by Jeff Chang
She was down, but the trials would not end. “I had to prove that I painted my own pieces. Because whenever a female enters the boy’s club, the world of graffiti, immediately it’s thought that she’s just somebody’s girlfriend and the guy is putting it up. But they’re not gonna believe that some girl is strong enough and brave enough to stand there for that period of time and do something big and massive and colorful. They just think that she’s on her knees and bending over for the guys. And that’s the kind of word that went out about me and goes out about every single girl that starts to write,” she says. “So you have to stand strong against that kind of adversity and that kind of prejudice or you’re just a little bitch slut.”
But PINK also knew that all toys had to prove themselves. Graffiti was not for the weak-hearted. “You’ve gotta be strong, carry your own point, have a lot of endurance, a lot of nerve. You can’t go hysterical and run screaming. You also have to be strong in character that if you get grabbed and they put the squeeze on you and they’re beating you silly and they have you upside down and they’re painting your balls purple, will you stay shut or will you sing and tell them all your friends and phone numbers and everything that they want?” she says. “ ‘Cause this is a serious game. We might have been playing cops and robbers but it was some serious shit.”
Graffiti is, PINK says, “an outlaw art. When we train other graffiti writers, we’re not training fine artists to exhibit in a museum. We’re training criminals. We’re training kids how to take life in their own hands and go out there and hopelessly paint on some wall or some train that will do nothing for you except get you fame with other vandals and criminals.”
In the spring of 1973, journalist Richard Goldstein famously made the case for graffiti in a New York Magazine cover story: “It just may be that the kids who write graffiti are the healthiest and most assertive people in their neighborhood. Each of these people has to ‘invent’ his life—his language, his culture are lifted, remodeled and transformed. In that ferocious application of energy to style lies the source of all flash . . .” To Goldstein, graffiti was “the first genuine teenage street culture since the fifties.”6
New York’s spraycan writers presented their own stunning defense. “If Art like this is a crime,” they wrote, “may God forgive me.”7 Graffiti writers had claimed a modern symbol of efficiency and progress and made it into a moving violation. As their mini-riots spilled all-city all day every day, authorities took their work as a guerilla war on civility. They were right. Ivor Miller has written that northbound trains had once been a symbol of freedom, and in decaying postindustrial cities, subway trains were merely the beginning of the daily circuit of alienating labor. Quiñones told Miller, “Subways are corporate America’s way of getting its people to work. It’s used as an object of transporting corporate clones. And the trains were clones themselves, they were all supposed to be silver blue, a form of imperialism and control, and we took that and completely changed it.”8 The writers replaced the circular logic of trains with their own.
From the primacy of the name, subway graffiti evolved spectacularly under innovators like PHASE 2, RIFF, TRACY 168 and BLADE, and into another generation of stylists including DONDI, KASE 2 and SEEN. Homely letters grew outlines, colors, patterns, highlights, depth, shadows, arrows. Names were bubblized, gangsterized, mechanized. Letters dissected, bisected, cross-sected, fused, bulged, curved, dipped, clipped, chipped and disintegrated. They filled with shooting stars, blood drips, energy fields, polygons. They floated on clouds, zipped with motion lines, shot forward on flames. And they got bigger and bigger. Expanding from window-downs to top-to-bottom to end-to-ends, the pieces began appearing as dazzling thematic murals by 1974, covering entire sides of twelve-foot-high, sixty-foot-long cars. They were imposing themselves, to use Goldstein’s words, in bigger, more unavoidable ways.9 This was style as confrontation.
Politicians and bureaucrats played an unwitting role in the development of style. The first major anti-graffiti campaign began in 1972. But graffiti’s inherent risk and its perpetual removal catalyzed innovation and ingenuity; its countless deaths generated countless, more magnificent rebirths. When the Metropolitan Transit Authority completed repainting its 6,800-car fleet in November of 1973, writers were temporarily relieved of the problem of having to cover another writer’s existing piece when executing a new one, and they began a golden age of style.10
Space on the subway car exteriors was a resource made even more limited by their limited access, the exploding numbers of painters vying for them, and the risk entailed in their painting. So in these early years, graf writers refined the finer points of their hierarchy. You became the king of a subway line by being more inescapable than anyone else—either through sheer ubiquity or ferocious displays of style. Toy writers might have their pieces covered by a cloud or written over with a HOT 110 tag by an established writer. The masters did not have to respect wack writing; they were concerned with the advancement of style.
But by 1975, MTA efforts to stop graffiti were all but shackled by the city’s impending bankruptcy, and tags and pieces covered virtually every imaginable space. Writers like IN, VAMM and AJAX began getting up with quick, easy “throw-ups”—essentially two-color tags on steroids, sometimes done side-by-side to cover a whole car, and mainly meant to cover over other writers’ work. The advent of throw-ups shifted the kinging system from quality to quantity.
Graffiti historian Jack Stewart wrote, “The graffiti problem on the tracks became so bad in 1976 that many of the graffitiists even believed the whole thing was going to come to an end, a victim of its own excess. The only way a writer could hit the trains was to cross out someone else’s work and this practice became so common that it began to demoralize many of the writers.”11
At the bottom of its economic torpor, city officials rallied to attack the problem again, unleashing a new creative spirit among the writers. Subway graffiti’s most influential period of style began. These writers dreamed and painted big, and this was the era of some of the most legendary cars. The biggest were two 10-car, whole-train productions—CAINE 1, MAD 103 and FLAME ONE’s “Freedom Train” Bicentennial tribute and the FABULOUS FIVE’s 1977 “Christmas Train.” BLADE’s 1980 nuclear blast whole-car sampled the expressionist ghost of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream.” FAB 5 FREDDY painted a 1979 whole-car tribute to Warhol’s famous Campbell’s soup cans, offering a “Pop Soup,” “Da-Da Soup,” and “Futurist Soup,” next to a “Fred Soup.” His writing partner, Lee Quiñones, seared feverish statements about war and violence into unsuspecting subway riders’ heads. He called the 5 line, where they bombed, “a rolling MOMA.”12
Graf developed a wide range of style. Although it represented only a small part of what they did, DONDI and SEEN were best known for their large, precise, readable words, and their bold, elegant designs. In particular, DONDI’s 1980 “Children of the Grave” whole-car series, in which his name appeared in huge stylized letters against subtly shifting color fields and which photographer Martha Cooper shot during its execution, would become an artistic blueprint for the hundreds of youths jumping into the graffiti scene. PHASE 2 and one-armed KASE 2 moved toward deconstructing the word and the name in less readable forms, encoding their names and letters in theory, dimension, and abstraction. The word was now growing armaments, curling like vines, whipping like boomerangs, penetrating with arrowheads. This was the form that, after TRACY 168’s groundbreaking crew, would come to be known as “wildstyle.” Its energy seemed to shatter concrete, burst through steel. FUTURA’s 1980 “Break” car exploded the bounds of the word completely, a crackling fission of orange-and-burgundy spilling across the exterior like visual dub music or an electro-Bronx encounter between Wassily Kandinsky and Jack Kirby.
The graffiti writers epitomized the extreme alienation of a generation coming of age under the long shadow of the baby boom. They were artists, individualists, stylists who had become comfortable in the cut, out of the glare of the media. In
a time of diminishing returns and vaporizing expectations, they freed no one but themselves. They came out to make their word and stake their flags, then they slipped back into the darkness. Continual destruction only stoked their creative fires. Style was a way to defy a hostile world.
“I think graffiti writing is a way of defining what our generation is like,” says LADY PINK. “Excuse the French, we’re not a bunch of pussy artists. Traditionally artists have been considered soft and mellow people, a little bit kooky. Maybe we’re a little bit more like pirates that way. We defend our territory, whatever space we steal to paint on, we defend it fiercely.”
A 1981 piece by NOC 167 summed up the graffitiist’s mission. On the left-hand side, between an ominous guard-tower and a gleaming new train lay the deadly third rail. A seething “STYLE WARS” rose out of mists of white, pink and blue. At the right, a cool, top-hatted cat rode an angry, blue-jacketed, fire-breathing dragon next to a portrait of the writer as a young rebel—staring nonchalant from behind his ski goggles like he’d already beaten the transit cops and the toys. No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop me now.
Style absorbed technology, accepted method and technique, aspired to science. It spun self-defense into skill, skill into art. It invented itself, violently, enclosed itself in outlaw codes and attacked normality. Out of ruin, it pulled beauty.
Style would make you friends, inspire loyalty and devotion, spawn a hundred imitators. It would make you enemies, unleash jealousy and fear, bring down the brute force of authority. The one thing style would never leave you was neutral. As King KASE 2 would say in the movie Style Wars, “When they see you got a vicious style, they wanna get loose about it. And that’s what keeps it going.”13
In every generation, radicals nurture scorn for authority and the old. They tap into a desire to destroy convention and induce shock. They demand tribal commitment and discipline. They risk everything to bring the new into being.
By the beginning of 1979, this desire had matured and outgrown the seven-mile world. In each of these youth movements, there might be a sense of possibility, an inkling of many possible directions, many possible futures, like arrows jumping through and out of a PHASE 2 piece. Or the movements might simply decline. They were youth movements after all, and youth is a passing condition.
The next shocks came not from within, but from the outside.
DJ Kay Slay (far right), then famous as the graf writer DEZ, with his crew in front
of an abandoned public school in East Harlem, 1982.
© Henry Chalfant
7.
The World Is Ours
The Survival and Transformation
of Bronx Style
We had this as kind of a refuge. Otherwise you would not have pride about anything.
—DOZE
In the journey from the seven-mile world to Planet Rock, nothing was ever guaranteed.
B-boying might have gone back to the living rooms, a dance to be taken out like a fading picture album late on a Saturday night after a couple of forties. Rapping and scratching might have remained a Bronx novelty, a curious musicological artifact. Graffiti crews might have been crushed like the gangs, its chief practitioners systematically rounded up and herded into prison. The flamboyant kids of the postgang generation might have grown up and moved on or disappeared or died, another five-plus years in the street life of a small part of New York come and gone in a flicker of the city’s eye.
Certainly that’s how the future seemed in the Bronx in 1979. But by the beginning of the new decade, brought out by commercial interests, pressed down by the state, and saved by traditionalists, the Bronx-born culture jumped its borders forever.
The First Death of Hip-Hop
On the one hand, rap was becoming known outside the seven-mile cipher. Live bootleg cassette tapes of Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, Flash and Furious 5, the L Brothers, the Cold Crush Brothers and others were the sound of the OJ Cabs that took folks across the city. The tapes passed hand-to-hand in the Black and Latino neighborhoods of Brooklyn, the Lower East Side, Queens and Long Island’s Black Belt. Kids in the boroughs were building sound systems and holding rap battles with the same fervor the Bronx once possessed all to itself.
But in the Bronx, hip-hop was a fad that was passing. “I called it the Great Hip-Hop Drought,” says Jazzy Jay. “Everybody started fleeing away from hiphop.”
The kids raised on Herc and Bam and Flash and Lovebug Starski and DJ AJ had graduated from high school and were looking for the next thing. “People started growing up and calling that ‘kiddie music,’ ” says Jay. “You ain’t gonna go into no high school gymnasium to party no more.”
He would peek over the balcony at the gym-sized T-Connection, and be shocked to find only forty people dancing in the whole room. He longed for the old days of battling at the Webster Avenue P.A.L. “It was a terrible time,” Jay says. “I done got all my techniques down pat, I done got my belts, I done whipped Flash’s ass, I done whipped Theodore’s ass, I’m looking for whose ass can I whip next! I’m like, you mean I done went through all of these stepping stones just to not be the man? Hip-hop is gonna die like this?”
The audiences had moved on from Bronx sound-system battles and outdoor jams to the drinking-age uptown nightclubs, depriving b-boys and DJs of their competitive setting. At the same time, disco nightclub DJs in Harlem were finding success by adapting the Bronx rap styles and mixing techniques into their gigs, offering a more sophisticated version of the Bronx beat for a maturing crowd.
“I was wondering where my core audience was going,” says Grandmaster Flash. “They were going to see people like DJ Hollywood, who would get a party going from twenty-three and older. When they moved on, they wanted to wear a dress or they wanted to wear a suit. They were just getting older and their taste changed in music.”
He continues, “When I went to go see DJ Hollywood, I would say, ‘Oh Regina, what are you doing here? I haven’t seen you in a long time!’ ‘Yeah this is where I come now.’ And there was this guy who was saying these incredible rhymes on the mic, he was about three, four hundred pounds and he had the crowd in an uproar the same way my Furious Five would have them. DJ Hollywood was quite incredible, he had the people singing his rhymes. So a lot of our audience was going to parties like that now, Eddie Cheeba parties, Hollywood parties, Pete “DJ” Jones parties. The bottom sort of dropped out. It was either you survive and you go with the changes or you get left back.”
The DJs themselves wanted more. It was no longer about rocking the block party and establishing a rep. They wanted to make a living. But the economics of the music had changed. “If Friday was the 25th, you would see DJ Hollywood in five places on five different flyers. How was this possible? How could he be in Manhattan, the Bronx and Queens all in one night?” Flash says he asked himself. “Only to discover that he didn’t carry a sound system. All he did was carry his records. He had a crew and a car. And he would do an hour here, get in the car, do an hour there an hour there and an hour there. After a while, people that had the huge sound systems became a dinosaur. Because now you could go and do five parties. And if you had a little record out, you could really make some money.”
Flash learned this last point the hard way. By 1979, independent Black record producers like Harlem’s Bobby Robinson and Paul Winley, and Englewood, New Jersey’s Sylvia Robinson (no relation to Bobby) had all heard about the rap phenomenon and were scouring the clubs in the Bronx and Harlem and doing their math, trying to figure out if rap could be financially viable. Flash and the Furious Five were at the top of everyone’s signing wish-list.
But Flash refused to meet with any record-label heads. To him, the idea was absurd. Who would want to buy a record of Bronx kids rapping over a record? He and the Furious Five were still a big draw in the clubs, and making a record wasn’t guaranteed money in the bank, like getting onstage.
“I kinda kicked these guys to the side. I kinda like had my security keep them people away from
me. I didn’t want to talk deals. As bad as they wanted to talk to me, no is no. That was that,” he says. As long as he had gigs to do all week, that was a sure bet, and he was content to play that game.
Then in October of 1979, the game changed.
The End Run
In retrospect, it makes perfect sense that a no-name group using partly stolen rhymes—the very definition of a crew with no style—would have been the first to tap hip-hop’s platinum potential. When three anonymous rappers stepped into Black indie label owner Sylvia Robinson’s studios to cut “Rapper’s Delight,” they had no local expectations to fulfill, no street reputations to keep, no regular audience to please, and absolutely no consequences if they failed.
Sylvia Robinson and her son, Joey, had been trying to sign a rap group but had been met with skepticism from Bronx luminaries like Flash and Lovebug Starski. Undoubtedly, the appearance of “King Tim III (Personality Jock)” on a B-side of a single by Brooklyn funkateers the Fatback Band in the summer of 1979 raised the pressure on the Robinsons to make a deal.
Henry “Big Bank Hank” Jackson was a Herc follower and a Bronx nightclub bouncer who somehow became a manager for Grandmaster Caz and the rappers who became the Cold Crush Brothers. He was making pizzas in New Jersey to pay for Caz’s sound system, and rapping along to a Caz tape one afternoon at the parlor, when Joey Robinson heard him and asked him to come to Jersey for an audition. On the way back, two other rhymers jumped into Joey’s car, Guy “Master Gee” O’Brien and Michael “Wonder Mike” Wright, and the three auditioned that evening. Sylvia Robinson immediately signed them to be the first group on her new imprint, Sugar Hill Records. Nobody knew who they were. They were the perfect people to vault hip-hop into the realm of pop.