Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  After being threatened by some cops for his drug selling, Herc’s fan Aaron O’Bryant moved on to promoting parties. He rented the Savoy Manor nightclub on 149th Street and the Grand Concourse. “I wanted to have Kool Herc versus Pete DJ Jones. Back then Pete DJ Jones was number one on the disco set and Kool Herc was just number one, period,” he recalls. “So I had a commitment from Pete DJ Jones because he was a businessman, he took on all bookings. The first thing Kool Herc wanted to know was where did I get his telephone number from. And he was explaining to me that I was not a proven promoter. Plus, he also insinuated that he could go to the Savoy Manor and rent it himself and do that battle if he wanted. He didn’t want to let me eat.”

  By the end of the spring, Herc noticed his audiences were declining. “People are getting older now, it wasn’t all about me. All of a sudden now you’re not eighteen no more, you’re twenty-four and twenty-five. You can drink now. You ain’t coming to no little seventeen-, eighteen-year-old party,” he recalls. “And other people was coming up.”

  After the blackout and the looting, there were plenty of new crews with brand new sound systems in the streets, and Herc’s main rivals were luring away his crowd. Flash had precision, sophistication and an entertainer’s flair. Bambaataa had his records and the power of Bronx River behind him. O’Bryant himself had begun DJing. As DJ AJ, he teamed with a new turntable tutor, Lovebug Starski, and expanded into Harlem. Herc says, “I stayed behind, I didn’t move with them to downtown. I stayed up in the Bronx.”

  Herc finally agreed to play with DJ AJ at a back-to-school party at the Executive Playhouse. It was sold out, AJ recalls, but Herc was no longer the main draw. “Flash was at my show. I let Flash get on and I let Melle Mel get on the mic,” AJ says. “But it didn’t help Herc’s career at all because he was fading fast.”

  A few months later, Herc was preparing for another night at the Playhouse, now renamed The Sparkle, when he heard a scuffle breaking out. “Mike-With-The-Lights had a discrepancy with somebody at the door,” Herc recalls. Mike was refusing to allow three men into the club and they had become increasingly agitated. When Herc went to mediate the situation, one of the men drew a knife. Herc felt it pierce him three times in the side. As he put his bloodied hand up to block his face, the attacker stabbed him once more in the palm before disappearing with the others up the stairs and into the night. “It made me draw back into a little shell,” Herc says, exhaling for a long moment.

  It was 1977.

  Bob Marley was in a foreign studio, recovering from an assassin’s ambush and singing: “Many more will have to suffer. Many more will have to die. Don’t ask me why.” Bantu Stephen Biko was shackled, naked and comatose in the back of a South African police Land Rover. The Baader-Meinhof gang lay in suicide pools in a German prison. The Khmer Rouge filled their killing fields. The Weather Underground and the Young Lords Party crawled toward the final stages of violent implosion. In London, as in New York City, capitalism’s crisis left entire blocks and buildings abandoned, and the sudden appearance of pierced, mohawked, leather-jacketed punks on Kings Road set off paroxysms of hysteria. History behaved as if reset to year zero.

  In the Bronx, Herc’s time was passing. But the new culture that had arisen around him had captured the imagination of a new breed of youths in the Bronx. Herc had stripped down and let go of everything, save the most powerful basic elements—the rhythm, the motion, the voice, the name. In doing so, he summoned up a spirit that had been there at Congo Square and in Harlem and on Wareika Hill. The new culture seemed to whirl backward and forward—a loop of history, history as loop—calling and responding, leaping, spinning, renewing.

  In the loop, there is the alpha, the omega and the turning points in between. The seam disappears, slips into endless motion and reveals a new logic—the circumference of a worldview.

  Fanga alafia ashé ashé

  [Welcome, peace be unto you]

  —Yoruban children’s rhyme

  LOOP 2

  Planet

  Rock

  1975–1986

  DMC (right) and Run (center) rocking at record mogul Charles Koppelman’s daughter’s Sweet Sixteen party.

  Photo © Josh Cheuse/WFN

  Afrika Bambaataa flying his cut sleeves downtown.

  Photo © Lisa Haun/Michael Ochs Archive.com

  5.

  Soul Salvation

  The Mystery and Faith of Afrika Bambaataa

  I was born out of time.

  —Napoleon Wilson, Assault on Precinct 13

  Afrika Bambaataa was a teenager with a big rep. “When he walked through the projects,” recalls Jayson “Jazzy Jay” Byas, “he was like The Godfather walking through Little Italy.” Jay had moved into the Bronx River Houses in 1971 after his family’s Harlem tenement was consumed by a fire. Like hundreds of other youths at Bronx River, Jay started following Bambaataa.

  “Bam used to put his speakers out the window and play music all day. He used to live right outside what you’d call the Center. The center of Bronx River was like a big oval. The community center was right in the middle and Bam used to live to the left of it. He used to play his music, and I would ride my bike around all day popping wheelies, you know?” Jay says. “He was like the Pied Piper.”

  As the gang days were receding, Bambaataa saw the future before anyone else. Each of the housing projects had its own gangs, sometimes turning the two-block distance between them into a no-man’s land. But he was ready to take people across borders that they didn’t know they could cross, into projects they weren’t sure they could be in. Bambaataa—he told them his name was Zulu for “affectionate leader”—would lead them where they didn’t know they were ready to go.

  Still astonished at the thought of it three decades later, Jay recalls, “Bam used to say, ‘Hey, they throwing a block party in Bronxdale,’ and he has his box and a bagful of tapes with all the music. He grabs the box and when he starts walking to Bronxdale, he’d have like forty people walking behind him.

  “Bam was the leader. You’d roll up in—Bronx River is represented. We up in Bronxdale, we up in Soundview, we in Castle Hill—wherever they was throwing a block party, we was there. Here comes Bam, here comes the entourage, here comes the army. Wherever Bam was going, that’s where some shit was gon’ be, that’s where you need to be. If you wasn’t there even for the march up, you know the word got back real quick. ‘Yo! Bam and them moving, there’s a party going on over there.’ ”

  Living Twice at Once

  Of the three kings, the trinity of hip-hop music—DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa—the most enigmatic is Bambaataa Kahim Aasim.

  It is not because he is reclusive. In fact, unlike Herc and Flash, he has never retreated far from the public eye. Through his prolific recording career and his ongoing stewardship of the Universal Zulu Nation organization, Bambaataa has lived a very generous life. He regularly crisscrosses the world, graciously giving of himself to fans, journalists, Zulu members and hip-hop heads everywhere. And yet he also remains essentially a mystery. There are things that everyone seems to know about Bambaataa, and things that no one seems to know. The philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss might have called Bambaataa someone who lives twice simultaneously—once as a man in history, and separately as a myth above temporality.

  His story seems well documented. He was the Black Spade warlord who became the Master of Records. The shaman who had hundreds of hard-rocks dancing to his global musical mash-up of Kraftwerk, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the “Pink Panther” theme, the Rolling Stones and the Magic Disco Machine. The founder of the Universal Zulu Nation, the first hip-hop institution, an organization that tried to raise consciousness like it raised the roof. The preacher of the gospel of the “four elements”—DJing, MCing, b-boying and Graffiti Writing. The missionary who took the hip-hop message to the four corners of the globe, and then beyond Planet Rock.

  When hip-hop lost its way, he added a fifth element—”knowledge.” Zulus, he explains,
are about having “right knowledge, right wisdom, right ‘overstanding’ and right sound reasoning, meaning that we want our people to deal with factuality versus beliefs, factology versus beliefs.” But some facts about his own life are slippery like quicksilver.

  It is known, for example, that Bambaataa was born in Manhattan to parents of Jamaican and Barbadian descent. But he refuses to disclose when or under what name. Many biographies have incorrectly listed his birth name as Kevin Donovan, another man who happened to be the leader of record-label owner Paul Winley’s house band, the Harlem Underground Band.1 Perhaps he was in perpetual reinvention as a youth. He had multiple graffiti tags, including BAMBAATAA, BAM 117 and BOM 117—the latter an acronym he once told German interviewers stood for Bambaataa Osisa Mubulu.2

  Bios often list Bambaataa’s birthdate as April 10, 1960. Other biographers have listed his birthdate as June 17, 1957. The month of April seems correct. Kool Herc, born in mid-April, has thrown joint birthday parties with Bam. But if Bambaataa was actually born in 1960, he would have joined the Black Spades at the age of nine, been a warlord before the age of ten, and started The Organization, the precursor to the Zulu Nation, at the age of thirteen. Most likely, Bambaataa was born in April of 1957. He won’t say. “We never,” he pointedly admonishes interviewers dumb enough to ask, “speak on my age.”

  He has good reasons for not revealing such personal information. Earlier in his career, revealing his true age might have hurt his credibility with young fans. And he has always been suspicious of surveillance from hostile authorities that have periodically—and wrongly—attacked the Universal Zulu Nation as a violent gang syndicate. So it seems as if Bambaataa is who he is because he’s always been. He appears as a man outside of time and age.

  For his part, Bambaataa conjures himself with good humor. The Zulu Nation’s Infinity Lesson #2 explains that the original Bambaataa was a late-nineteenth-century Zululand leader who led an anti-tax revolt against the British colonial authority in South Africa. This Bambaataa was not above using mystical means to inspire his people. After calling on them to abandon the signs and objects of European culture—except for their guns—he told them a resurrected witch doctor had given him a potion that made him bulletproof. He drank it, then stood before a firing squad and commanded them to shoot. “But when the smoke cleared there stood Bambaataa, smiling and unhurt,” the Infinity Lesson reads. “The explanation? Blank cartridges.” Sometimes factualities and factologies matter less than the myths we want to believe. “Stopping bullets with two turntables isn’t about sociology,” Gary Jardim wrote in a famous 1984 Village Voice profile on Bambaataa, “it’s about finding the spirit in the music and learning how to flash it.”3 No one ever debated whether Bambaataa could stop the bullets. He made you believe he did.

  So Bambaataa is the generative figure, the Promethean firestarter of the hiphop generation. He transformed his environment in sonic and social structure, and in doing so, he called forth the ideas that would shape generational rebellion. So many of the archetypes of the hip-hop generation seem to rise from the body of facts and myths that represent Bambaataa Aasim’s life—godfather, yes, but also original gangster, post–civil rights peacemaker, Black riot rocker, breakbeat archaeologist, interplanetary mystic, conspiracy theorist, Afrofuturist, hip-hop activist, twenty-first-century griot.

  But two dates help to place the man back into his time and place. In 1971, the year of the Bronx gang truce, a young Bambaataa was first bused to Stevenson High School at the eastern, white edge of Soundview as part of a court-ordered desegregation order. Within weeks the appearance of Black students, some of whom were Black Spades, caused white gang members to organize and a racial war broke out across the borough’s borderlands. School grounds became stomping grounds, integration’s bloody frontline, with the gangs as the shock troops.

  But by 1981 Bambaataa was in the middle of a very different kind of desegregation, a wholly voluntary one. He was taking the music and culture of the Black and brown Bronx into the white art-crowd and punk-rock clubs of lower Manhattan. The iron doors of segregation that the previous generation had started to unlock were battered down by the pioneers of the hip-hop generation. Soon hip-hop was not merely all-city, it was global—a Planet Rock.

  Most old school hip-hoppers look back on those heady days—the ‘70s turning into the ‘80s—with a sense of wonder that something they had been involved in as wide-eyed youths could have become so big, so powerful. Never Bambaataa. To him, it was always supposed to be this way. “Each step was a stepping stone, the gang era and all that, that helped to bring about this formation,” he says, as if he had already been to the mountaintop long ago.

  Sound Destiny

  Afrika Bambaataa grew up on the ground floor of one of the fifteen-story towers of the Bronx River Projects, a complex of a dozen buildings in the vicinity of two other postwar superdevelopments, the Bronxdale Houses and the James Monroe Houses.

  Bambaataa was raised by his mother, a nurse from a family immersed in international Black cultural and liberation movements. As he came of age during the turbulent late ‘60s, he experienced the fierce ideological debates over the Black freedom struggle—integration or separation, the ballot or the bullet—as close as the dinner table or the living room. His uncle, Bambaataa Bunchinji, was a prominent Black nationalist. Many in his family were devoted Black Muslims.

  He seemed born with a sense of destiny. David Hershkovits, a journalist who came to know Bambaataa during the early ‘80s in the downtown club scene, says, “At some point early on, people had kind of spotted him as somebody to educate and talk to about what’s going on in the rest of the world outside of the Bronx. I think he was somehow chosen.”

  The late ‘60s were a period of irreconcilable forces locked in struggle with each other. In the community, political positions on integration, violence, and revolution could harden into matters of life and death. But through his mother’s record collection—an eclectic shelf that included Miriam Makeba, Mighty Sparrow, Joe Cuba, and Aretha Franklin—Bambaataa developed a different kind of perspective. In the rhythmic pull of James Brown’s “I’ll get it myself” black-power turn or Sly Stone’s “everyday people” integrationist dance, these positions lost all their rigidity. James Brown could sing Black pride to all-white audiences. Sly Stone could get down with the Black Panthers. Music made ideologies shed their armature, move together, find a common point of release, a powerful unity.

  Bambaataa was coming of age in an accelerated popular culture, a quantum explosion in sounds and images. He began imposing his own order on the chaos of representations. As a youth he became fascinated with the 1964 movie Zulu, a Michael Caine vehicle recounting the 1879 siege of Rorke’s Drift in Natal, South Africa. The battle remains a celebrated moment in the military history of the British Empire, an unlikely triumph of a hundred redcoats defending a lonely colonial outpost against an overwhelming onslaught of four thousand Zulus. Indeed, Rorke’s Drift is remembered as something like the Queen’s Fort Apache, an Alamo where the whites actually won.

  Zulu is told exclusively from their point of the view. There are hundreds of African extras, but not a single Black role of any consequence. In the climactic scene, the red-suited soldiers stand with their bayonets arrayed silently before a pile of Black bodies, a dark tide stopped at the very lip of their boots. Had the movie been released two decades later, after civil rights and Black power, activists might have boycotted it.

  But when the young Bambaataa saw it in the early ‘60s, he was captivated. The movie opens after the Zulus have routed the British camp at Isandhlwana, with a slow pan of hundreds of dead redcoats strewn across the African plain. It then detours to a majestic scene of a Zulu mass marriage ceremony and victory dance. The ragtag Brits are seen as individualists who tend to feud loudly amongst themselves. By contrast, the Zulus remain a primitive, undifferentiated mass. Here is the central tension of the movie: Can the divided, outnumbered defenders of white western democracy get t
heir act together in time to prevail over the unceasing armies of ancient Dark Continent despotism?

  But what Bambaataa saw in Zulu were powerful images of Black solidarity. Before the attack on Rorke’s Drift, hundreds of Zulu warriors appear atop the ridge, leaving the imperial soldiers awestruck. They bang their spears to their shields, give a resounding war cry and storm the garrison. Although many of them fall before the British muskets, they just don’t quit. Into the night, the Zulus continue their assaults and succeed in setting the outpost on fire.

  “That just blew my mind,” Bambaataa says. “Because at that time we was coons, coloreds, negroes, everything degrading. We was busy watching Heckyl and Jeckyl, Tarzan—a white guy who is king of the jungle. Then I see this movie come out showing Africans fighting for a land that was theirs against the British imperialists. To see these Black people fight for their freedom and their land just stuck in my mind. I said when I get older I’m gonna have me a group called the Zulu Nation.”

  Later he would give his followers a round Black face with white eyes and lips to wear around their necks—an emblem taken from one of New Orleans’s oldest and most famous Black Mardi Gras groups, the Zulu Krewe. Civil rights groups had once pressured the Krewe to disband for what they took to be offensive blackface stereotypes. But Bambaataa approached Zulu and the Zulu Krewe the way he did political ideologies and his own records. He pulled out what was precious and tossed the rest. He created new mythologies.