A Tribe Called Quest – Jazz(We’ve Got) & Buggin’ Out

cool as fuck

 

 

Looking at the Soundtrack of Your Life in New York City, 1980s-1990s:

 

Looking at Music 3.0, the third in a series of exhibitions at The Museum of Modern Art exploring the influence of music on contemporary art practices, focuses on New York in the 1980s and 1990s and the birth of “remix culture.” Highlighting a singular range of activity within the city during those decades, the exhibition addresses the birth of hip hop; new articulations of feminism as seen in video chain letters, zines, and raucous art and music performances; the continued artistic development of music videos; and the rise of the digital domain, where sound and image acquired a curious parity as sampled bits of electronic information, raising the curtain on new creative possibilities. Approximately 70 works from a wide range of artists and musicians are on view, including works by the Beastie Boys, Kathleen Hanna and Le Tigre, Keith Haring, Miranda July, Christian Marclay, Steven Parrino, and Run-DMC. A film exhibition closely linked to the artists and works on view in the gallery exhibition runs from March 2 to March 10, 2011, in MoMA’s Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters. The exhibition is organized by Barbara London, Associate Curator, Department of Media and Performance Art, The Museum of Modern Art. Read All.

 

 

Laura Levine (American, born 1958), Tina Weymouth and Grandmaster Flash, New York City. 1981. Black and white photograph; “This was shot for the cover of the NY Rocker. It was right about the time when hip hop and downtown music scenes were starting to discover each other, and there was a wonderful cross-polliation going on (Liquid Liquid’s White Lines, Blondie’s Rapture, and in this case, the Tom Tom Club’s Wordy Rappinghood). Flash and Tina got along great, they had never met before. Boom boxes were the prop de rigeur back then.”

 

 

Laura Levine, Arto Lindsay, Ikue Mori, Tim Wright/DNA, NYC 1981.

yeah, Ikue Mori was such a hot asian ny hipster girl.

 

 

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Then, here’s a great interivew of Laura Levine;  

 

Laura Levine’s work is too varied and voluminous to be hemmed in to one particular time, scene, or discipline — the bio on her website rightfully describes her as a “cross-disciplinary visual artist” — but I’m assuming many readers of this site discovered her work the same way I did: via her photography in the pages of several music publications during the ’80s, including the Village Voice, Trouser Press, Musician, Rolling Stone, and especially New York Rocker, where she served as chief photographer before becoming Photo Editor. Levine’s photography resumé reads like a Who’s Who of those loopy years following punk and disco: from early snaps of Prince and Madonna (pre-world domination) to photogenic weirdos like Captain Beefheart, August Darnell (a.k.a. Kid Creole), and Bow Wow Wow’s Annabella Lwin to No Wave shit disturbers D.N.A. and Glenn Branca to  “new romantic” mop-fops Yazoo to rap icons Run-D.M.C. and Afrika Bambaata to hardcore visionaries Black Flag and X to… well, you get the picure.

 Go –>