‘He knew hip-hop could change his life’: how Biz Markie made his name
When the future director Sacha Jenkins was growing up in Astoria, Queens, he was enthralled by a New York rapper who constituted a jolt to the musical system. “Biz Markie was so fresh and new,” Jenkins remembers of the early days of the late legend and hip-hop change-maker. “So compared to what hip-hop is today and what people are into now, his story is refreshing in a lot of ways.”
For the man born into a housing project before living in a tent under a Long Island bridge and then entering foster care, Markie funneled joyful art through his experiences, all the while keeping a childlike wonder about the world and influencing a genre in the midst of changing culture forever.
It’s an improbable success story highlighted in Jenkins’s new documentary All Up in the Biz: The Life and Rhymes of Biz Markie.
A veteran director who most recently helmed Showtime’s Everything’s Gonna Be All White, which put the modern Black experience under a microscope, Jenkins spent the past two years immersing himself in the world of the man many call the Clown Prince of Hip-Hop, with the two discussing a potential project about his life before the rapper’s July 2021 death.
“When he was around, I couldn’t make it happen; it just never worked out for whatever reason,” he recalls. “Now it feels great to get the thing out there and know that it’s at least what I believe something he’d be into based on the conversations we had.”
The film is an eccentric portrait of an equally eccentric and iridescent figure. While it naturally opens with and touches on Markie’s biggest mainstream hit in the form of 1989’s Just a Friend and delivers tales of his passion for beatboxing (he’d have to soak his lips in ice he’d perform so so fiercely), it also takes a wider view of Markie’s vast influence and life outside of the microphone, and features interviews with his doting widow Tara Hall as well as a disparate list of Markie disciples and friends including the beatboxer Doug E Fresh and Run-DMC’s Darryl McDaniels, as well as Nick Cannon and Tracy Morgan.
“There was something very simple about Biz, and I don’t mean this in a negative way, but in a creative way,” muses Jenkins. “I think he just genuinely had so much love for hip-hop and knew that hip-hop could change his life. It was his Superman cape. Once he donned it, he could change his destiny.”
Along the way, his unique style and trailblazing career wound up making an impression on some of hip-hop’s
other founding fathers. “Look at his influence on guys like Rakim and Big Daddy Kane, two of the most important poets in the culture,” says Jenkins of one of the more overlooked aspects of Markie’s career. “At first, he was a guy who people made fun of. Plenty of people told him ‘no’ early on, but he knew what he wanted to do. Knowing that at such a young age is rare.”
Jenkins also highlights the joy and flat-out humor of Markie in both his music (songs like 1987’s Pickin’ Boogers which opens with the line “Now this may sound disgusting and like very gross” and is about exactly what its title suggests), and career (an appearance as a beatboxing alien in Men in Black II). He also embodied a youthful aura stemming from his habits as a candyloving adult who never drank, smoked or did drugs.
“He collected toys like Charlie’s Angels dolls and was into video games, candy and cereal,” says Jenkins. The director honored Markie’s penchant for silliness by featuring animation and even puppetry, recruiting the puppetmaster from the show Crank Yankers to creatively re-enact Markie’s year in the hospital following the effects of a stroke.
“I used puppets to get into his life in the hospital,” explained Jenkins. “This was around Covid, so a lot of people who really loved him really didn’t get to see him in his last days unfortunately. So I wanted to give a sense of him there and with his wife by his side.” It was a concept Markie was fully on board with. “I said, ‘Hey man, would you be into some puppets?’ and he said ‘Hell yeah, I’d be into some puppets,’” laughs Jenkins.
As hip-hop celebrates its 50th anniversary, Markie’s music remains an indelible part of its lore. But overall, it was Markie’s effect on people that Jenkins says he wants to shine a brighter light on.
“We went back with Rakim to the high school he went to with Biz (Longwood in Middle Island, New York) and we’re sitting in the lunchroom and I asked, ‘Where did you go when you learned he passed?’ He looked at me and said, ‘I came right into this room and wept.’ It was great to know that people were not afraid to tell me how much they loved him.”
All Up in the Biz: The Life and Rhymes of Biz Markie premieres on Showtime and Paramount + on 11 August with a UK date to be announced
the nearly 250 that makes up a new retrospective of Modotti’s photography at Barcelona’s Fundación Mapfre, the most extensive exhibition to date, and one that its curator Isabel Tejeda Martín hopes will “break from the iconic figure of the hypersexualised muse”. In other words, moving further away from the “passive model” she was often perceived to be and turning closer towards the “active citizen” she actually was.
The exhibition takes a biographical approach because “it is unavoidable if you want to understand Modotti,” Tejeda Martín says. Born into a working-class family in Udine, in northeast Italy, Modotti emigrated to the US in 1913: first to San Francisco when she was 16, then to Los Angeles in her early 20s, where she became a silent movie actor and modelled for Weston. The inclusion of Weston’s work in this exhibition is important, Tejeda Martín says, “to highlight the differences in their gaze”.
In 1923, she and Weston moved to Mexico City, where Modotti followed Weston’s lead, a biographical detail that often relegates her to “an apprentice” who never broke free from his schooling. Tejeda Martín is determined to change this narrative, a re-examination that is shared by SFMoma’s head of photography Erin O’Toole. “I find that people oversimplify the differences and often it feels very gendered, which I naturally resist,” she says. “Clearly Modotti learned a lot from him, but the influence went back and forth.” So much so that when it comes to their early photography in Mexico, it has sometimes been hard to tell them apart.
Modotti learned quickly. A year after her arrival in the Mexican capital, she became the “official” photographer of the muralists – at the express invitation of its titan, Diego Rivera – taking hundreds of pictures of his first largescale fresco project at the Secretariat of Public Education. Initially tentative in her approach, it wasn’t until Modotti’s politics deepened that her path peeled away from Weston’s. The pivot, for Albers, occurred in 1927 when she officially joined the Mexican Communist party and “her whole attitude towards photography changed”. One of her most acclaimed pictures, Workers Parade – a geometric sea of wide-brimmed hats – was taken during a May Day demonstration in 1926. “Weston would never do Workers Parade,” Albers says. That’s where the fusion began, mixing “artistic rigour with political power”.
Galvanised by her working-class roots, Modotti moved away from the formalist modernism she had learned, and homed in on the social realities she was observing around her: a child labourer on his lunch break, a woman carrying wood, a man hauling a bale of hay. “I try to produce not art but honest photographs,” Modotti said at the time she was taking them. Tejeda Martín calls it “embodied” photography: “Empathy, for her, is the key concept, it’s in everything she sees.” For instance, a boy defecating in the street (1926-29) brings in questions of dignity: “She cannot forget that she was also a child worker and that it is difficult being in a world like that, exploited by capitalism.” In this sense, she is present on both sides of the camera, because she is equally “the point of view and the scope.”
Her gaze also radically captured the female experience and her photographs of the Indigenous women of Mexico show us how. In the dusty streets of Oaxaca, “everything is carried on the head by the women in Tehuantepec” as a worker’s impassive gaze matches ours under her heavy load. The same year, in 1929, Modotti focused her lens on what the feminist film theorist Laura Mulvey later called “the labour of mothering” in a series of images that document the simultaneous intimacy and exertion of breastfeeding. “Women producing the next generation of workers,” as Tejeda Martín calls it.
“When Modotti photographed Indigenous women,” Tejeda Martín writes in the exhibition’s accompanying text, “her vision vindicated the feminine from a labour and social perspective.” No doubt this is why her subsequent revival occurred alongside the second wave of feminist theory in the 1970s. After she died stateless in Mexico, in 1942, Modotti’s work became largely forgotten, her negatives so scattered that many were lost. It would take the efforts of Riccardo Toffoletti, a fellow Udinese photographer, for things to change. In 1973, he recovered and exhibited 30 vintage prints in her home town. Moma responded five years later with a small installation of her work. Then, in the early 1980s, a pioneering exhibition curated by Mulvey and Peter Wollen, at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, would bring Modotti face-toface with another neglected female artist, her friend and comrade, the now exoticised and commodified Frida Kahlo.
So why, then, did Modotti disappear for so long? “I’m loth to go along with the idea that the key reason she fell off the map was because she was a communist,” O’Toole says. “Sure, she was a communist, and in the US after her death there was a lot of fearmongering around communism” – but her story is more complicated than that, she argues. “There are aspects of misogyny there, in that female photographers are less interesting to people.”
After a short spell of only eight years taking photographs, Modotti was expelled from Mexico in 1930 after Julio Antonio Mella, a Cuban revolutionary, was assassinated as he walked home with Modotti by his side (Modotti was arrested before being cleared of the murder). She subsequently gave up photography, although questions linger as to whether this is irrefutably the case. Taking into her consideration her subsequent movements from Berlin, to Moscow, and finally Spain – where she took on a range of political and humanitarian work during the Spanish civil war – perhaps one thing is clear. “She’s hard to pin down,” O’Toole says. “She became an American as far as I can understand, but she spent very little of her life in the US, so is she an American photographer?”
Additionally, there are the rumours about her untimely death. Was it heart failure in the back of a taxi or was Rivera right in suggesting that it was a politically motivated crime? And so the question marks in this extraordinary woman’s story remain. “People continue to be interested in her work in much the same way as Kahlo,” O’Toole says. Because like Kahlo: “Her story keeps the work alive.”
• Tina Modotti is at the Fundación Mapfre, Barcelona, until 3 September.