Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  The Duck Rock video captured scintillating double dutch and township dance performances and gave many outside of New York their first glimpse of graffiti, b-boying, popping, and DJing. In an inspired signifier mashup, McLaren played a British redcoat mock-shocked, upside down, and bleeding to death on a battlefield—the opening scene of Zulu redux. As a shebeen-styled guitar beat unfurled, the scene cut to township dancers kicking up dust while wearing Rock Steady–style cotton tees emblazoned with iron-on letters that read, ZULUS ON A TIME BOMB.

  McLaren told journalists that in darkest South Africa he had regaled the Zulus with tales of the Sex Pistols, which inspired them to pen some of Duck Rock’s songs. But this was just his crude imperialist fantasy. In fact, far from being “folk” songs he’d discovered in a distant village, the township jive and merengue songs had been local pop hits in the ‘70s, replayed note-for-note by pick-up bands in Johannesburg and New York City. Their inspirations—such as the “Indestructible Beat” of South African guitarist and composer Marks Mankwane, his legendary Makgona Tsohle Band, and the groaner, Mahlathini, and vocal group, the Mahotella Queens—went unacknowledged and uncredited. A flood of lawsuits would follow. Perhaps it was perfectly hip-hop.

  On the other hand, McLaren’s self-serving pomo-imperialist-as-new-rock-star mythology was annoying. The longform video shredded context, running b-roll of Brazilian carnival over Dominican merengue, even as McLaren gave goofy, lyrical shouts to rock-n-roll, calypso, “m-m-m-mambo” and “discago”—descarga, that is. Brain-curdling bushman stereotypical images accompanied the sacred batá rhythms. In the same year Duck Rock was released, Robert Farris Thompson’s book on the diasporic links between African and African-American art and philosophy, Flash of the Spirit, came out. Bambaataa had inducted McLaren into the same world of rhythm and soul that Thompson was describing, but McLaren had returned from his journey with less than half the story, and that portion was scrambled.

  Duck Rock’s liner notes mocked folkie earnestness and anthropological “discovery.” Moreover, they seemed to anticipate an academic petrifaction of the hip-hop subject. But the liner notes also revealed McLaren’s crassly exploitative desire, the dark underside of his ironic distancing:

  The performance by the Supreme Team may require some explaining but suffice it to say, they are d.j.’s from New York City, who have developed a technique using record players like instruments, replacing the power chord of the guitar by the needle of the gramophone, moving it manually backwards and forwards across the surface of the record. We call it ‘scratching.’

  Despite McLaren’s ambitions, Duck Rock never became “The Great Hip-Hop Swindle.” Instead of McLaren swallowing hip-hop, hip-hop devoured him. He would not fully comprehend the lessons Bambaataa and his followers had taught him until long afterward. By then, he had become a parody of himself, remaking Duck Rock in myriad failed ways before finally giving up on a recording career. Years later Bambaataa himself would chuckle at the mention of McLaren’s name and dismiss him with two words: “culture vulture.”

  Now that they were no longer invisible, the young rebels made it clear that they wanted more. FAB 5 FREDDY told a journalist, “I didn’t want to be a folk artist, I wanted to be a fine artist. I wanted to be a famous artist.”19

  At the Graphiti International gallery, with paintings by CAINE and CRASH. From left:

  TRACY 168, WASP 1, LADY PINK, IZ THE WIZ, ERNI. Standing: FREEDOM.

  Photo © Martha Cooper

  9.

  1982

  Rapture in Reagan’s America

  The room was hot, sweaty, highly charged and had the feel of destiny to it.

  —Chi Chi Valenti

  You just had the sense of the future, like you could do anything you wanted to.

  —Ruza “Kool Lady” Blue

  It was morning in Ronald Reagan’s bright white America. Elected by a landslide in 1980, he rode into office like a celluloid cavalry colonel coming to the rescue of the beleaguered frontiersmen. When Reagan’s campaign trail took him through the dead land of Fort Apache to Charlotte Street, it followed almost exactly the same route that Jimmy Carter had taken in 1977. There, Carter had given his soundbite: “I’m impressed by the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have.” Three years later, on the same empty block, the only things new were John Fekner’s graffiti stencils on the blasted brick walls, which read: FALSAS PROMESAS and BROKEN PROMISES. Reagan stopped in front of one of these stencilled walls, to the eternal grief of his handlers and positioners, and told the media: “I’m impressed with the spirit of hope and determination by the people to save what they have.”1 The presidential campaign had become a nitrate film, looping in advanced decomposition.

  In downtown’s tiny art-crammed sweatboxes, whites were watching young brown and Black b-boys go off to throbbing Afro-Latinized versions of soundtrack music from the spaghetti westerns often played by mixed-race bands like the Incredible Bongo Band’s “Apache” and Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican,” dramatic rewrites of Ennio Morricone themes that the b-boys favored for their head-bursting percussion, thundering basslines and Morricone’s cascading, whooping melodies. In particular, “The Mexican,” sung by Jenny Haan, captured the fall of the Alamo through the eyes of a Mexican bandito caught on the American side when the fighting commenced. It climaxed with a final battle cry: “Morning, sad morning, heaven will be there!”

  Downtown Utopia

  The nightclub had become a communal sacred space, a chance to escape the chafing oppression of time, to vault the restrictions of the social order, a place to watch the rules become liquid, and peer into possibility.

  In the body heat and thumping beats, Ruza Blue, a true believer in the power of clubbing, was seeking a sensual utopia and a democratic alternative. “It was the Reagan era and there was talk of war and nuclear weapons,” she says. “But then there was this whole thing going on in New York where it was the youth culture getting together in unity and peace and having fun. No segregation and everyone joining together. Just the opposite of what was going on politically.”

  And Crazy Legs, a true believer in the power of hip-hop, saw what many others saw—a bit of magic happening. “It was the beginning of the breaking down of racial barriers,” he says, “ ‘82 was the beginning of worldwide understanding.” But there would be a price to pay, too. They were promised heavens—false heavens and heavens which never materialized. The nights of radiant children always came to an end.

  When spring bloomed in 1981, the giddy affair between uptown and downtown topped the charts. Deborah Harry—who, by the number of canvases dedicated to her, seemed to be the object of every graffiti artist’s desire—was sweetly sighing out of every radio in the country: “Wall to wall, people hypnotized, and they’re stepping lightly, hang each night in rapture.” Then she turned sly, and rapped: “FAB 5 FREDDY told me everybody’s fly, DJ’s spinning I said, ‘My, my!’ Flash is fast, Flash is cool. Francois c’est pas flashe non deux.” Not that anyone outside of New York—least of all Paris—knew what she was talking about. Not yet.

  The rapture was still mainly in the minds of the believers, a small tribe moving to the edge of reshaping pop culture. Ruza Blue, a recent immigrant from London, was one of the believers. By day, she ran World’s End, Vivienne Westwood and Malcolm McLaren’s Soho boutique. In London, she had been a regular at a landmark new wave club run by Steve Strange called The Blitz. She recalls, “I used to go down there every Tuesday night to the club, sometimes not even getting in because sometimes Steve wouldn’t let you in. I used to stand outside, ‘Please let me in!’ And I thought one day, I’m gonna do a club like this. I don’t know what I’m going to put inside it, but I’m gonna do something like that.” After she saw Bambaataa and the Rock Steady Crew open for Bow Wow Wow at the Ritz, she knew she had found religion. She began frequenting the Disco Fever with FAB 5 FREDDY, who dubbed her “Kool Lady Blue.”

  By November, Blue started hosting her own Thursday night
“Wheels of Steel” parties at a tiny basement reggae club—capacity: 200—called Negril. Once frequented by Bob Marley, Negril had become the after-hours hangout for the Clash and other Brit punk expats. With Michael Holman, she brought in what seemed to have become the party-starting bill of the year: Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation DJs, FAB 5 FREDDY, RAMMELLZEE and the Rock Steady Crew. Then she promoted it to her punk peers, “People heard, ‘Oh wow, the Clash are hanging out there.’ ” When they arrived, they encountered iconic Bronx b-boys hanging outside in kangols, ski goggles, and bubble jackets, and inside, a racially mixed crowd who had cleared a circle for the Rock Steady Crew and were moving to the sounds of Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay and Afrika Islam on the turntables and FAB 5 FREDDY on the microphone.

  Blue’s “Wheels of Steel” night at Negril was the next logical step from FAB’s “Beyond Words” show at the Mudd Club, Henry Chalfant’s abortive Common Ground show, and the revived “Graffiti Rock” shows with FAB and The Rock Steady Crew and a host of graf artists at the Kitchen. Jazzy Jay says, “First couple times we played at Negril, it was an a-ight crowd, not too many people was in there. By the time a couple of weeks went by, man, it was standing room only!”

  The tiny club hummed with sensory overload. Jorge “Popmaster Fabel” Pabon, who was initiated into Rock Steady on the Negril dance floor, recalls, “Here we are looking at punk rockers and different types of bugged out people, you know, those Village type people. It was a whole new experience.”

  Negril had been a space for punks and Rastas and like-minded scenesters to meet on equal terms. Now, Blue handed the club over to the Bronx and uptown crew, and the exclusive crowd soaked up the vibe. Jazzy Jay says, “We’d school from the DJ booth, you know what I’m saying? That’s what we was doing downtown. We was schooling them on our artform. Bam would put these breaks on and drive them wild and then I’d get on the turntables and start cutting shit up and they’d be losing their minds. MCs get on, that was it. B-boys take the floor, it was like, yo!”

  Fabel recalls, “We fed off of the crowd a lot; to get them hyped was half of the reason we did it. Well, at least a quarter. Three-fourths were for more selfish reasons,” he chuckles. “Like, there’s some fine girls around here, yo!”

  Jazzy Jay couldn’t believe his luck either. “I’m a carpenter by trade,” he says. “I’m making as much from this as I’m making from my union gig. You know what? The union gig can wait. My hobby is doing me alright.” After four dazzling months, the crowds were bursting the club’s walls. Fire department officials stepped in to shut Negril down. No matter. Negril would turn out to be merely a prelude.

  By then, everyone was humming another downtown hit. Tom Tom Club, a lighthearted spinoff group of the heralded post-punk band Talking Heads, caught ears with “Genius of Love”—a girlish ode to the deepest, coolest guy in town that slipped, somehow appropriately, into a celebration of the Black rhythms of George Clinton, Bootsy Collins, Bohannon, Bob Marley and Sly and Robbie. The song captured the peculiarly downtown ecstasy: “There’s no beginning and there is no end. Time isn’t present in that dimension.” By the last verse, however, it was clear that the affair—sweet as it was—was doomed.

  Be What You Be

  In April of 1982, Afrika Bambaataa unleashed a grand statement for what he was now calling the hip-hop movement. It was called “Planet Rock.”

  Bambaataa was the right man to do it. He walked through downtown the way he did in the Bronx, the warrior-king of a massive, expanding tribe. He shaved a mohawk into his head—a salute, it seemed, not only to the rebels of Kings Road and the Bowery but a young, shocking Sonny Rollins. His crew dressed like a wild cross between a band of New Orleans Mardi Gras Indians and interstellar Afrofuturist prophets. Downtowners were impressed. “This guy carries weight,” Gary Jardim wrote in The Village Voice, “like the music stars in the ‘60s did.”2

  After cutting two singles with Paul Winley—different versions of “Zulu Nation Throwdown” (Bambaataa says “Death Mix” was unauthorized)—and being disappointed with the results, Bambaataa met Tom Silverman, a white music journalist who had started a record label for twelve-inch dance singles.

  “Bambaataa was very, very different than anybody else was from the Bronx. He said, ‘I don’t want to be a star because stars fall,’ ” Silverman recalls. “When you’re in the presence of a person like that you just feel a different kind of energy. I’ve seen this guy when he was DJing and a fight would break out. He’d stop the music and then he’d play like four bars of James Brown and stop the music again. And he goes, ‘You like that? Stop fighting.’ And everyone would stop fighting and he’d turn on the music again.” Silverman knew he wanted to do business with this guy.

  While publishing a popular tip-sheet called Dance Music Report, Silverman had first heard about hip-hop music from a friend at Downstairs Records. “I knew the store because I used to buy doo-wop music there. They’d opened a new room and it was called the ‘B-boy Room’ and it was like a closet the size of a small office. It had a high desk in the front and in the back they had the records. It was the specialty room where you have kids come in and buy these breakbeat records.

  “They were buying things like cut-out records that were like a dollar each but they were being sold for ten dollars. Albums like The Eagles’ The Long Run and Billy Squier’s “Big Beat,” all these weird records! Bob James, “Apache,” “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat”—a lot of them on 45s, a few off albums and a lot of people would buy them just for one break and the break would only be for seven seconds long or three seconds long so they have to buy two of them so they could mix it. The kids were fifteen and sixteen. They’d chip in money, then three or four of them would come in and buy records together. I asked them how they find out about which records had the breaks, where they find out about the breaks, and they say there’s this guy in the Bronx called Afrika Bambaataa and he had this thing called the Zulu Nation. So I went up to check it out.”

  Bambaataa was spinning at the T-Connection at a Zulu Nation anniversary party. Red Alert and Jazzy Jay were standing sentry, handing him records. “It was the weirdest mix of music I ever heard in my life but it was amazing,” says Silverman. After returning to Bam’s parties a few more times, Silverman asked him if he’d like to make records. They talked for a minute, then before Silverman left Bambaataa handed him a business card that read, “Afrika Bambaataa Master of Records.” Under Silverman’s label, Tommy Boy, Bambaataa released “Jazzy Sensation” in November 1981.

  Silverman had brought in a young dance producer named Arthur Baker to oversee “Jazzy Sensation.” Baker had begun to learn how to use drum machines, synthesizers and early sampling technology. The record was a success, and the three wanted more.

  By then Bambaataa had realized, “I could use my albums to send messages. And the record companies played their role of sending these messages to all these places.” He told Silverman he had an idea for a song. He and Jazzy Jay had already drawn up a rough blueprint of the music, based on some of his favorite records: Babe Ruth’s “The Mexican,” Captain Sky’s “Super Sperm,” Kraftwerk’s “Numbers” and “Trans-Europe Express,” B.T. Express’ “Do You Like It” and Rick James’ “Give It to Me.” Together, he and Silverman put together a rough eight-track demo on synthesizers. In the meantime, Bam went to his rapper MC GLOBE and gave him the concept to begin laying out the rap.

  Bambaataa had hooked up with gearhead and keyboardist virtuoso John Robie, who had a dance single that Bam was playing. Silverman, seeing the obvious, blessed the project and sent the Bam, Baker and Robie to Vanguard Studios in the Village to assemble the record. The final version included only Kraftwerk and Babe Ruth.

  This stripped-down result somehow perfectly captured Bambaataa’s mystery. “Planet Rock” ‘s polycultural pastiche, framed by swooping, synthesized orchestral stabs, sucked the listener into another world—where dramatic melodies drifted across a barren landscape, “where the nights are hot, where nature’s children d
ance inside a trance,” where everyone could rock it, don’t stop it. Not only did it sound unlike anything that had ever come out of the Bronx, it sounded unlike anything else anywhere. “Planet Rock” was hip-hop’s universal invitation, a hypnotic vision of one world under a groove, beyond race, poverty, sociology and geography. The Soulsonic Force shouted, “No work or play, our world is free. Be what you be, just be!”

  Bambaataa says, “I really made it for the Blacks, Latinos and the punk rockers, but I didn’t know the next day that everybody was all into it and dancing. I said, ‘Whoa! This is interesting.’ ” Silverman says that the record cost eight hundred dollars to make. It went on to sell 650,000 copies. But its importance would be felt far beyond the number of copies it sold.

  “ ‘Planet Rock’ had more impact than any record I’ve ever been involved in,” Silverman says. “The only record I can think of in the hip-hop movement that maybe had more of an impact was ‘Rapper’s Delight’ because that’s the first one that opened the door.3 But ‘Planet Rock’ took it in a whole ‘nother way. That was the record that initiated that it wasn’t just an urban thing, it was inclusive. It was okay for rockers, new wavers, uptown coming downtown. That’s when they started pouring in from France and England to cover hip-hop. That’s when hiphop became global.”

  Street Culture’s at the Roxy