Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

When Kool Lady Blue finally found a new home for her “Wheels of Steel” night, her club became the steamy embodiment of the Planet Rock ethos. In Negril, Blue had seen the potential of a model that countered the elitism of the Blitz. To its ecstatic followers, the Roxy would become “a club that changed the world.”4

  After getting kicked out of Negril, Blue had done a couple of “Wheels of Steel” nights at Danceteria, another downtown new wave club. But convinced that she was on to something big and magnificent, she fell in love with a huge, nearly block-long roller rink in Chelsea on West 18th Street and Tenth Avenue. The Roxy’s capacity was twenty times that of Negril. “I said the Roxy is megabig, I can’t see you packing that joint,” says FAB 5 FREDDY. “She said, ‘Well I think we have an idea, we can bring this curtain and cut off more than half of the club.’ So she took me to show it to me and I gave her my thumbs up on some shit like that. Then from there it was like, boom!”

  In June, Blue hung out a sign at the rink: COME IN PEACE THROUGH MUSIC. Her gamble was immaculately timed. She opened the club with all of the scene’s leading lights at the beginning of a hot summer when graffiti and b-boying and hip-hop music was on everyone’s minds.

  For the first few nights, a curtain painted by FUTURA was set in the middle of the floor. Each week, the crowd grew and the curtain moved back toward the wall, until it was literally against the wall. Long lines snaked down West 18th toward the Hudson. After clearing the bouncers, clubbers stepped up into a long hallway that featured neon-colored graf murals and felt the tricky beats set their hearts to racing. They were stepping into another world.

  “The regulars were Bam and Afrika Islam, and then Grandmixer DST, Jazzy Jay, Grand Wizard Theodore, Grandmaster Flash, and I’d rotate them,” she says. “We had no booth. The DJ would be in the center of the floor on a podium. Everyone could see what he was doing, and he was kind of elevated to rock star status.” On both sides of the DJ, large projection screens displayed Charlie Ahearn’s slides of Bronx b-boys, rappers, and scenemakers. Nearby, the Rock Steady Crew convened all-night ciphers on the beautiful blonde wood floors. PHASE 2 designed the club’s flyers and he, FUTURA, DOZE and others often did graf pieces live onstage. Here were the four elements, re-presented downtown as performance art on an epic and mythic scale.

  FAB 5 FREDDY recalls the turning point as the July night Blue decided to book a screening of McLaren’s Sex Pistols movie, The Great Rock ‘N’ Roll Swindle before the regular opening of the club. “The crowd initially was mostly heads from the scene. The night when it all really mixed I remember vividly,” he says. “[The film] attracted all of these cool punks, white new wave heads, whatever. The film was shown kinda early like around nine. When it was over, a lot of that crowd stayed. And then the crowd for the hip-hop night started to come and I was wondering like, ‘Yo what’s gonna happen?’ And everybody kinda bugged out looking at each other. You had these ill b-boys with the poses and shit, checking out these kids with the crazy haircuts and that whole vibe. And everybody kinda got into each other, so to speak. That’s when it really kinda took off as the first really major downtown club that had like a legitimately mixed scene.”

  The East Village elite came west—all the Mudd Club regulars, the Co-Lab activists, bands like the Talking Heads and the B-52s, the come-ups known by a singular name: Basquiat, Haring, Madonna. Blue billed it as the anti–Studio 54. But the stars came anyway, blown in by the winds of change, the promise of something ineffably new and vibrant. David Bowie and Andy Warhol descended from the VIP booth to the join the masses on the dancefloor.

  The scene also felt inviting for mainstream whites, like David Hershkovits, a music journalist who would go on to publish PAPER magazine. “It was cool, it wasn’t rowdy. And I don’t remember it smelling dangerous or anything like that, the way those things eventually turned into,” he says. “What attracted me to it at first was it was a hip-hop thing coming downtown from the Bronx into my neighborhood and mingling with the artists and the writers and the people who were in Manhattan who didn’t have any direct contact with hip-hop at the time. The doors were open.

  “The crowds were very diverse. That was why I was so excited to be there. Suddenly this racially mixed group was having a good time partying in a room together, which was a very rare thing. On the level of music and art, people were able to bridge all these boundaries.”

  He adds, “The other thing that reminds me of those days is the style, because we were coming out of a sloppy era. Punk rock was about wearing torn clothes, T-shirts and just messy. Here you got these guys who would wear their jeans, but they’d be creased and they’d be perfect. And they’d have their sneakers but they’d be completely white. I remember one time I went into the bathroom and I said, ‘What are you doing?’ And it was FAB 5 FREDDY and another guy with toothbrushes cleaning their shoes. Here were these guys from the ghettos coming out and showing everyone how to dress, how to be fresh, how to be clean, how to have it together—whether it was the way you did your dance or your graffiti or your rapping or your DJing, it was all style.”

  Among the masses on the floor were a new generation of white kids, watching the future rush right up to their shelltoes. Dante Ross, who would become a key hip-hop A & R exec during the late ‘80s, remembers, “I used to go to the Roxy, me and my neighbor Adrock. Me and the Beastie Boys and the girls from Luscious Jackson, we were like the handful of people who got to experience shit while it was still open and ill, before New York was corny and everything was kind of co-opted. The word ‘alternative’ didn’t exist. It was this great moment, man, the ‘Graffiti Rock’ moment. Everything was all mixed up, it was cool to be eclectic.” The music was uptempo, bright—Malcolm McLaren’s “Buffalo Gals,” Chuck Brown’s “Bustin’ Loose,” Manu Dibango’s “Soul Makossa,” the Rolling Stones’ “Start Me Up,” Aleem’s “Release Yourself,” new rap records by FAB 5 FREDDY and PHASE 2—a perfect showcase for the Rock Steady.

  Crazy Legs, all of sixteen, was amazed at how far he and his crew had come in three short years. “We were the stars,” he says. “When we had started performing, we were the people that were at the jams in the Bronx outside the ropes. Now we had become the people that were inside the ropes. Now we had the opportunity to perform with Cold Crush Brothers, Fantastic Five, Grandmaster Flash, Grandmixer D.ST., Funky Four + One, we became part of that elite clique in hip-hop. We thought about that a lot. We were just appreciating the fact that we were at a place where we could be recognized for our skills by all these people we wanted to be.”

  “We were just innocently having fun,” he says, “not realizing that we were setting a foundation for what is a multibillion dollar a year industry.”

  Charlie Ahearn recalls, “You would go to a night at the Roxy and there would be eight b-boying circles. Girls would be getting laid in the back room by fourteen-year old graffiti artists that couldn’t wait to do some blonde. It was all good. A lot of excitement, a lot of energy.”

  “Ah man, the Roxy,” sighs DOZE. “Home! That’s when the money was rolling and cocaine was flowing!

  “I call them Dustland Memories. Fuck Stardust memories, it’s Dustland memories!” he laughs. “Just everyone being on zoo-bang, walking around with cocaine wrapped up in newspaper, and just being in the VIP room with Madonna, and Shannon and fucking Jody Watley and fucking Shalamar and all them heads. It was just funny.” He shakes his head at his teen mischief, halfway between pride and sadness.

  “You go from the real new waver to the hardcore punk to the b-boy to the stick-up kid b-boy to the Dale Webo fashion boy to the Funhouse Jellybean Benitez look to the Madonna lace-fiend to the wannabe artist nouveau bohemian. It was just an eclectic bunch. But it was cool ‘cause everybody got along and you got to meet some real cool chicks. Kinda weird chicks, too. Weird weird weird weird!”

  Then he becomes animated. “Crazy shit went on in that place. My mom even went! Ken Swift’s mom used to go. Crazy Legs’s mom used to go. Yeah! We’d be embarrassed. Like—’
Ah Ma! Get outta here, come on!’ ‘I’m so proud of you, come here!’ We’d be like, ‘Fuuuuck, get outta here!’ So we’d hide ‘til they leave, ‘cause parents have to go home early.” He’s laughing hard now. “They’d leave, then we’d be like, ‘Yeah! Aiiight! Wassup baby!’ ” he laughs, making a high-five, then bending his head as if over a mirror laced with white lines. “Snnnnnooooort! Ahhh. Aiiight!”

  Chi Chi Valenti, a downtown personality and sometime host at the Roxy, wrote, “By late 1982, Fridays had become a required stop for visiting journalists and Eurotrash—to be in New York and miss the Roxy was unthinkable. More than anything the Roxy embodied a certain vision of what New York could be—a multiracial center of a world culture, running on a current of flaming, uncompromised youth.”5

  Blue tried to match all the artistic ambition with a booking policy that was just as eclectic and innovative. She brought an uptown who’s-who to the downtown stage: Double Trouble, the Treacherous Three, the Fearless Four, the Disco Four, The Crash Crew, The Sequence, Masterdon and the Def Committee DJs. In the earliest stages of their careers, New Edition, Madonna and Run DMC stepped onto the Roxy stage. She brought in the Double Dutch girls, and featured a Harlem youth dance troupe and a Brazilian capoeira crew. She even hired Native Americans to perform a sundance.

  But as high as the highs were, some of the hip-hop heads were beginning to wonder about what was really going on. Were they being paid fairly? Were they being exploited? Just how did this white downtown crowd really see them? Did being a part of the anti–Studio 54 only mean that the street kids got a chance to sniff coke, too?

  Crazy Legs says, “The Roxy could have also been a zoo. People were able to hang out in the cage with us and feel safe from getting beat up or stuck up, as opposed to coming to the Bronx, coming to a jam. It’s like they were allowed to hang out in the cage and party with the animals, you know? It was a safe haven for a lot of people. But on the flip side, it was also us getting into places that we never thought we could get into. So there was an exchange there.”

  He concludes, “I’m not gonna sit here and act like, ‘Oh wow, it was so great back then!’ There were things—that was also the beginning of us getting jerked. I’m not bitter about it. I’m over that. But that’s a reality.”

  Close to the Edge

  Outside the floating world of the Roxy, Reagan’s recession had bloated unemployment levels to the highest levels since the Great Depression—30 million searching for work.6 The official Black unemployment rate hit 22 percent.7Poverty rates were soaring too. Black poverty hit a twenty-five-year peak in 1983, with 36 percent of the population counted as living below the poverty level. It was much worse for young people. One estimate was that only one in five New York City teens had a job, only one in ten African Americans, the lowest ratios of youth employment in the country.8

  After dark, DJs cut up Trouble Funk’s “Pump Me Up,” with its ironic command for people to dance their troubles away: “All we want to see is your body work!” But the Roxy night always opened into a Reagan morning that was much more than a comedown. “The Message,” released just weeks after the Roxy opened, was a downtempo track that perfectly captured that after-dawn crash when the buzz wore off.

  It was credited to Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, but the story behind that naming revealed other tensions as well. The song was a home-studio concoction of Sugar Hill songwriter and house band percussionist Ed “Duke Bootee” Fletcher, featuring a memorable synthesizer hook from Jiggs Chase, that seemed to bear the influence of Peter Tosh’s “Stepping Razor” and Black Uhuru’s Red. Bootee and Sugar Hill mogul Sylvia Robinson could not interest Flash in recording it. He and the rappers felt the song had no energy, that the lyrics would get them booed offstage by their hardcore fans. You went to a party to forget about shit like this.

  But Robinson and Bootee recorded the track anyway, peeling off Furious Five rapper Melle Mel to add his last verse from a forgotten version of “Superappin’.” Robinson decided “The Message” had to be released as a single. Flash saw where this was going, and he pushed the rest of the Five into the studio to try to rap Bootee’s lines. It didn’t work. Instead, Bootee and Robinson added them at the end of the record, in streetside arrest skit recalling Stevie Wonder’s interlude in “Living for the City.” But Pandora’s Box had been opened. The ensuing tug-of-wars between the group and the label and between Mel and Flash resulted in Flash leaving Sugar Hill the following year. The video appeared, with Flash and the crew lip-synching along to a rap only Mel had helped compose.

  Sugar Hill’s second most important rap record had been as A&R–driven and market-driven as its first, and the consequences for hip-hop music were also far-reaching. Not only was “The Message” another boost for the rapper over the DJ, the crew itself became a dramatic casualty of rap’s realignment towards copyrights, trademarks, executives, agents, lawyers and worldwide audiences. By the end of 1983, there were two groups called the Furious Five, competing in civil court for the rights to the name, and dousing their creative fires under thousands of dollars of cocaine. From this point, questions of ownership and authorship would become hip-hop generation obsessions.

  But Robinson’s instincts had been exactly right: the record became the fifth rap single to reach gold-selling status. The single certainly did not represent the first time post-’60s rappers had chosen to touch on themes of social dislocation and institutional racism—Kurtis Blow’s “The Breaks,” “Hard Times” and “Tough,” Brother D and the Collective Effort’s “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise,” and Tanya “Sweet Tee” Winley’s “Vicious Rap” were just some of the recorded examples. But because it was set to a beat too slow to rock a crowd, “The Message” focused the listener on Bootee and Mel’s vivid lyrics and their delivery—neither frenetic nor flamboyant, but instead, by turns, resigned and enraged. Flash’s instincts had been correct, too: it was the grimmest, most down-beat rap ever heard.

  And that vibe matched a rising disgust with Reaganomics, the culmination of fifteen years of benign neglect, and a sense of hopelessness that only seemed to be deepening. Liberal music critics who had been sitting on the fence about rap jumped off with both feet. “[I]t’s been awfully easy to criticize mainstream, street-level rap for talking loud and saying nothing. No more,” wrote Vince Aletti in The Village Voice, praising the song’s chorus as “a slow chant seething with desperation and fury,” and the track’s “exhilarating, cinematic sprawl.”9

  It’s among hip-hop history’s greatest ironies that “The Message,” so artificial and marginal by the standards of the culture then, would prove at once to be a song so truthful about the generation’s present and, in its righteous retail math, so influential to that generation’s future culture.

  Fun and Guns

  The visions of “Planet Rock”—universal communion and transcendence—and “The Message”—ghetto strife and specificity—could only be brought together on the dance floor. But in the graffiti movement, both a bellwether and a vanguard, the contradictions were intensifying. Mike “IZ THE WIZ” Martin, a king from Queens, says, “1982, in my opinion, was the beginning of the end for graffiti. That’s why I did as many pieces as I could during that time period. I knew it was the last hurrah.”

  Dondi White, for instance, had made his legend during the blackout of 1977. When the next summer morning came, the sixteen-year old’s name had been emblazoned over a staggering number of cars and he had begun his journey toward becoming the Stylemaster General.10 Five years later, he was leaving the subway underworld for the light of the galleries—a carnival of openings, meetings, contracts, exhibitions. On Valentine’s Day in 1982, he opened his first solo show at the dizzying, packed Fun Gallery.

  The public face of the Fun Gallery was its magnetic co-director, Patti Astor, a ‘68er, sometime Warhol associate, and a former underground movie star, who had just finished a role in Wild Style playing a journalist who brings the hip-hop scene downtown. Her tiny storefront in th
e East Village became a more traditional gallery counterpart to the Bronx’s freewheeling Fashion Moda. It was a downtown lodestar from which a shortlist of writers could catapult themselves into the art scene.

  When it opened in August of 1981, it was a temporary space with no name. The artists would give it one when they showed there. “Kenny Scharf came up with ‘Fun Gallery,’ FAB FIVE FREDDY was next. He wanted to call it ‘The Serious Gallery,’ ” Astor said. “We stayed with ‘Fun.’ ”11 FAB’s show vaulted the gallery into the international spotlight. The East Village, once needle-stick somnambulant, was suddenly fun. At its peak, it featured over seventy galleries.12

  There was a growing duality in the movement. Some writers called the galleries their new yard. But they would never master the art-world the way they had their world of yards and transit cops, toys and enemies. Years later, Elizabeth Hess would ask the question that was never answered at the time, “Was it their work or their class and racial exoticism that inspired patrons to support them and dealers to legitimize their unorthodox talents?”13

  “Between ‘82 and ‘85 I created enough work to supply ten dealers in five galleries,” Dondi told ZEPHYR. “The thing is, I felt if I wasn’t painting then people would think I wasn’t a real artist to begin with.”14 Collectors dabbling in graffiti as radical chic wrapped the artists in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable strait-jacket of preconceptions and expectations.

  It was becoming clear to the artists that while the biggest galleries were eager to make stars of Haring and Basquiat and Scharf, they saw the artists from the subways as a bunch of primitives. ZEPHYR says, “One thing that always comes back in my mind is that CRASH, FUTURA—totally different artists, completely different aesthetics visually—all were struggling with the fact that the people who were presenting this work were often unwilling or unable to present those artists as individuals with a very distinct vision. Every artist had their own thing visually. But it didn’t come out because very few of the dealer/owners, with a few exceptions, had the willingness to avoid group shows.”