Can't Stop Won't Stop

by Jeff Chang

  In 1981, the group shows had been a way for the smaller galleries to make their name and for marginal artists to join together to administer the shock of the new. By 1983, group shows were another form of marginalization. And even as the slightly tipsy art-world toasted itself in opening itself to ghetto youths, the subway and street graf scene was undergoing an explosion of violence it had never seen before.

  Mayor Ed Koch and the MTA’s Richard Ravitch militarized the yards with $20 million worth of razor-wire fences and guard dogs. The cars were whitewashed, turned into “The Great White Fleet,” and the MTA shifted its strategy towards defending the clean cars. Suddenly the amount of painting space dropped.

  This problem was exacerbated by all of the media attention. At the same time, Chalfant’s and Cooper’s photos, the anti-graffiti campaigns, the TV shows, the magazine articles and the gallery buzz swirled into a mega-TAKI effect. In the past when a young toy was seen in the yard, he would be carrying the paint-bag of a master. Now IZ was finding himself face to face in the yards with packs of thirty and forty little kids, descending in clouds of noise, hitting him up to tag their piece books, leaving empty cans all over the place, always setting off cop raids.

  With the buff and the toy flood, a new breed of bombers took over. IZ says, “One of the cardinal rules of graffiti was you didn’t go over somebody. And if you did, you made sure it was very clear it wasn’t a dis. Like if somebody had a throw-up, you did a whole car and naturally you buried it, so it wasn’t disrespectful.” Now, as Chalfant and Silver would document in their brilliant documentary Style Wars, bombers like CAP ONE could overturn that rule. When the masterpieces were erased, the definition of fame changed, the underlying structure of respect collapsed and graffiti’s code of conduct unraveled.

  To CAP, the distinction between his throw-up and your piece was meaningless. If you went over him, he was going to go over you—everywhere, he emphasized. He began attacking on multiple fronts. These cross-outs weren’t, like Basquiat’s, for play, they were for blood.

  There had always been beatdowns, but now crews mobilized to defend themselves and their spaces, and more consciously and viciously policed their layups and yards. The beefs sometimes spilled into block parties and neighborhood jams. There was, SPAR ONE says, “a whole war mentality. That’s when I remember things started getting really violent.”

  At the High School of Art and Design, PINK curated a graffiti-art exhibit with twenty of the school’s best writers. She recalls, “We had a wonderful exhibit with canvases and big eight-foot panels, free standing, and illustrations and black books and the works. We had everything in glass cases, hung up. All in all, it was a successful opening and I went home at three that afternoon, I was all exhausted. And I catch my exhibit on the six o’clock news.

  “Apparently CAP and PJAY showed up, pulled out a .45 and shot my school full of holes. Shot one kid in the back. That was it. They closed the show the next day and the principal requested I just leave their school. I never graduated from the High School of Art and Design and the faculty really cracked down on graffiti writers after that.”

  Graffiti was caught between acceptance and rebellion, aspiration and motivation. IZ says, “It was getting to a point where beef was getting settled at gallery shows, because you couldn’t find them anywhere else.”

  A World Tour

  At the same time, the four elements were being packaged to tour for the first time outside of New York. As a measure of how big hip-hop was dreaming, the tour would bypass America and head straight for the Old World. In November, Kool Lady Blue sent the stars of the Roxy to tour England and France.

  Organized by French journalist and indie record label owner Bernard Zekri, the bill was headlined by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, and included the Rock Steady Crew, the World Champion Fantastic Four Double Dutch girls, FUTURA, DONDI, Grandmixer D.ST. and the Infinity Rappers, RAMMELLZEE and FAB 5 FREDDY.

  FAB recalls, “Heads were like, ‘Yo, what’s our show gon’ be, what we gon’ do?’ I thought about it, I said, ‘Let me just tell you. Look, being that I got an art background I done seen some weird shit on the performance art tip. So no matter what we do onstage, we gon’ always look cool. Just keep it real natural. Like if you just want to walk out onstage and give your man a pound or whatever, that’s cool, that’s how we gon’ do it!’ ”

  David Hershkovits hopped on the bus to cover the tour for the New York Daily News. They planned to play seven dates in France and England on the two-week tour. “They had this whole show,” he remembers, “It wasn’t just a band, it was the graffiti and the breakdancers and the DJs and the whole experience.”

  After long bus trips broken up only by full-scale tagging and pilfering attacks at the gas stops, the twenty-five-member entourage would head onstage to try to replicate the organic feel of the Roxy for the crowds. DST spun, and his rappers rapped. Bambaataa got up and played and the b-boys would get up and dance as the spirit moved them. The Double Dutch girls headed up for a few routines. FAB and RAMMELLZEE took turns on the mike, while FUTURA and DONDI painted live pieces.

  Hershkovits recalls, “Not too many people showed up to these shows. Especially some of these little towns where they didn’t have a critical mass audience anyway. They’re not the hippest people out there. We’d play in some school gymnasium in some town, maybe fifty kids would show up. And the French are not demonstrative, even in Paris where there was a decent turnout. I remember looking at the people and they would just sort of be looking at each other trying to figure out if they should like it or not. They didn’t know quite how to react. It was so new.”

  Legs laughs, “Typical European audiences, man. But that’s just the way it is. We were asked like really stupid questions like, ‘Yo, are there trees in the Bronx?’ ”

  In Strasbourg, France, they got a taste of that old Bronx River unpredictability. Crazy Legs recalls, “We did a show and there was these drunk people, and the Double Dutch girls were onstage doing their thing. They threw bottles at them.” The music stopped. D.ST armed himself with a broken bottle, PHASE 2 picked up a chair. “Next thing you know, people were backstage talking about, ‘We gon’ get them!’ DONDI led the people out there. DONDI had his belt with his name buckle on and the dudes caught a beatdown. After they got beat down, everybody stepped back onstage, and then the people in the audience started clapping! It went from a show to a brawl to getting applause.” Bambaataa went back to playing his records, and their legend was sealed. By the time they reached Paris, the media came out to meet them like they were the real thing.

  When the hip-hop heroes returned to the Roxy, the innocence seemed to be fading. ZEPHYR says, “Everyone was trying to hustle something. Someone had an angle, someone was like, ‘Can I take your picture?’ ‘Can I make a movie about you?’ ‘Can I do a series of shows at The Kitchen with you?’ ‘Can I write an article in The Village Voice?’ ”

  Rolling Stone, People and Life came down with photographers and journalists. Fashion designers prepared their next year’s lines by taking notes and trading numbers with the graffiti writers. Post-disco indie-label owners like Tom Silverman, Corey Robbins and Steve Plotnicki of Profile Records, Aaron Fuchs of Tuff City Records or Will Socolov of Sleeping Bag Records might be buying artists drinks at the bar. Soon these white-owned indies would eclipse the Black-owned ones; even the mighty Sugar Hill never recovered from the acrimonious collapse of its biggest act, Flash and the Five. Harry Belafonte had begun to soak up ideas for a multimillion dollar Hollywood movie that would be called Beat Street. A year later, the Roxy’s owner ousted Kool Lady Blue. The dispute, she says, was over money.

  A Little Story That Must Be Told

  Perhaps the most lasting tribute to the spirit of ‘82 is the movie that Charlie Ahearn, Fab 5 Freddy, and Lee Quiñones gathered to talk about in the abandoned massage parlor in Times Square, Wild Style. The movie captured the sense of discovery, the new thing in all its raw, unpolished glory.

  P
erhaps much of its wonder had to do with its surrender to the culture. Ahearn—whose previous movie, The Deadly Art of Survival, had been shot on Super 8, with its main budget expense going to “buying pizza for the kids”—admits, “I’d never written a script. I really had no connection to the movie business whatsoever. I had never been to film school or been in the film business. But everyone accepted me as a Hollywood movie producer right off the bat. It was a matter of innocence on all sides.”

  Ahearn was out, he says, to make a “Bruce Lee movie. A simple hero, a simple story. Lee Quiñones was gonna be the hero. What is his problem? He’s in love with this girl but she doesn’t know he’s the famous graffiti artist. That’s it. That’s all the movie is. And in a way, it reflected exactly how I saw things—in a comic book fashion.”

  The movie’s principals were heads in the scene. There were no professional actors. PINK says, “There was a script that we all chuckled about. Picture that, a white guy just introduced to the scene and he’s trying to write slang. That was funny!”

  But Ahearn also truthfully described the scene’s deepening schisms. ZEPHYR says, “The whole thing of the whole sensibilities of the downtown and the up-town, and the woman Neva who wants to seduce Lee—’Oh can I buy your painting? Oh sit down!’ All that shit seems like it’s laughable when you watch the movie, and yet it all happened. All those things were so real. Charlie didn’t say, ‘I’m gonna parody the scene.’ ”

  By now he was deep in it, enough to understand the subtleties of off-screen realities like PINK and Lee’s tortured relationship. Lee had refused to star in the movie until Ahearn made two things clear. If he did it, he would be paid. If he didn’t, someone else would have to do the scripted love scenes with PINK. “When we shot the scene where Lee goes to the art collector, and he’s supposed to be in bed with this woman, that could have been something else entirely,” he says. “PINK found out that he was shooting this scene. She showed up at that apartment. She sat right between the camera and Lee the entire time. That’s why he was so nervous. And like, you know, it was hard to direct!”

  During Charlie and Fab’s yearlong advanced seminar in the post–”Rapper’s Delight” club scene, they walked into a marquee rivalry between Charlie Chase’s Cold Crush Brothers and Grand Wizard Theodore’s Fantastic Five Freaks, which became a major organizing theme for the movie. They caught the rappers on the stoop and in the limo, at the Dixie and the Amphitheatre, even on the basketball court. Over wickedly exciting dubplate special riddims—cut by Blondie’s Chris Stein with FAB and a downtown session band and recut Bronx-style by Theodore, Chase, DST and KK Rockwell—they captured three of the most electrifying, influential ensemble routines ever committed to tape.

  Here was Fantastic’s Prince Whipper Whip, channeling H. Rap Brown: “I am the New Yorker, the sweet walker, the woman stalker, the jive talker, the money maker”—bragging about being “the least conceited”. And undefeated, at least until Cold Crush’s JDL dispensed him with a shrug: “If you still got money and you wanna bet, well I bet a hundred dollars that I’m not whipped yet.”

  The movie’s climax was a feverish reimagining of a Bronx park jam, another downtown presentation of the four elements, but with one crucial difference. Instead of taking hip-hop up-market, Wild Style went back to the people hip-hop came from. Ahearn had always been concerned about where he screened the work as much as what was being shown. That was why The Deadly Art of Survival and his hip-hop slides always looped back to be shown in their points of genesis: the Smith Houses, the Bronx clubs. His greatest ambition for Wild Style had been to screen it in Times Square for the b-boys and b-girls, the street rappers, the Five Percenters, all the folks from around the way. Here, once again, was representation as liberation, art as activism. So the show was staged at an abandoned amphitheater near the Williamsburg Bridge in East River Park.

  The cast and crew cleaned it and fixed it up and Lee and others painted it into full hip-hop glory. Then they invited all the neighborhoods to the party. In a sense, it really was a park jam. No permits, no city fees, it was wholly a self-generated creation. The night of the shoot, thousands had gathered and the show was getting into full swing when the law finally showed up. As the police car pulled near the gate, Ahearn ran over, clipboard in hand, and said, “Oh man, I’m so glad you guys showed up. We thought you would never get here. We just need you to stand right here and help us keep this thing together.” The cops took one look at the scene, got back in their car, and drove off, never to return.

  Aside from such regular displays of improvisational genius from the producers and performers, the brilliance of Wild Style lay in the decision of Charlie and FAB never to cork the ferocious competitive energy, the feverish call-and-response, the phantasmic sense of possibility present in a hip-hop moment. Wild Style remains the only hip-hop film and soundtrack that adequately conveys the communal thrill of merging with the tide, riding the lightning.

  The timeless moment of Wild Style is the night before Reagan’s morning, sad mourning, in America. Shockdell is talking homelessness like a prophet. Ikonok-last panzer RAMMELLZEE strides onstage waving a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, reaching down and pulling rhymes out his pocket with the other. One second he’s stepping out at Cypress Hills, beating down a toy with his def graffiti, the next he’s signing off with an apple-pie flourish, shouting out the Rock Steady on the linoleum and the cops in the crowd. That ricochet unpredictability, that badder-than-bold, bolder-than-bad chest-thumping, the volatile combo of sociology-shattering disbelief and Sunday-morning faith it inspired in anyone it touched—all this was Wild Style’s, and 1982’s, gift to the world.

  Waiting for something to happen: FUTURA 2000 (foreground), Anita Sarko

  (background), b-boy, and bobby-soxer at the Roxy.

  Photo © Josh Cheuse/WFN

  10.

  End of Innocence

  The Fall of the Old School

  All the symbols of a new generation—its sense of style, scale and solidarity—are read as evidence of nascent terrorism.

  —Richard Goldstein

  When the Wild Style entourage stepped into the hot quickening buzz of Yoyogi Park in Tokyo’s Harajuku shopping district in 1983, they were walking into a battlefield of pop style. In the heart of the crowded city, Japanese youths were deep into their own generational rebellion.

  There was a circle of Bosozoku rockers, the Wild Drivers—guys with high-pomaded pompadours leaning on their motorcycles, the girls in pink party dresses dancing to Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. There was the Takenokozoku circle, the Bamboo Shoots—boys and girls with teased-out hair, faces caked with makeup, swinging and posing in loose unisex silk clothing halfway between New Romantic and Kabuki to Yellow Magic Orchestra and Culture Club tapes.

  The style tribes had taken over the park and established their turfs. They coexisted in a strange equilibrium with the passing crowds of the Harajuku and each other, a balance between projecting the menace they needed to preserve their space in the park and the flamboyance that attracted the attention they craved. So as they stared at these Bronx boys, they must have felt equally curious and threatened.

  Here were the American b-boys in their Wild Style T-shirts, Chief Rocker Busy Bee, a white towel draped over his head, scanning the scene sagely from behind dark sunglasses. The crew was deep—FAB 5 FREDDY, DONDI, FUTURA, Double Trouble, the Cold Crush Brothers. Always up for battle, they grabbed their radio and set up their own circle.

  “As a group we were so much more than what anyone could understand,” recalls Charlie Ahearn. “We just blew these people out of the park.

  “Within three days,” he says, “there were people scratch-mixing. Graffiti was popping up in imitated fashions. And by the time we left, they were so excited.” City by city, country by country, Bambaataa’s Planet Rock was being born.

  Renegades

  Tom Silverman was a former college radio DJ who had abandoned a doctorate program in environmental geology to move to New Y
ork and leap headlong into the disco scene. After scoring three hits with Bambaataa on his Tommy Boy label, he understood exactly what he had to do and who he was doing it for. “My skill is marketing these things and understanding who you’re selling records to,” he said, “which in the case of Tommy Boy is [a] thirteen-year-old Black youth.”1

  When he started, Silverman had planned on releasing only twelve-inch singles. But Bambaataa’s success demanded an album. Silverman and Bambaataa began to argue. “He likes rock and calypso and reggae. He wanted every song different. And people wanted more ‘Planet Rock’,” Silverman says. The album was delayed as Bambaataa’s and Silverman’s lawyers tangled. “The record companies would try to tell us what we should make, what we should do,” Bambaataa says. “We said, ‘Listen, we’re the renegades, we sing what we want to sing, dress how we want to dress and say what we want to say.”2 Out of this tension, Afrika Bambaataa would create another manifesto.

  “Renegades of Funk” began with a lyric from The Temptations’ 1969 Black power anthem, “Message From A Black Man”: “No matter how hard you try, you can’t stop us now.” Then, as Arthur Baker and John Robie set off an orchestra of electronic drums that pounded harder than anything they had yet done, the Soulsonic Force invoked the “renegades of their time and age”—Chief Sitting Bull, Tom Paine, Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X—in a wildstyle view of history that connected the high period of the Italian Renaissance with the rise of the Bronx’s “Big Street Beat,” and affirmed the power of “everyday people like you and me” to “change the course of history.”