat. I finally got it.

SALT Pep always says, “Hurby is our third,” and the chemistry between the three of us was explosive on so many levels. Pep and Hurby fought like cats and dogs. It was just an explosion of creativity, passion, drama that resonated in a sound, a music, a movement.

The part of you portrayed in the film that attracts opposites is based on reality?

PEPA One hundred percent.

SALT I am an introvert and a little lonely. What I love about the artist is the creative process. I love taking something out of nowhere and making it a reality, I love the audience reaction, but I don’t necessarily love everything that comes with it – the attention and the chatter. But Pep loves everything.

PEPA I’m an extra-extra extrovert.

SALT When we first met someone asked us what fascinated us about each other. What interested her in me is that she thought, “Who is this girl who doesn’t pay any attention to me?”

PEPA When we were in college I came into the dining room and was talking crazy and I saw Cheryl in the corner and noticed her. It was a chemistry. I was drawn to her.

How much did you both write for the script and did you work separately or together?

PEPA Separately.

SALT Many changes have been made. What I found frustrating – I’m just keeping it real – there were some limitations with making a movie that I wasn’t ready for.

PEPA Keep it real, salt!

SALT Legal restrictions that violate other people’s rights that people had to sign off, budget restrictions. What became important in the end was the story of two women in a male-dominated industry who were first friends, became business partners, who struggled with many difficulties to be heard, to be taken seriously – from the record company to our producer Hurby. We had problems in our relationships and kept picking the wrong men.

PEPA We can take her back to college when it all started and we’re making $ 200 a show.

SALT And split it up.

There was a long time after Salt-N-Pepa’s greatest hits and before Nicki Minaj and Cardi B, when the route for women in hip-hop was limited. How much did you pay attention to it?

SALT I remember this question was asked many times when there was a big empty room with no women. I have no idea why, other than this is a male dominated music and business genre and we had to get through a hurby. There was a time when you had to vouch for a camp – a men’s camp. That is starting to change with social media and all the ways people have to stand up there without belonging to a Jay-Z or whoever.

How many of the original “Push It” video eight-ball jackets, originally designed by your friend Christopher Martin (Play of Kid ‘n Play), do you each own?

PEPA The original was stolen during a performance backstage.

SALT I remember it was Brixton in London and someone broke in the back door of our dressing room. We came in and the door was open and the jackets were gone.

PEPA Everything else remained – the paperbacks, everything.

In the film, Salt says at the time of the breakup: “I have to work out a space that has nothing to do with you.”

SALT Absolutely. When I left I had to deal with many of my own problems, my own demons. It is healthy when you are in a group so that you can also preserve your individuality. We’d been doing this since we were 18, 19, and I didn’t get a chance to find out who I was but Salt-N-Pepa. After a while, I felt a lot of separation, a lot of resentment, a lot of anger from Pep, whom I didn’t understand. I felt like I was in a spiral trying to prove myself to her: “Girl, I have your back. Girl i’m here for you “Nothing I did or said could remedy what she was feeling. I feel like there was a lot of miscommunication.

PEPA [vigorously playing with her hair] The point is, you and I have never spoken to each other – you keep telling me how I feel and say and think. When did you and I talk?

SALT I feel upset with you. And your answer –

PEPA It feels like I never had to talk to her. It’s all her feeling with everything. I have to do with your friend being the manager! I also go through a whole situation. We were there together. When you feel all of this, I feel it too.

How uniform is Salt-N-Pepa these days?

SALT Relationships go through different phases. I know one thing: I love Sandy, and I know Sandy loves me. It is difficult to be friends and business partners, and anyone in this position can relate to it. Sometimes we’ll be married and sometimes we’ll raise the brand together and sometimes I’ll sleep on the couch.

PEPA However, communication is the key to all successful relationships.