Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  “And I cried for like a week,” Flash says. “Why did things go wrong?”

  It was a lesson. You could be smart, you could be good, you could be scientific, but being smart and good and scientific wasn’t going to rock a party all by itself. And Flash figured he got off easy that day—if a party wasn’t being rocked, violence was always lurking right behind. He was going to have to win his crowds over to his new style. So Flash set his mind to theorizing the rest of his show. “I realized I needed vocal accompaniment to help spark this concept,” he says.

  Robert Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins was a former Bronx River Black Spade who had moved down to the South Bronx, and was already a feared street legend known to be nice with the hands. When he started hanging out with Flash, he became known to be nice with the mic. He would praise his DJ Flash, and command the crowd to “Say ho!” and “Throw your hands in the air and wave ‘em like you just don’t care!” He linked with two more regulars at Flash’s jams, the Glover brothers, Melvin “Melle Mel” and Nathaniel “Kidd Creole,” and together they rewrote Shirley Ellis, the Last Poets, “Hustler’s Convention” and the dozens. They devised ever more intricate lines, finishing each other’s rhymes, throwing in unexpected melodies and harmonies, exhorting the crowd higher and higher.

  In 1976, they moved into a club called the Black Door, where they enlisted the Casanova Crew as their rough-and-ready backup, and then later on to the Dixie. The posse grew. Grandmaster Flash and the Three MCs became the Furious 4 and finally the Furious 5. They also continued to play the parks—St. Ann’s, Mitchell, 23 Park, 63 Park. As the DJ scene expanded and the playlists became more standardized, crowds cared less about speaker size than showmanship and style. DJ AJ says, “Kool Herc couldn’t draw a crowd after people saw Flash.”

  While the MCs kept the energy high, Flash unveiled eye-catching tricks—cutting while flipping around, scratching with his elbows, cross-fading with his backbone. Sometimes he would bring out thirteen-year-old Theodore, soon to be named Grandwizard Theodore, who had applied Flash’s theories to invent the scratch, and who could drop a needle right onto the spinning breakbeat. With a complete show, Flash’s DJ innovations—the scratch-and-mix techniques and the high-performance dazzle—finally took hold. “I got ridiculed for a couple of years. ‘You’re the guy that ruins records!’ ” laughs Flash. “But all the DJs had to change their style.”

  By 1977, DJs that weren’t already rapping, like Lovebug Starski and Eddie Cheeba, were looking to line up rap crews as raw as the Furious. And one by one they did: the L Brothers, the Mighty Force (later known as the Cold Crush), the Funky 4 + 1 More. Soon, in an instant, the scene would change beyond their wildest dreams.

  B-Boying: Style As Aggression

  By 1975, the b-boy dance had been picked up by kids too young to get into the clubs. It used to be a private thing for them, something they taught each other in living rooms or building hallways, something to do at house parties, but the outdoor jams brought the dance out in the open. Now that the gangs no longer controlled the streets, the bedroom b-boys could travel across the borough to find other kids to battle.

  Before he began DJing, Jazzy Jay says, “I used to be a b-boy myself. We used to just go from area to area. I’ll never forget, one time it was me, my cousin Theodore, and a couple other cats, and we went over to Webster Avenue and they got a whole bunch of b-boys. So we went over to the other side of the Bronx, and they had a little project party up on some floor. Some guys was playing some music there. We went in there and took out the whole crew. At first they were jumping and everyone wanted to get in the circle. After we got done with our thing nobody wanted to get back in the circle. We went and scooped up all the girlies and we was out, you know?”

  As in the ciphers at Herc’s parties, there were rarely group routines, instead the spotlight was on each dancer’s style. “Each individual cat got up and did his thing,” Jay says. “Plus it wasn’t like today where they come down and put down some nice linoleum so you don’t get burnt up. I mean, we used to b-boy right in the middle of the park with broken glass everywhere! And you’d get up and you’d be all scratched and bruised and bleeding and you would be ready to go right back in the circle. You’d just wipe the glass off your elbows and go right back in.”

  “We used to get tore up,” says BOM 5, the former Savage Skull who joined Zulu Nation, then became an original member of Rock Steady Crew. “It was called battle scars. You had to go through it. You didn’t care. If you cared, it wouldn’t be no breaking!”

  Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon, a b-boy historian, first encountered the dance in his projects during the mid-’70s, the Jackie Robinson Houses in Spanish Harlem, watching a Puerto Rican gang called the Baby Kings. He says, “The style of a b-boy, I never saw nothing like it. I’d never seen a dance approached like that original b-boy flavor, that straightforward, aggressive sort of I’ma-tear-up-this-floor feeling. A lot of times in my neighborhood I didn’t see smiles on their faces. They were on a mission to terrorize the dancefloor and to make a reputation, ghetto celebrity status.”

  The dance looked different from the floor-spinning form that would become popularized a decade later. Fabel says. “It was all strictly top-rocking, interesting drops to get down to the floor, incredible blitz-speed footwork. It was actually really unpredictable. Bouncing around, pivoting, turning, twists, front-sweeps, you know? And very aggressive, really aggressive, to the point that I thought it was a gang dance at first.”

  In fact, the line between dance and martial arts was thin. Black street-dance legend Rennie Harris came up in North Philadelphia during the early ‘70s, where the popular dance-style was steppin’, something like tapdancing without taps. Steppin’ was as competitive as b-boying but, Harris says, not nearly as militaristic. “If you really look at hip-hop dance, it’s really a rites-of-passage thing. You never see the arms release down. They’re always up in fighting position. It’s going to war,” he says. “What do we say? We say you’re going to battle. You go out there to fight.”

  Many specific b-boy styles had their roots in the gangs, practiced from the Bronx and uptown Manhattan to the Brooklyn ghettos of Bushwick and Bedford-Stuyvesant, as a prelude to a rumble. According to Luis Angel “Trac 2” Matteo, “They would have a get-together between the rival gangs for specific turf and the two warlords would go at it, and the winner to that dance actually decides where the rumble’s going to be held.”1 One of the wardances became known as “the Uprock,” which gave a new meaning to the old Apache line. Rivals lined up across each other, and went head-to-head—making as if they were jigging, stabbing, battering each other.

  In the 1930s, Zora Neale Hurston had written that African-American dance was “dynamic suggestion. No matter how violent it may appear to the beholder, every posture gives the impression that the dancer will do much more.”2In the 1970s, Trac 2 says, b-boying was “a lot of motion and a lot of gestures, what one person was going to do to another, what one gang was going to do to another gang.”3 Sometimes a dance was enough to settle the beef, sometimes the dance set off more beef. This was style as aggression, a competitive bid for dominance.

  The b-boys tapped into the same spirit that had given rise to New Orleans’s Mardi Gras Indian gangs—segregated Blacks who, from the early 1900s, came out on Mardi Gras Day “masked Indian” in boldly colored, hand-sewn costumes to meet and confront other gangs, dancing rank by rank to the second-line street rhythms, climaxing in a great showdown between the two Big Chiefs—or Harlem’s original Lindy Hoppers, the pioneering African-American jitterbuggers who emerged from pool-hall gangs like the Jolly Fellows in the late 1920s to galvanize uptown’s integrated nightclubs and then, a decade later, the entirety of American popular dance with their floor steps, air steps and breakaways.

  It is impossible to see b-boying now and not be impressed by its similarities to forms of Angolan and Brazilian capoeira, Cuban rumba, or Chinese gung fu—all of which by now have been incorporated into the dance. But
, Crazy Legs emphasizes, the dance evolved in a very specific time and place. “We didn’t know what the fuck no capoeira was, man. We were in the ghetto! There were no dance schools, nothing. If there was a dance school it was tap and jazz and ballet. I only saw one dance school in my life in the ghetto during that time, and it was on Van Nest Avenue in the Bronx and it was a ballet school,” he says. “Our immediate influence in b-boying was James Brown, point blank.”

  By the mid-’70s, Puerto Ricans had begun adopting the b-boy dance. “There was ‘a time when there was some racial tension,” says Fabel. “Certain Black folks would look at us and say, ‘Pssh, why you trying to do our thing?’ And then there were times where we would dis ourselves, like ‘Why you trying to do that cocolo thing?’ And then we had our parents, the older generation, older sisters and brothers saying, ‘Why you dressing like a cocolo? Why you want to be like them?’ Man, it was hard.”

  Trac 2 told hip-hop journalist Cristina Verán, “See, the jams back then were still close to 90 percent African-American, as were most of the earliest b-boys, but they took breaking more like a phase, a fad. I say this because I had to see the reactions on their faces when we started doing it. They were like, ‘Yo, breaking is played out’ whenever the Hispanics would do it.”4

  Instead, they breathed new life into the dance. Between 1975 and 1979, crews proliferated, including mixed or dominantly Puerto Rican crews. Coming from Bronx River, Beaver and Robbie Rob led the Zulu Kings crew. Near Crotona Park, a number of mainly Puerto Rican crews were making their name—Sal-soul with Vinnie and Off, Starchild La Rock with Trac-2, Rockwell Association with Willie Will and Lil Carlos, the Bronx Boys (also called The Disco Kings) with Batch. To the west on Burnside Avenue, there was the Crazy Commanders, with the infamous “man of a thousand moves,” Spy. The dancers often formed new alliances under new names in the struggle to stay on top.

  From top-rocking and up-rocking, the dance descended to the floor. “It got into elaborate footwork, into a freeze, and then you mixed up the top-rocking, then the floor-rocking, the spin into a freeze,” says Rock Steady member “DOZE” Green. Crazy Legs says, “Ours was just a natural progression from standing up to going down. It’s funny because a natural progression would be from down to up, but for b-boys, it’s up to down.” Styles evolved quickly, Legs says, because, “it was like, what you gonna have next week? What you gonna have when you go to Mom and Pop’s Disco or the Crotona Avenue basement party? ‘Cause all the dope b-boys are gonna be there. And that’s what you strive for—you strive to take your move to the next level. It’s about shock value, always shock value, but keeping it flavor and stylized and making it yours.”

  On the west side, Spy had unleashed new styles of flying footwork, propping his body with one hand to generate flurries of legs and feet. Then in the east, Zulu King Robbie Rob answered with the chair freeze—suspending motion to balance his body upside down on a single elbow and toe point, twisting the rest of his body away to taunt his opponent. Sometime later, someone did a baby freeze, propping both legs on his elbows, kicking up one of his sneakers in his opponent’s face, looking like a snapshot of Pele in an overhead kick. From the freezes, dancers seeking to extend their routine discovered basic body spins like swipes, the backspin, and the headspin. Then they closed with another freeze, monumentalizing themselves into statues of middle-finger attitude. Now the story was complete.

  Each time a b-boy or a b-girl stepped in the cipher, they wrote their own generational narrative. Starting upright in the top-rock, hands up and stabbing like a gang-member in motion, feet moving side to side like Ali in a rope-a-dope, dropping down like James Brown, turning hurricanes of Spy’s boricua footwork, exploding into a Zulu freeze, tossing in a spin and punctuating it all with a Bruce Lee grin or a mocking Maori tongue—the entire history of the hip-hop body in a virtuoso display of style.

  Graffiti: Style As Defiance

  After TAKI 183 got his name in the New York Times in 1971, graffiti took off. “Every new school year was a new graffiti season,” says IZ THE WIZ.

  To Hugo Martinez, the sociology student and youth gang advocate who in 1972 organized the first graffiti association, United Graffiti Artists, “Graffiti writing is a way of gaining status in a society where to own property is to have identity.” Your name was your currency, and you created value by making your mark in the niches or getting into mass production. Here was the logic of reverse colonization, a virus spread by the faceless fellow travelers of roaches and rats. “You started on your street, then you went to the buses. You take over your neighborhood, then you take over your home line, then you take over your division, then you take over all city,” says Luke “SPAR ONE” Felisberto.

  You wanted fame. To an invisible generation, fame itself was wealth, liability transformed into asset. Maybe you hung yourself off the side of a building or climbed the steel beams supporting an elevated subway station to rock a tag that would make cleaning men scream in frustration and the other writers shake in jealously. Or you were outrageous enough to hit the biggest, riskiest target you could find, as the pioneering female writer STONEY did in 1972 when she tagged the Statue of Liberty.5 You tagged everywhere you went. Inside the cars, you and the other writers staked space as if it were a turf to claim with your names. The train riders would treat your tags as invasions of their daily anonymity.

  Still only a few tags, like those of the spliff-star saint STAY HIGH 149, could really register much louder than the dull ad placards. The “pieces,” on the other hand, were personal pageants of light, line, and color, rolling billboards for the self. And when writers added style to these, it was like they had begun printing million-dollar bills. Soon hundred of kids were scaling barbed wire fences, leaping instant death on electrified third rails, and running from police just to piece cars in the train yards and layups in ever bolder detail and wilder style.

  The graffiti underground was an elite cloistered order. But it was also the first movement to break out of the seven-mile world. From this point forward, developments in the graffiti movement would anticipate the arcs of the other movements.

  Centers of power outside of the Bronx and Uptown sprung up quickly. The Brooklyn crew, the EX-VANDALS, for instance, had spread back along the train lines to the Bronx. And because it had overrun sociogeographic cages, the graffiti movement was surprisingly desegregated. First practiced largely by inner-city youths of color, by the mid-’70s the second generation of writers was more integrated than the army.

  Upper East Side whites apprenticed themselves to Bronx-based Blacks. Brooklyn Puerto Ricans learned from white working-class graf kings from Queens. They met up in the back cars of off-hour trains or in the afternoon at the Writer’s Benches at 149th Street or Atlantic Avenue. Together they went on spray-paint stealing raids—they said they were “inventing” paint—and midnight bombing runs. They created an alternative world—in itself, quite an invention.

  ZEPHYR was a self-described “hippie wanna-be” and “problem kid” who grew up in Yorkville section of Manhattan near the Mayor’s Mansion, the land of Gracie Grace. He apprenticed with LSD OM and SHADOW (Spike Lee’s younger brother) of The Rebels, lifted his name from the legendary Dogtown-based surf and skateboard team in Santa Monica, California, and finally got fame writing with the Rolling Thunder Writers in 1977.

  “Everybody wrote,” he says, “but no one was all that serious about it, it was just a rite-of-passage type thing. Like you fuckin’ rob a marker, and you fuckin’ mark shit up for six months, then you throw that shit away and get into some other shit.” But for him and his peers, graffiti was a permanent outlet for their fizzy reckless energy, a legacy to maintain and a future to enter. He says, “We knew it wasn’t starting with us and it wasn’t ending with us, that it was already an eight-year-old tradition, that we were stepping to it, and that we were trying to bring some of our vibe to it.”

  There were rebel codes to follow, and as one of a tiny number of girl writers among the ten thousand bo
ys getting up, LADY PINK had to break through all of them. In 1979, she had begun tagging her boyfriend’s name, KOKE, after he was sent back to Puerto Rico by his parents, she chuckles, “for being naughty.” After being accepted into the High School of Art and Design soon afterward, she found a core group of ambitious teens intent on making an impact on the graffiti scene. They were all well aware that famous writers like TRACY 168, DAZE and Lee Quiñones had already come through the very same halls.

  “I was studying with guys like ERNI, SEEN TC5, DOZE TC5, FABEL, MARE 139, LADY HEART,” she says. “We specifically had a Writer’s Table. So for years and years whoever was the best automatically got the best table. Anyone who was worthy would sit, anyone else who wasn’t worthy would just stand around. And that would go on for at least four periods of lunch! No one would go to class, we would just sit at the writer’s table.”

  She wanted badly to be down, she says, but “I was getting sexism from ten-, twelve-year-olds saying that you can’t do that, you’re a girl. It took me months to convince my old homeboys from high school to take me to a train yard. They were not having it. They were not taking some silly little girl into danger like that. So I had to harp on them and convince them and finally they said, ‘Fine. Okay. Meet us inside the Ghost Yard.’ They left it to me to find my way in there and meet them inside.”

  The Ghost Yard was a vast train depot perched on the northern tip of Manhattan on the Harlem River at 207th Street, a servicing shop for cars from many different lines. It had been built on a graveyard, and at night a howling wind often rose from the River. Because of its wealth of cars, a number of graffiti crews turned the Ghost Yard into violently contested ground.

  PINK recalls, “I walked around the entire yard, couldn’t find my way in. So I just climbed the nearest ten-foot fence. They tell me it was in sight of the guard tower, but no one stopped me. So I was inside the train yard and I waited for them. I see my friends coming through the bushes, and then they just come up to the fence and they just peel back a whole section of it like a big doorway.”