Fred Brathwaite, more popularly known as Fab 5 Freddy, is an American visual artist, filmmaker, and hip hop pioneer. He is considered one of the architects of the street art movement. Freddy emerged in New York's downtown underground creative scene in the late 1970s as a graffiti artist. He was the bridge between the burgeoning uptown rap scene and the downtown No Wave art scene. He was immortalized in 1981 when Debbie Harry rapped on the Blondie song "Rapture" that "Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly." In the late 1980s, Freddy became the first host of the groundbreaking hip-hop music video show Yo! MTV Raps.
Christopher George Latore Wallace, better known by his stage names The Notorious B.I.G., Biggie Smalls, or simply Biggie, was an American rapper. Rooted in East Coast hip hop and particularly gangsta rap, he is widely considered one of the greatest rappers of all time. Wallace became known for his distinctive laid-back lyrical delivery, offsetting the lyrics' often grim content.
Marion Hugh "Suge" Knight Jr. is an American music executive and convicted felon who is the co-founder and former CEO of Death Row Records. Knight was a central figure in gangsta rap's commercial success in the 1990s. This feat is attributed to the record label's first two album releases: Dr. Dre's The Chronic in 1992 and Snoop Dogg's Doggystyle in 1993. Knight is serving a 28-year sentence in prison for a fatal hit-and-run in 2015.
"Hit 'Em Up" is a diss track by American rapper 2Pac, featuring the Outlawz. It is the B-side to the single "How Do U Want It", released on June 4, 1996. The song's lyrics contain vicious insults to several East Coast rappers, chiefly Shakur's former friend turned rival, the Notorious B.I.G.. The song was recorded at Can Am Studios in 1996. A previous version of the song was recorded in October 1995.
The East Coast–West Coast hip hop rivalry was a dispute between artists and fans of the East Coast hip hop and West Coast hip hop scenes in the United States, especially from the mid-1990s. Focal points of the feud were East Coast–based rapper The Notorious B.I.G. with Puff Daddy and their New York City–based label, Bad Boy Records, and West Coast–based rapper Tupac Shakur with Suge Knight and their Los Angeles–based label, Death Row Records. The feud culminated in the murders of both rappers in drive-by shootings. Although several suspects have been identified, both murders remain unsolved.
"Who Shot Ya?" is a song by American rapper the Notorious B.I.G., backed by Sean Combs. Bad Boy Entertainment released it on February 21, 1995, on an alternate reissue of Wallace's single "Big Poppa/Warning". Its new B-side "Who Shot Ya", a revision of a track already issued earlier in 1995, was "controversial and hugely influential." Widely interpreted as a taunt at Tupac Shakur, the single provoked a "rap battle" between the two rappers, formerly friends.
Cathleen "Cathy" Scott is a Los Angeles Times and New York Times bestselling American true crime author and investigative journalist who penned the biographies and true crime books The Killing of Tupac Shakur and The Murder of Biggie Smalls, both bestsellers in the United States and United Kingdom, and was the first to report Shakur's death. She grew up in La Mesa, California and later moved to Mission Beach, California, where she was a single parent to a son, Raymond Somers Jr. Her hip-hop books are based on the drive-by shootings that killed the rappers six months apart in the midst of what has been called the West Coast-East Coast war. Each book is dedicated to the rappers' mothers.
Janette Beckman is a British documentary photographer who currently lives in New York City. Beckman describes herself as a documentary photographer. While she produces a lot of work on location, she is also a studio portrait photographer. Her work has appeared on records for the major labels, and in magazines including Esquire,Rolling Stone,Glamour,Italian Vogue,The Times,Newsweek,Jalouse,Mojo and others.
Ricky Powell was an American photographer who documented popular culture including hip hop, punk rock, graffiti, and pop art. His photographs have been featured in The New York Times, the New York Post, the Daily News, The Village Voice, TIME, Newsweek, VIBE, The Source, Rolling Stone, among other publications. His photographs included candid portraits of artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat, Andy Warhol, Madonna, in addition to many other popular culture artists and other common people. His photographs were included in the books The Rap Photography of Ricky Powell! (1998), The Rickford Files: Classic New York Photographs (2000), Frozade Moments: Classic Street Photography of Ricky Powell (2004), and Public Access: Ricky Powell Photographs (2005) and were exhibited both domestically and internationally.
The Killing of Tupac Shakur is a biographical, true crime account by American journalist and author Cathy Scott of the 1996 murder of rapper Tupac Shakur. The book made news upon its September 1997 release, on the first anniversary of Shakur's death, because of an autopsy photo included in its pages. It was the first book to be released covering the rapper's death. The book was reprinted in the UK by Plexus Publishing and in Poland by Kagra. Coverage of the autopsy photo, taken of Shakur's body on a gurney in the coroner's examining room, catapulted the book onto the Los Angeles Times bestseller list. New editions of the book were released in 2002 and 2014.
Bill Adler is an American music journalist and critic who specializes in hip-hop. Since the early 1980s he has promoted hip-hop in a variety of capacities, including as a publicist, biographer, record label executive, documentary filmmaker, museum consultant, art gallerist, curator, and archivist. He is known best for his tenure as director of publicity at Def Jam Recordings (1984–1990), the period of his career to which the critic Robert Christgau was referring when he described Adler as a "legendary publicist".
Charles Alan Philips is an American writer and journalist. He is best known for his investigative reporting in the Los Angeles Times on the culture, corruption, and crime in the music industry during the 1990s and 2000s, which garnered both awards and controversy. In 1999, Philips won a Pulitzer Prize, with Michael A. Hiltzik, for their co-authored series exposing corruption in the entertainment industry.
Christopher Wallace, an American rapper known professionally as the Notorious B.I.G., was murdered in a drive-by shooting in the early hours of March 9, 1997 in Los Angeles, California. He was 24 years old.
Brian Cross, better known as B+, is an Irish photographer and filmmaker based in Los Angeles, California. He is a co-founder of Mochilla, a film and music production company. He predominantly photographed the Los Angeles' hip hop scene in the 1990s as well as helped create album art for a number of artists including Q-Tip, Eazy-E, Damian Marley, DJ Shadow, and J Dilla.
Michael Benabib is an American portrait photographer, known for his portraits of David Bowie, Tupac Shakur, Sean Combs, and Keith Richards among others. Notable portrait photography of public figures include Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz and Loretta Lynch. His work has appeared in publications including Vanity Fair, Vogue, GQ, Rolling Stone, Vibe, ESPN magazine, The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, NPR and Newsweek. His work was included to photography collections on display by The Smithsonian and MoMa.
Vikki Tobak is a culture journalist, author, independent curator, and producer born in Soviet-era Kazakhstan who was raised in the United States. She reports about and creates content regarding politics, arts, social justice and music photography.
The Annenberg Space for Photography was an exhibition space in the Century City neighborhood of Los Angeles' Westside. Founded in March 2009, it was dedicated to displaying photographic works, ranging from artistic to journalistic, using both traditional photographic prints and modern digital techniques.
Barron Claiborne is an American photographer and cinematographer who grew up in Boston, Massachusetts. He began taking photographs at the age of ten. After moving to New York in 1989 he began assisting established photographers such as; Richard Avedon, Irving Penn, Saint Claire Born, and Richard Numeroff. His photographic mentor, was Gordon Parks.
Ithaka Darin Pappas, known professionally as Ithaka, is an American-born multidisciplinary artist of Greek ancestry who creates using music, writing, sculpture and photography. He has authored a collection of short stories, entitled Ravenshark Chronicles published in international magazines and periodicals, which have sometimes been the basis for his travel-oriented lyrical content. In a 2005 article for the magazine Waves, journalist Ricardo Macario described Ithaka as "The Miscellaneous Man". In a 2008 review of Ithaka's sixth album Saltwater Nomad, the online surf-culture platform Surfline stated that "the artist effortlessly traverses at ease between all of his choses mediums of expression [music, sculpture, writing and photography]", and that "his life's journey is a soulful balancing act somewhere between the worlds of euphoric creation and aquatic diversion."
Christopher Chijioke"Chi" Modu was a Nigerian-born American photographer known for his photos of various pioneering hip-hop music entertainers which "helped set the visual template for dozens of hip-hop stars." Hypebeast, which interviewed him in 2017, covered his 2021 death.
