by Jeff Chang
He laughs, “They were history, whatever.”
Taking It to the Bridge
But if Bambaataa was to expand his vision beyond his sphere of influence, he would need to convince brown youths on the other side of the Bronx River that the peace was for real. During the early ‘70s, while white gangs had pressed the Black Spades from the east, the Puerto Rican gangs—especially the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads—were a buffer on the west. The Bronx River remained a dividing line between African-American and Puerto Rican youths.
Ray Abrahante—who would later become an original member of the Rock Steady Crew and gain fame as the graffiti writer named BOM 5—was then an eleven-year-old Baby Skull. He had followed his older cousin, a shot-caller, into the gang. Soon after he joined, two young Skulls ended up dead, and the fingers pointed to the Black Spades.
The Baby Skulls’ hangout spot was in the East Tremont neighborhood near the west bank of the river, right where the Bronx River Parkway cut through a hook in the Cross-Bronx Expressway, under a high, rusting Amtrak train layup. There they scrambled up the lattice of steel girders into the high reaches under the layup to hang ten-foot ropes from the beams. They would mount the ropes, dangling three stories above the ground, and swing themselves at each other, trying to knock the other down just for kicks.
When the Baby Skulls came out from under the layup, dusting the dirt off their colors, maybe bloody and bruised from a nasty thirty-foot plunge, they could see the towers of the Bronx River Houses scraping the sky to the south. Everything that lay in between—the tagged-up bus yard, the train repair track and the commuter line, the furious Parkway and Expressway—might as well have been a DMZ. Traffic from everywhere rushed through there and over them, but never across. They’d go back under the layup and swing madly at each other again in a kind of metronome limbo.
A few blocks away, the 174th Street Bridge connected East Tremont with the Bronx River Houses, but this was no-man’s land, a no-crossing zone. Abrahante was a reckless kid. One day he wandered onto the bridge on his bike. A burly Black tagger was spraypainting BAM 117, WRITERS INC. Abrahante, who was the Baby Skulls’ tagger, took the spraycan, and wrote his own tag, SPIDER. He wasn’t wearing his colors, and by the size of this guy, he knew not to write SKULLS next to his name. He handed the spraycan back to the tagger, and they gave each other an unspoken recognition. Then they went back their separate ways.
A few days later when Abrahante went across the bridge again, he had it in his head to try to tag the Skulls name deep in Spades territory. He headed across the Bridge in full colors, and cruised into the Bronx River Houses. A group of Spades came out from the basketball courts, hurled bottles at him and chased him back across the bridge. He noticed that the tagger he had met on the bridge was with them, simply watching.
By the time the summer ended, things had changed. The Savage Skulls were falling apart, turning on each other, snitching out each other to the cops. The leadership wasn’t stable. Abrahante was ready to take on more responsibility in the gang. But his cousin had made up his mind and told him, “Fuck that, that shit ain’t no good for you. That shit ain’t good for me.” Abrahante says, “He told the Skulls, ‘I’ll fight whoever to get me and my cousin out.’ He pushed me out by beating me up.”
In September, Abrahante received a flyer for a party in the Bronx River Houses. The promoters had been going through the neighborhoods, shouting, “Free jam! Come one come all, leave your colors at home! Come in peace and unity.” His cousin didn’t believe it. “Don’t go,” he said, “it’s a set-up. The Spades will pound you.”
It was a warm afternoon when he and some Skulls and Nomads walked across the bridge. They joined the crowd heading toward the Community Center. Abrahante noticed a lot of gang members, maybe even the ones who had bottled him, but he was surprised to see a lot of Puerto Ricans as well. At the door, they lined up to be searched by a pair of big bouncers. But the mood was one of anticipation, not tension as he had expected.
The music was blasting. Onstage, a DJ worked two turntables. He recognized the music and the dances from the gang parties and the park jams, but it was like he was experiencing it again for the first time. When the room filled, the DJ stopped the music. Then that guy from the bridge got on the microphone.
“Bambaataa talked,” Abrahante recalls. “He was saying how happy he was that people came out. That this gang thing, the cops put us up to this stuff. Society put us all in here to fight against each other and kill us off, and we’re not getting nowhere.”
Abrahante was impressed. “A week later, I was meeting more and more kids, and he was trying to open Bronx River to everybody. I mean it was inspiring.” With the Zulu Nation, Bambaataa was integrating a new generation in the Bronx.
The Lessons
Zulu chapters proliferated throughout the tri-state area as quickly as had the Black Spades. To be down with the Zulus conferred street power and respect, but perhaps just as important, the promise of good times. While gang legacies remained, Bambaataa steadfastly pushed the organization in the direction of his new motto: “Peace, Love, Unity and Having Fun.” By the early ‘80s, he had largely succeeded. But without the military hierarchy of the gang structure, the Zulu name was still prone to being tarnished by knuckleheads.
Bambaataa says, “We had to come up with something to get the order back. That’s when I started thinking, and it was coming back to me, all the teachings and everything I experienced. I started sitting down and writing things from my head. Other people started saying, ‘Well this is a belief that I’ve had.’ So then I started taking from all people of knowledge to make up our lessons. And it started catching on and keeping people in check.”
In place of a set of beliefs or a ten-point platform, the Universal Zulu Nation offered Seven Infinity Lessons, which formed the basic foundation of principles for a member. The lessons established a fundamental code of conduct and gave broad directives to the Zulu “way of life.”
Like a Bambaataa DJ set, the Infinity Lessons followed a ranging eclecticism, mixed a bit of the familiar with a lot of the arcane. They touched on the origins of Universal Zulu Nation and its South African antecedents, and offered a Bronx River view of the origins of hip-hop. They highlighted esoterica like Elijah Muhammad’s dietary pronouncements and Dr. Malachi Z. York’s racial interpretations of Biblical history. They were presented in the same question-and-answer studies and keyword glossary forms used by the Nation of Islam and the Nation of Gods and Earths, better known as the Five Percenters.
The Infinity Lessons drew on the Black Muslims’ evocation of a glorious, original African past, but not their impulse to racial separation. And although the Lessons leaned hard on the language of the Nation of Islam, they disdained dogma and orthodoxy. “The religion of the Universal Zulu Nation is truth wherever it is,” reads Infinity Lesson #4. “So our way of life is knowledge, wisdom and understanding of everything, freedom, justice and equality.”
The Lessons picked up the Black Panthers’ call for self-defense, but they dropped the programmatic demands for housing and employment. Formed at a time when the arc of Black Power was dropping precipitously, the Universal Zulu Nation was not about politics. As Elijah Muhammad had preached, Zulus first had to come to know themselves, attain knowledge of self. Consciousness did not come from the unmasking of social forces, but from having a true reckoning with one’s god within. The revolution did not emanate from mass organizations struggling against systems and institutions, but in one’s personal transformation. Only then could one “overstand,” that is, comprehend and confront the injustice of the world by manifesting one’s power.
Most important, the Lessons were an evolving document. They would expand and change as more members came into the fold. By definition, they were open-ended, infinite.
To the ministers and ideologues moving in the Bronx, the Zulus presented a question mark: they were agnostic devotees, skeptical true-believers, noncommittal revolutionaries. The Infinity Lessons seemed a quasi-the
ological mess, an autodidactic crazy-quilt, a political road map to a nowhere. But to Bambaataa the ideas were less important than the process.
If you are of gods, Bambaataa seemed to say, then it follows that you are just as capable as I am to make this new world. Zulus celebrated the instinct for survival and creation. Living young and free in the Bronx was a revolutionary act of art. To unleash on a social level these vital urges was the surest way to ward off mass death. Bambaataa’s message was: We’re moving. There’s room for you if you get yourself right. Perhaps this is why, of all the utopias proffered to the teeming rabbles of outcast youth, Bambaataa’s spread through the streets of the Bronx and then out into the world like a flaming wick.
So here they were, Bambaataa’s army—the MCs, the DJs, the graffiti writers, the b-boys and b-girls, the crews they brought and the crowds they moved. They were elemental in their creative power—four, after all, was “the foundation number,” representing air, water, earth and fire, and in another sense, the rhythm itself. What they were doing was yet to be named. But in the cooling sunlight of a park jam or the mercury-bursting intensity of an indoor one—from everywhere a crowd rising, the DJ excising and extending the groove, ciphers and crews burning, distinctions and discriminations dissolving, the lifeblood pulsing and spirit growing—Bambaataa took Herc’s party and turned it into the ceremony of a new faith, like he knew that this was exactly how their world was supposed to look, sound and flow.
In the cipher at Patterson Projects, the South Bronx, 1982.
Photo © Henry Chalfant
6.
Furious Styles
The Evolution of Style in
the Seven-Mile World
Style involves conflict, the strain of races, classes, ages and sexes pitted against each other in the arenas of clothing and music and slang.
—Richard Goldstein
It’s funny, ‘cause people say, “I practice style.” It’s either you got style or you don’t!
—Richie “Crazy Legs” Colon
It may be hard to imagine now but during the mid-1970s, most of the youthful energy that became known as hip-hop could be contained in a tiny seven-mile circle.
Take a map of New York City and shift your gaze up from Manhattan to the Bronx. Place the point of your compass in the heart of Crotona Park and trace the circumference. Beginning in the east, there was the Zulu Nation empire; along the northern rim, Edenwald projects and the Valley, where the Brothers Disco and the Funky 4 + 1 More rocked the parties, and the 2 and 5 Train Yard, where thousands of masterpieces by BLADE and TRACY 168 and THE FABULOUS 5 began and ended their subversive circuits; to the west, across the river from Kool Herc’s Sedgwick Avenue and Cedar Park cipher, the Ghost Yard, the misty, violent backdrop of graffiti lore, and Inwood and Washington Heights, where TAKI 183 first picked up his pen; further down through southern curve, Harlem, where disco DJs rapped on demand, and Spanish Harlem, where the Baby Kings chapter of the Spanish Kings gang did the outlaw dance on the hard concrete. There were eruptions happening in Brooklyn, Queens, Long Island’s Black Belt and the Lower East Side. But in 1977 this circle felt like a hothouse of style, the tropic zone of a new culture.
Richie “Crazy Legs” Colon, the leader of the Rock Steady Crew, tells this story. One night, when he was a wide-eyed ten-year old, his cousin Lenny Len and a neighborhood buddy Afrika Islam began practicing moves to a new dance in his living room. He had been learning to box, was picking up some martial arts, but this dance, he wanted to know everything there was to know about it. He had to wait until the following summer, the blackout summer, when Lenny took him to his first jam in a schoolyard on Crotona Avenue and 180th Street, near the heart of the seven-mile circle.
“Ah, I was just blown away,” Crazy Legs recalls. “I just saw all these kids having fun, comparing the graf on the wall to their books, checking out the whole scene, and it was my first time watching the dance with the music being played, so it made more sense. I just immediately became a part of it. My cousin started teaching me how to get down, a few moves here and there, and I guess it just kept on going.”
He had just been initiated into a secret Bronx kids’ society. Later he would say that jam had made him a witness to the rise of hip-hop’s “four elements”—b-boying, DJing, MCing, and graffiti. In time, the story would take on a patina of myth.
The heart of the Seven-MileWorld, 1977–1980 Map layout by Sharon Mizota
In fact, old-schoolers still passionately debate how congruent these youth movements in music, dance, and art really were. Elder graffiti writers like Sandra “LADY PINK” Fabara object to their art being grouped with rap. “I don’t think graffiti is hip-hop,” she says. BLADE, SEEN and IZ THE WIZ say their musical tastes were closer to jazz, doo-wop, and rock. The Rolling Thunder Writers, says graf historian Andrew “ZEPHYR” Witten, were influenced by the prog-rock album covers and posters of Roger Dean and Rick Griffin, and the music of Hot Tuna and The Grateful Dead. “Frankly I grew up with disco music,” says PINK. “There’s a long background of graffiti as an entity unto itself.”
Perhaps only within the seven-mile circle did all these youth movements come together the way Crazy Legs had experienced it. Regardless, they shared a revolutionary aesthetic. They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful, protected and enclosed by almost monastic rites, codes, and orders. They sprung from kids who had been born into the shadows of the baby boom generation, who never grew up expecting the whole world to be watching. What TV camera would ever capture their struggles and dreams? They were invisible.
But invisibility was its own kind of reward; it meant you had to answer to no one except the others who shared your condition. It meant you became obsessed with showing and proving, distinguishing yourself and your originality above the crowd. It put you on a relentless quest to prove to them that you were bigger, wilder, and bolder than circumstances dictated you should ever be, to try to generate something from nothing, something no one else had, until everyone around you had to admit that you had something they might never have, something that might even make other people—big, important people—stand up and take notice themselves, offer you money, give you power, or try to crush your very soul. That was the key to having style.
DJing: Style As Science
When Kool Herc first came on the scene, he stayed ahead of the other DJs with the power of his sound system. Bambaataa changed the game with his programming genius. Both men were titans in the streets, backed up by major crew. But in the beginning, Joseph Saddler didn’t have expensive equipment, a deep record collection, or a posse of hardrocks. All he had was his style.
He was the fourth of five children of Barbadian immigrants, a boy in a house of girls, living on Fox and 163rd streets in the heart of Fort Apache amongst Skulls and Spades and Ghetto Brothers. He was less attracted to the street life than he was to the broken radios lying in the street. “I was a scientist looking for something. Going inside hair dryers, and going inside washing machines and stereos and radios, whatever you plugged into the wall,” he recalls. As strung-out junkies plundered arson-devastated abandoned buildings for copper pipes to support their smack habit, Saddler scoured abandoned cars for their radios and speakers. He took them back to his bedroom to see if he could make them sing again.
“I wanted to know what’s a resistor? What’s a capacitor? What’s a transformer? What’s AC? What’s DC? Why do these things do what they do?” he says. “Although there was crazy violent things happening around me on Fox Street, I was in my own world, in my own room.”
Saddler wouldn’t go to a Kool Herc or a Pete “DJ” Jones jam to get high, holler at the girls or be seen. He hung back in the cut and took it all in—the DJ, the crowd, the equipment, the music. Back in his room with his screwdriver, soldering iron and insatiable curiosity, the kid who would be named Grandmaster Flash was theorizing the turntable and mixer, pondering the presentation of the p
arty, trying to figure out how to turn beat-making and crowd-rocking into a science.
The thing that both Herc and Jones did was release the music on the record from linear and temporal constraints. But Herc, Flash felt, was sloppy. The break went around, but it never came back on beat because Herc was dropping the needle all over the place. Flash saw Pete “DJ” Jones seamlessly extending disco records by mixing two copies of the same record, and realized he could apply the same technique to the music he really loved—the breaks Herc was spinning. Flash wanted to lift these slices of recorded time out of the progression of time, to re-enclose a song’s break in a perfect new loop.
Apprenticing himself to Jones, he began to work toward the idea at weekend parties in an abandoned apartment in his building. Weekdays, he studied the mixer—jerry-rigging a headphone cue into his cheap set—and the turntable—trying to understand which model and what cartridges and styli were the most durable, which platters had the best torque. He considered Jones’s simple circuit—begin break on record 1, cue record 2 on the headphone, end break 1, begin break 2, recue break 1. Then he understood that each record’s rhythm had its own circumference to trace, that the break could be measured from point-to-point, and he developed a theory based on sectioning off the record like a clock. This was he breakthrough, he says. “I came up with the Quick Mix theory, which was like cutting, the backspin, and the double-back.”
After months of study and refinement, Flash finally felt he had perfected the mix. In the summer of ‘75, it was time to take it to the waiting world. But the reaction was not what he had expected. “The first time I did it, the crowd just stood there, just watched me. I was hoping to get, ‘Whoa yes, I love it!’ But it was like, no reaction, no movement. Just hundreds of people standing there. They were just trying to understand.