Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  Brathwaite wanted to become a serious artist. But he was also searching for an artform he could organize his own worldview around—the same way his father saw his world through jazz. He found fresh energy in the Brooklyn mobile DJ scene, at shows thrown by Grandmaster Flowers, Maboya, and Pete DJ Jones. On hooky trips he went to the Metropolitan Museum of Art to study its collections of art and armor. He immersed himself in Caravaggio, Duchamp, Boccioni and Warhol. And he tagged BULL 99 and SHOWDOWN 177.

  Graffiti brought it all together. “I had looked at all the movements that were kind of radical, like Futurism, the Dadaists, the Impressionists, the Abstract Expressionists into the Pop Artists. To me, it was like, wait a minute, this shit is a lot like what graffiti is,” he says. “So I was thinking about how to make moves into the art world, but still keep the integrity of what graffiti was.”

  He too was inspired by Lee Quiñones’s work, and decided he needed to meet the artist. Sometime in 1978, he boldly strode into Lee’s high-school classroom. Before being told to leave, Freddy whispered to Lee to meet him outside after school. Lee was suspicious, but when they spoke, they realized they had found the perfect foil in each other. Lee was shy and elusive, Freddy radiated confidence and cool. Lee kept his thoughts to himself, Freddy talked to anyone. Through Lee, Freddy met the rest of the Fabulous Five—all in various stages of retiring from the lines—and was brought into the crew. As FAB 5 FREDDY, he painted trains and walls and publicized graffiti in the downtown art scene. In early 1979, he appeared in a Village Voice article about graffiti, smoking a cigarette under Lee’s GRAFFITI 1990 mural, and offering his contact info. By the end of the year, the two had landed the first graffiti art show in Italy, at the Galleria La Medusa.

  FAB floated right into the burgeoning downtown scene. He hung out at Interview magazine editor Glen O’Brien’s cable access show, a central hub of the New Wave/No Wave movement. He partied at the Mudd Club with Deborah Harry and Blondie, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Andy Warhol. At the same time, he was checking out Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Four at the Smith Houses with Lee, and collecting bootleg cassettes of all the rap crews. The nineteen-year-old found himself moving through two very different worlds, and he had both the charisma and the desire to bring them together.

  Four Movements to One Culture

  Bambaataa’s vision of a revolutionary youth culture was unfolding before FAB’s eyes and he began to see what his role could be. “As a painter at the time, and having read a lot about art, I wanted to make sure that we weren’t perceived as folk artists,” he says.

  “Not everybody doing graffiti had aesthetic intentions, but many did. Those that did were the ones that drove the development from just simple tags to elaborate window-down wildstyle. Those heads were on some creative shit. I wanted to make sure that the scene that I was coming from was actually seen in that light, basically that we were smart enough to understand that game as well,” he says.

  “I once read somewhere that for a culture to really be a complete culture, it should have a music, a dance and a visual art. And then I realized, wow, all these things are going on. You got the graffiti happening over here, you got the breakdancing, and you got the DJ and MCing thing. In my head, they were all one thing,” he says. FAB understood the history of artistic movements, and he realized that he was right at the beginning of a big one. He had an idea to set it off.

  At the Times Square Show, Mudd Club and Co-Lab co-conspirator Diego Cortez introduced Charlie Ahearn and FAB 5 FREDDY. FAB had seen “The Deadly Art of Survival” and knew Ahearn could be just the person to speak to. Ahearn recalls, “Fred told me that he wanted to make a movie with me. He said, ‘We should make a movie about this graffiti thing’, and he said he knew Lee Quiñones. So I said if you can bring Lee to me, come by tomorrow and I’ll give you guys fifty dollars ‘cause I wanted them to do a mural outside the building. They came by the next day. And I said, ‘Okay, here we are, the three of us.’ That became the beginnings of the idea of Wild Style.”

  Ahearn and FAB began a year of immersion in the culture, finding themselves one night in a far corner of the north Bronx, at a party presided over by Chief Rocker Busy Bee and DJ Breakout. “It was in a place called The Valley. It’s in a large park and it was dark. I remember there was a dub reggae band playing and the other side was hip-hop music. And we wandered to the hip-hop music,” Ahearn says. “I often wonder what would have happened had we ended up going toward the dub band.

  “Fred and I were standing by the side of this little tiny stage,” he recalls. “This guy next to me later told me he was sweating bullets because he thought I was a cop. Everyone always thought I was a cop. I don’t blame them. For a year that I was hanging out there, I never saw anyone that was from downtown or that was white hanging out in any place I went to.

  “So Busy Bee was there and he says, ‘What are you doing here?’ and I said, ‘I’m Charlie Ahearn and I’m here to make a movie about the rap scene.’ And he takes me by the hand and he leads me out on the stage where there’s a microphone and there’s an audience.”

  Ahearn’s twin, John, had moved to the Bronx two years before, and was becoming something of an art-world star for his cast sculptures of his neighbors on Walton Avenue, an area where the Savage Skulls had once roamed. Another close associate, Co-Lab member Stefan Eins, had opened a gallery he called Fashion Moda on East 147th Street at Third Avenue in the heart of the South Bronx. “The Bronx was a hip place to go if you were an artist, everybody was going up there,” Charlie says. “But this was not the same. It was a totally different scene—high school kids—and it was wild.

  “It was dark and Busy Bee leads me out onto stage, to the microphone—and you gotta understand, everybody who is anybody in hip-hop is right there. The Funky 4 were there, Mercedes Ladies, all these people were all in the audience right there. So Busy Bee puts his arm around me and he says, ‘This here is Charlie Ahearn and he’s my movie producer. We’re making a movie about the rap scene.’ Boom! That’s all it took.”

  Ahearn and FAB became regular guests of the biggest rap crews in the scene, frequenting clubs like the Ecstasy Garage, the T-Connection and the Disco Fever. As he had done at Smith Houses, Ahearn took pictures, made slides, and brought them back to project them on the walls of the clubs. He was practicing his activist art.

  When he met graf writers CRASH and DAZE, he walked them the short distance from their residences to meet Eins at the Fashion Moda. “No graffiti artist had ever heard of Fashion Moda,” Ahearn says, despite the fact that the gallery was only two blocks from the Writer’s Bench. “CRASH organized the ‘Graffiti Art Success for America’ show. Fashion Moda became one of the capitals of graffiti in a month.”

  FAB 5 FREDDY was thrilled to be meeting all of his Bronx heroes, and he began opening doors for them downtown. Grandmaster Flash says, “FAB was like one of the town criers. He would come into the hood where whites wouldn’t come and then go downtown to where whites would, and say, ‘Listen there’s some music these cats is playing, man, it’s hot shit. You gotta book these guys.’ So I got my first taste of playing for an audience that wasn’t typically Black.”

  FAB invited Bambaataa down to play at Keith Haring’s black-light art exhibition in a tiny church basement on St. Mark’s Place called Club 57. It was exactly the kind of opportunity Bambaataa had been waiting for. The crowd loved it, and FAB brought Bam and his Zulu Nation DJs, Jazzy Jay and Afrika Islam, back to play at venues like the Jefferson Hotel and the Mudd Club.

  In April 1981, FAB curated an art show at Mudd Club called “Beyond Words: Graffiti-Based, -Rooted and -Inspired Work.” The line-up read like a who’s-who of the punk, subway graf, and street art scenes. Photos by Cooper and Chalfant hung next to canvases and installations by Lee, PHASE 2, LADY PINK, ZEPHYR DONDI, John Sex, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Alan Vega, Iggy Pop and FAB’s notorious running partner, RAMMELLZEE, an eccentric painter and freestyler obsessed with military codes and alphabet armame
nts.

  At the opening, FAB brought in the Cold Crush Brothers, the Fantastic Freaks, and Bambaataa’s Jazzy Five MCs to perform. “That was the first official time when hip-hop really hit downtown,” FAB says. “It was wildly received. All these cool new wave heads came down and loved it. I knew nobody had a sense or clue about anything because barely any real rap records had hit the market commercially, maybe ‘Rapper’s Delight,’ but nobody really understood it as like a scene.”

  When the hip-hoppers met the rockers, parkies, and freaks downtown, a weird new nightclub elite emerged. “We used to go to Bowl-Mor and we would bowl,” ZEPHYR laughs. The high-flying, Studio 54, velvet-rope, VIP-exclusive club era was over. People were going downtown where gutter-familiar scenesters mixed freely, the picture of a wild and fabulous new pluralism.

  “We had this team called the Pinheads,” ZEPHYR says. “It was a big mix of people from the Mudd Club. FAB 5 FREDDY was down with us, and Grace Jones used to come down and go bowling.5 These very new-wave/punk type people from downtown, less eccentric folks, some of the old hippie dudes like me and my boys. And then of course, from the Bronx, you had a little more macho folks. Everything overlapped. It was really surreal.”

  On the season’s shortlist, race and class segregation was out, cultural crossover was in. “There was this shifting and mixing that was very exciting to people,” says Ahearn. “The racial thing was a big deal. Mixing a lot of Black, Puerto Rican and white people downtown all together is very combustible, because people are coming from very different types of areas and they are getting used to the idea that they can hang out with each other.”

  Graffiti Success in America

  Before long, the elite of the art-world came calling. Once cloaked in secrecy and code and executed under the constant threat of violence, graffiti suddenly became a very public performance, for the consumption of high society. The temporary and fleeting tried to fix itself as permanent.

  Graffiti had flirted with the big-time in 1973, when Hugo Martinez secured for his elite graffiti union, the United Graffiti Artists, a Twyla Tharp commission and a downtown exhibition at the Razor Gallery. UGA got an avalanche of publicity, including a Newsweek article, and even sold some canvases for as much as $2,500. But by 1975, UGA had fizzled amidst slacking patronage and internal discord. Other similar community-based efforts to bridge graf and the art world, like Jack Pelzinger’s NOGA and ALI’s Soul Artists, also eventually faded.

  As the 1980s arrived, Modernism was dead. Minimalism and Conceptualism had become increasingly cold, detached, cerebral, feeble. The art world thought it was ready for something authentic and passionate, something innocent and incandescent. It wanted to feel deeply again. After an era of self-referentiality and white-room obscurantism, the art world wanted a door-opening gust of the sights, smells and tastes of the real world.

  Upper Manhattanites and Europeans who had supported the explosion of Pop Art during the 1960s rushed in to buy anything marketed as graffiti. In a year, Jean-Michel Basquiat—who had never painted on a train—went from homelessness to international art stardom, commanding as much as $10,000 a canvas. Teenage bombers found they could cut school and pocket $200 for a quick canvas on the way to the lay-up.

  Many of the paintings were little more than tags, albeit with a buff-proof, overglowing impertinence that came with the “for sale” sign. And although collectors oohed and awed at the novelty of it all, dealers pushed the writers to give them more complex work, to make statements. Some of them did. As journalists and the media gathered to watch, ZEPHYR painted an unfurling American flag. Then he slammed a big, wildstyle “Z” across it, daring critics to embrace a new idea of “American graffiti.”

  PINK, the youngest of the gallery writers, displayed a feminist take on war, psychological repression and sex work. CRASH fostered the link between Pop and graffiti, sampling Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rauschenberg. Lee Quiñones moved toward an intense social realism, abandoning words and cartoons for harrowing scenes, such as the lonely, desparing junkie shooting up between the Statue of Liberty and an American flag in “Society’s Child.”

  The most influential—DONDI, PHASE 2, RAMMELLZEE and FUTURA—developed new visual languages. PHASE 2, whose 1973 canvases had been widely recognized as defining the early genre, continued deconstructing the letter into hard lines, third eyes, horns, drills, spikes, arches, Egyptian pharoahs and dogs, pure geometrics. RAMMELLZEE’s canvases swirled with forces locked in struggle, a visual analogue of his insurgent theories about the letter and word as armored vehicle in a militarized world. DONDI, the high priest of wildstyle, played with letters, arrows, often faceless head and bodies, constantly commenting on the various representations of himself in the world—names, diagrams, checking account numbers, currency.

  The most visually accessible of the artists, FUTURA, provided critics with a target they could interpret. Some called him the Watteau or Kandinsky of graffiti; others used him to deride the entire movement as empty and directionless. He combined a militant, almost architecturally precise line and an understanding of industrial design and fonts with a nonpareil spatial sense of the abstract and the fantastic. He became the most famous in-house performance graffiti writer of the “Wheels of Steel” night at Negril and the Roxy, and his best work perfectly captured the atom-crashing, buzzsaw energy of the time, the rapture of the cipher, the cut, the light, the truss and the arc.

  The graffitiists’ work was remarkable for their outsiderness, the way in which they completely collided with the big-money gallery sensibility. Art critic Elizabeth Hess called the moment “a genuine disruption of form in the history of art.”6In a People Magazine feature, Claudio Bruni, the man who had set off the frenzy by bringing FAB 5 FREDDY and Lee Quiñones to Italy in 1979, said, “To me, it was not just vandalism. It was the new expression of art, unsophisticated but very real. An art so strong it hurt people.”7

  Cynics thought the art world’s embrace of graffiti represented the worst kind of white liberal guilt, a bizarre flirtation with the repressed Other. But the artists remained hopeful. ZEPHYR said, “People might say graffiti looks really out of place in a gallery. But I think it’s good if graffiti is out of place. Sneaking into these places is just what graffiti is supposed to do.”8

  A Riot of Their Own

  As the Reagan era commenced, hip-hop was a force that had begun reintegrating the downtown clubs, and vaulted society’s outcasts into the rarified art world. But these places still represented the fringes of the avant-garde. On the streets, reality was still as color-coded and divided as ever.

  FAB FIVE FREDDY says, “Things were relatively polarized. There was a term called ‘bridge-and-tunnel,’ which was the people that came from the outer boroughs that were really just dumb, ignorant white kids that were really racist. And they would cause problems for everybody. They would want to fight, you know what I mean? Like tough, kinda street white kids that was really not on some creative shit.”

  At the same time, across the Atlantic, punk’s great idealists, The Clash, were so enchanted with rap that they recorded one in early 1980 called “The Magnificent Seven” for their epic Sandinista! album. When they arrived in New York the following summer, they were thrilled to find it had become an unlikely hit on the Black radio station, WBLS. With Don Letts, their partner and documentarian, they took a video camera to Times Square to film graf writers, b-boys, rappers and boombox renegades.

  The Clash had come a long way, ideologically and musically, since they had issued “White Riot,” a naive, revolutionary statement of solidarity with the West Indian immigrant rebels of the 1976 Nottinghill Carnival riots. That record had paradoxically left many wondering whether the record wasn’t expressing neo-Nazi sentiments. “White riot!” they had shouted, “I wanna riot, a riot of my own!” In fact, they were searching for audiences who, as Strummer rapped on “This Is Radio Clash,” recognized Sugar Minott’s ghettology as Afrika Bambaataa’s Lil’ Vietnam.

  They were set to play eight
nights in June 1981 at an aging Times Square disco, the Bonds International, and they announced their stand with a dramatic unfurling of a magnificent banner painted by FUTURA. But on the eve of their opening, the fire department threatened to shut down the club for overselling the shows, and their fans finally had their white riot when mounted police stormed down Broadway to meet the punks in the streets.

  The Clash compromised by agreeing to perform eleven additional gigs, and hurried to find opening acts. In yet another naive act of solidarity, they booked Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But, as Michael Hill wrote in The Village Voice, “Rather than achieve a cultural crossover, it threatened to widen the gap.”9

  When Flash and the Furious Five stepped onstage on The Clash’s opening night, the white punks stood bewildered as Flash began his “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” routine on three turntables. Then the Furious Five, dressed in fly leather suits, jumped onstage and started rapping and dancing. Some in the crowd began shouting their disgust. They hadn’t come to see no disco. When Flash paused so that the Five could try to regain the crowd, the crew found themselves ducking a hail of beer cups and spit. The next night, dressed down this time in street clothes, they suffered the same reception. They left the stage angrily, with Melle Mel admonishing, “Some of you—not all of you, but some of you—are stupid,” never to return.10

  The Clash responded by excoriating their own fans in interviews, and future Bronx-bred openers, The Treacherous Three and ESG, received marginally better treatment. But in 1981, the American punks clearly wanted the riot to remain exclusively their own.

  Rocking and Fighting

  While the British punks learned something about American racism, the downtowners found their own liberal assumptions being tested.