Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  Henry Chalfant was managing the Rock Steady Crew. It had begun in an innocent, fortuitous way. A couple of months after the O. K. Harris show, Martha Cooper and he were in his studio and she showed him pictures of her next project. Cooper explained that a year before, she was called on assignment to a “riot-in-progress” at a Washington Heights subway station. When she got there, she encountered a group of kids in Pro-Keds and transit cops who were still scratching their heads. Whatever had happened was apparently over, so the cops told the kids to show her what they were doing. A kid stepped up, went down and spun on his head. Cooper was stunned. She said, “I called The Post and said, ‘Well, this is more interesting than a riot—they were dancing!”

  For the better part of the following year, she and NYU dance professor Sally Banes had tried to track down b-boys and b-girls, frequenting high school dances and rap shows to see if they could find anyone who did it. “Everybody said, ‘Ah, we don’t do that anymore. It’s finished, over,’ ” Cooper recalled. When they caught back up with the High Times Crew, the members said they were now into roller-skating.

  With Cooper’s story in mind, Chalfant later asked some graffiti writers at his studio if they had ever heard of folks who did a dance called “rocking.” TAKE ONE said he knew the best in the city. He happened to be in a crew called Rock Steady. The next day, TAKE brought Crazy Legs and Frosty Freeze to Chalfant’s studio. Chalfant saw them dance, and asked them if they would like to perform at a graffiti slide show he was doing at a Soho loft performance space near his studio called The Common Ground, a name which would later prove rich in irony.

  Chalfant had been at FAB’s “Beyond Words” show the month before, and he invited FAB FIVE FREDDY and RAMMELLZEE to come and rap. He, too, wanted to present graffiti, DJing, rapping, and b-boying together. The term “hip-hop” was not yet being popularly used to describe the youth movements, so Chalfant called the show “Graffiti Rock.” On the Common Ground’s promotional postcard, which also advertised a performance-painting event and a Chekhov reading, the event was described this way: “Using music, rapping, and dance, graffiti artists transform the static image into a unique performance dynamic. Scupltor/photographer Henry Chalfant coordinates graffiti artists in a multifaceted performance event.”

  Rock Steady decided to stage a battle. They split their crew into two, and he, Banes and Cooper bought them t-shirts customized with iron-on letters. They began energetic rehearsals. DOZE recalls being stunned by RAMMELLZEE’s bizarre freestyling. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this?’ This fucking guy was like, ‘Werrnnnnnt werrnnnnnt! Rock rock! Plop plop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is! Bob! Jellybeans! Spam! Ham!’ ” he laughs. “I figured, this guy is off his wig.”

  More important, Banes and Cooper landed a cover story in The Village Voice. Titled “To the Beat Y’all: Breaking Is Hard to Do,” it was the first major story on b-boying. Cooper’s photos from the Graffiti Rock practices were evocative: Frosty Freeze in a leftward feint, Ty Fly suspended in a back-flip. Banes, for the first time in print, speculated on b-boying’s origins:

  For the current generation of B Boys, it doesn’t really matter that the Breakdown is an old name in Afro-American dance for both rapid, complex footwork and a competitive format. Or that a break in jazz means a soloist’s improvised bridge between melodies. For the B Boys, the history of breaking started six or seven years ago, maybe in the Bronx, maybe in Harlem. It started with the Zulus. Or with Charlie Rock. Or with Joe from the Casanovas, from the Bronx, who taught it to Charlie Rock. “Breaking means going crazy on the floor. It means making a style for yourself.”11

  The article was also perhaps the first to link graffiti, rapping and b-boying—which Banes called “forms of ghetto street culture” that were all “public arena(s) for the flamboyant triumph of virility, wit, and skill. In short, of style.”12

  The line that most captured the liberal imagination was this one:

  [B]reaking isn’t just an urgent response to pulsating music. It is also a ritual combat that transmutes aggression into art. “In the summer of ‘78,” Tee [of the High Times Crew] remembers, “when you got mad at someone, instead of saying, ‘Hey man, you want to fight?’ you’d say, ‘Hey man, you want to rock?’ ”

  Rocking instead of fighting—the idea would become one of the most enduring myths of hip-hop—but history would once again belie it.

  Many around town seemed to be talking about the “Graffiti Rock” event, including Rock Steady’s envious rivals. The afternoon before the show, Chalfant had gathered everyone for a dress rehearsal at the Common Ground. They were interrupted by a Dominican crew from Washington Heights. “We had a war with this crew called the Ball Busters back then ‘cause we were Zulus,” says DOZE. Afrika Bambaataa remembered the beef as one “between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.” Chalfant says that he later pieced together that the beef had begun in a violent dispute over graffiti turf between affiliates of the Rock Steady Crew and the Ball Busters, and that it had likely spilled over along ethnic lines. Whatever the case, this wasn’t something that would be settled with a rhythm and a dance.

  The Ball Busters walked into the Common Ground loft, and while a number of white downtowners looked on, the words began to fly. Someone shouted that there was a gun, RAMMELLZEE and his DJ crew pulled out machetes, Chalfant called the police, and the Ballbusters chased a Rock Steady–affiliated graffiti writer out of the loft toward the subway station.

  The next day, one of Chalfant’s graf-writing friends called him and said, “We’ve got it all worked out. We’ve got a lot of back. We’ve got shotguns in the car. We’ve got a nine millimeter for you. The Salsoul Brothers are gonna come and police it.” But when large crowds, including many of the East Village art and nightclub elite, gathered to see the show that afternoon, Chalfant stood at the door to send them away. The violence had caused the Common Ground’s owner to pull the plug.

  The Folkies

  Hip-hop’s future was still unclear. It might be a folk art, a cultural expression whose authenticity needed to be preserved. Or it might be a youth uprising, a scream against invisibility that wanted nothing more than to be heard by the world.

  One future offered a nicely trimmed path to folk art museums and cultural institutions that might nurture hip-hop in a small safe world. The other was a bumpy, twisting road, which might lead to cultural, economic and social significance, but also to co-optation, backlash and censure. Hip-hop’s downtown advocates, especially the older ones, understood the tensions. They favored authenticity over exploitation, and they vacillated between being protective of the culture and championing it.

  Cooper and Banes made presentations at folk-culture and academic conferences, met with corporate event planners and civic arts programmers, and pitched stories to magazines like The Smithsonian and National Geographic World. Cooper recalls that her folklorist peers were “genuinely excited and enthusiastic.” But they also had their limits. Cooper and Banes attended one mind-numbing meeting with a city-funded arts group interested in doing a film series on forms of New York City street dance. After much struggle, the group accomplished nothing other than arrive at this yawner of a definition: “Street dance is nontheatrical participatory dance in environments available to the public.”13 Predictably, the project fizzled. Meanwhile, the file of rejection letters from magazine and book editors got fatter.

  Cooper arranged for the Rock Steady to perform at the High Bridge Library. The librarians produced a crude stick-figured flyer for “BREAKING, RAPPING & GRAFFITI, an original blend of dancing, acrobatics and martial arts,” and appended a special note at the bottom: “Young adults especially invited.” Then Chalfant landed a summer show for the Rock Steady Crew in the plaza of the Lincoln Center. This time, DOZE drew a graf-style flyer depicting a ski-goggled, big afroed b-boy smirking and saying, “Breaking or otherwise known as (B-Boy) is a competitive warlike dance, making the opponent look bad.” The news media, including ABC’s 20/20 newsmagazine show, came out in droves.


  Chalfant had coordinated and filmed a battle between Rock Steady and the Dynamic Breakers at the United States of America roller rink in Queens earlier in the year.14 He wanted to restage that battle. “I thought that would really be authentic,” he says. “What I hadn’t banked on was that the crews would bring all their neighborhood.”

  The Rock Steady Crew rolled out thick, their people from all the boroughs representing fresh and bold in light grey jumpsuits. Their Queens rivals, the Dynamic Rockers, came out just as deep in beige and maroon athletic suits. The plaza was transformed into a massive cipher. A small raised stage was placed at the center and covered with kitchen floor linoleum. Hundreds of seats were set up around it. As the battle intensified, the circle enclosed and most of the audience could no longer see the action. The crowd drifted away.

  But as the temperatures rose, so did a few tempers, and the battle deteriorated into small fights. Just as the USA battle had ended, so did this one—with a lot of riffing and posturing about who actually won. “And it ended in a kind of mini-wilding spree,” Chalfant adds. “A few hot-dog stands were kicked over, and on the train that I got onto, the Broadway local, somebody punched out a window.”

  To say that Rock Steady’s biggest shows had been a little rough around the edges was an understatement. But Chalfant possessed a sense of humor and no small feeling of responsibility for them. Despite his misgivings about his abilities, he gallantly labored on as their manager. “I was the only one who was kind of like an adult with connections,” he says.

  “I was a terrible manager in terms of finding gigs,” he says, smiling and shaking his head. “I got things like the Clearwater Festival, a Pete Seeger thing on the Hudson River in Croton-on-Hudson, which was complete culture clash for everyone. I had a Volkswagen van and we all piled in and we went up. There were all these nice little people. There was somebody trying to do sign language for RAMMELLZEE’s rap, Rock Steady looking at the vegetarian food and going, ‘Eccccccch!’ It was a big, big culture clash!”

  He adds, “I know we tried to get something done with commercials—McDonald’s and others. We’d put together a package, like, ‘Here’s this amazing dance group!’ And—nothing.”

  Chalfant’s business relationship with Rock Steady would not last much longer. Perhaps the artist in him objected to wringing commerce from the culture, or perhaps he was too old and settled to have the hunger for it. “Crazy Legs and I have often talked about it. ‘Henry, you should have been our manager,’ ” Chalfant says with a twinge of sadness, “but I wasn’t good enough, or really aggressive.”

  When hip-hop finally broke through two years later, its global demand blindsided Chalfant, Banes and Cooper. “Graffiti became huge internationally and I wasn’t prepared for that. I never thought that would happen,” Chalfant says. Within a year and a half, Banes and Cooper had to retool their pitches to discuss how b-boying “had drastically changed from a folk art form to the hottest entertainment of New York’s nightlife . . . sparking world-wide interest in hip-hop style.”15 In their book proposal, they promised to discuss why graffiti, rapping, and b-boying is “not taken seriously because it diverges drastically from the ‘proper’ Euro-American high culture our educational system imposes.”16 So the rejection letters continued to pile up. The three were still struggling to try to present the youth movements as purely as they had first encountered them.

  Separately, Chalfant and Cooper had been shopping graffiti books to no avail. They teamed together and suffered two more years of rejections from New York publishing houses. They were told that Norman Mailer’s 1974 book The Faith of Graffiti was the last word on the subject. Chalfant says, “The other reason, truly, was that they were scared, and they were afraid that they’d get hell.”

  Their book, Subway Art, was finally accepted and published in 1984 by a London-based house, Thames and Hudson. The book brought the energy of the Writer’s Bench and Chalfant’s studio into the world, and became a style canon and study-guide for the third, now global generation of aerosolists. Subway Art went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

  With American and British public television, foundation and government arts grants and even support from Nathan Glazer, though not a penny from the William Bennett–run National Endowment for the Humanities, Chalfant and documentary filmmaker Tony Silver put together the classic hip-hop movie Style Wars. Shot between 1981 and 1983, it captured the youth movements in a moment of high flux as they stood on the brink of becoming a generation’s global culture.

  The movie had begun as a short on b-boying, but when Chalfant and Silver ran out of money, Rock Steady blew up on the downtown scene and were no longer available. So after hearing Kathy Chalfant describe the drama Henry was living through with his graffiti-writing friends—it was an aria, he later said—Silver shifted the focus to graffiti. He was convinced that they had a Wagnerian opera on their hands: Here was a street art poised on becoming a legitimate artform; but first it would have to get through Mayor Koch, MTA chief Richard Rav-itch and a snarling graf writer named CAP ONE. Style Wars stands as a landmark achievement for hip-hop film, the seminal documentary of graffiti and b-boying.

  All these works now evoke an era of Apollonian innocence. But at the time, the downtowners felt they had backed into an ideological wasp’s nest. The movie had a successful run on PBS stations across the country, proving especially popular in West Coast markets like Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area. But after a single showing on the PBS outlet in New York, it never returned. The documentary’s sympathetic portrayal of graf artists was deemed irresponsible.

  When Silver and Chalfant began screening Style Wars for audiences around the country, many people their age thought the two should have known better. Even some liberals who had survived the ‘60s with their long-hair values intact were upset. Chalfant wrote, “The audience at any showing of Style Wars attended by Tony or me always raises the same questions: in one, angry citizens berate us for encouraging vandalism everywhere, and in the other, the purists ask if we regret being part of a process that has destroyed urban folk culture.”17

  World’s Famous

  For Malcolm McLaren, all these earnest folkies were only worthy of being pranked. Authenticity was a bad word, exploitation was not.

  McLaren was a carrot-topped London art student energized by the Parisian spirit of ‘68, who then embarked on a career of anarchic fun-making. By 1977, with an eye on the Big Idea and a gift for self-promotion, he had succeeded like no other Situationist before him, dropping the Sex Pistols on quaint old England like a blitz bomb. After the spectacular collapse of the Sex Pistols and the postcolonial pop candy of Bow Wow Wow, McLaren’s first “serious” project was a sendup of global folk dances called Duck Rock.

  For the project, McLaren positioned himself as a sort of arch-browed, post-modern Alan Lomax. He would go around the world collecting ethnic dance music on a little tape recorder and brand it all with his general dadaist nonsense. “I think it’s gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened. I think it’s gonna be the most truthful,” he boasted to one journalist. “And I think it’s gonna create an awareness that will bring together whatever they’re doing in El Salvador or Peru with whatever they’re doing in Zululand or Appalachia.”18

  McLaren had realized the future was in global rhythms, what marketers would later call “world beat.” He owed this new worldview to Afrika Bambaataa. Arriving in New York City the same summer as The Clash, McLaren met Michael Holman, a downtown club promoter and one of Rock Steady Crew’s new managers, who took him up to Bronx River Community Center for a Zulu Nation throwdown. Hip-hop was pastiche, bricolage. It was worldly wise and you could dance to it. Best of all, it was dangerous.

  McLaren later admitted he was scared out of his wits. At the end of the night, when a fight broke out and the entourage was hustled to a back wall as the fists and knives flew, all of his stereotypes were confirmed, and, typically, he had come up with a plan for how to exploit them. He began by ask
ing Bambaataa, the Soul Sonic Force and the Rock Steady Crew to open Bow Wow Wow’s downtown show at the Ritz. Then, he made plans to visit the Zulu townships of South Africa.

  Back in London, his partner, Vivienne Westwood, matched McLaren’s musical ambition with a line of “ethnic hobo” clothing, a style that made its models look like raccoons wearing shopping bags. McLaren’s young associate in New York, Ruza Blue, opened a nightclub called Negril in the East Village where she booked the Zulu Nation DJs and the Rock Steady Crew. McLaren returned to recruit a DJ crew to front the project, and after lots of heads turned him down, the World’s Famous Supreme Team, a two-man crew of Five Percenters named Just Allah the Superstar and Cee Divine the Mastermind who had a rowdy, popular late-night show at WHBI, finally agreed.

  In the fall of 1982, he unleashed a stunning little single called “Buffalo Gals.” McLaren’s collaborator Trevor Horn tried to replicate the feel of Bam’s funky breaks, using brand-new sampling technology to add on Supreme Team show call-ins, township jive groans, Just Allah’s rap, and McLaren’s interpretation of the old “hilltopper” song. The video, shot in the middle of the freaky Greenwich Village Halloween parade, featured the Rock Steady Crew popping and breaking, Dondi White painting a graf piece and Westwood’s models going round the outside and looking like hobos. With a video, a radio show, a nightclub, and a clothing line all ready for consumption, McLaren and his team had come up with hip-hop culture’s first corporate synergy plan.

  The album that followed, Duck Rock, was backwards brilliant. Using hiphop’s global vacuum signifier intake as their method, McLaren and Horn brought together popular and religious regional dance music—merengue, mbaqanga, mambo, sacred Lukumi drumming, the odd square dance and, of course, hip-hop. The Supreme Team’s raucous, hilarious radio call-ins held the whole thing all together. In a sense, a hip-hop worldview allowed McLaren to sum up the “world music” genre a decade before its fixture in the First World pop marketplace, and deconstructed it at the same time. In the United States, the record was released by the pioneering “world music” label, Chris Blackwell’s Island Records.