by Jeff Chang
Bam stepped into the studio bursting with ideas. For “Renegades Chant,” producer Arthur Baker simply played the break and let Bam freestyle at the mic. Bam let loose with Afrodiasporic refrains and children’s rhymes. He ran through Bronx bad boys Willie Colón and Hector Lavoe’s salsa adaptation of a Ghanaian play song, “Ghana’E,” Manu Dibango’s makossa groove, “Weya,” the Black New Orleans Mardi Gras standard, “Iko Iko.” “Fanga alafia ashé ashé,” he trilled, the big man from the Bronx offering a child’s welcome in a singsong Yoruba. Pieced together by Baker into a stream-of-consciousness rap that built into ecstatic chants, Bam’s performance had the same effect as one of his famous sets—effortlessly making connections, capturing a fresh worldview.
At the same time, Temple University professor Molefi Kete Asante was pressing his idea of Afrocentricity, pulling the field of African-American Studies out of the ebony tower toward the pyramids of Egypt. Asante advocated inspirational scholarship that bridged the Pan-Africanist historiography of Cheikh Anta Diop and the cultural nationalism of Maulana Karenga.3 “Renegade Chant” was instead a kind of proto-Afrocentrism rising up from the streets—a new world heard through children’s ears.
Tommy Boy packaged the single behind a comic-book-styled cover calculated to knock a thirteen-year-old’s socks off. A mohawked Bam was depicted in a blue cape and gold genie pants, leading the Soulsonic Force—Pow Wow in full Mardi Gras Indian gear, Mr. Biggs in purple-and-leopard-skin tights, G.L.O.B.E. slicing an avenging sword—over a crumbling Bronx brick wall. Critics who had been enraptured by the Roxy and compelled by the intellectual implications of everything Bam did were confused: was this single meant to be a statement? Or a cartoon?
It was the fundamental question of the day: was hip-hop the latest surge of the freedom struggle, an Afrofuturist flash of the spirit? Or was it a kid’s fad whose marketing possibilities had not yet been exhausted?
Hip-Hop Exploitation
As the 1970s gave way to the ‘80s, popular culture still largely depended on the decisions of a small, centralized few who dictated the seasonal tastes of the masses. For the tastemakers, Michael Jackson and Prince signified Black, urban, dangerous and not ready for MTV, much less any boombox-banging crew chilling on the corner in a b-boy stance.
Sometimes, rarely, ideas came from the bottom-up rather than the top-down. Just as Gordon Parks’s The Learning Tree and Melvin Van Peebles’s Sweet Sweetback’s Baadassss Song had set off an era of blaxploitation flicks, Wild Style and Style Wars clued Hollywood producers into a potential market for hiphop themed movies.4 Would they respond by taking the audience seriously or patronizing them? On the eve of Wild Style’s New York opening, Richard Grabel wrote presciently: “Wild Style might be the first of a new genre, a Beach Blanket Bingo, a teen film for the ‘80s. Or its verisimilitude might help posterity see it as something more important, a The Harder They Come of hip hop.”5
After the unexpected success of 1983’s Flashdance—which featured Rock Steady Crew members b-boying to “It’s Just Begun” and body-doubling in Jennifer Beals’s climactic audition—Hollywood decided to cash in, and 1984 and 1985 saw a wave of teen-targeted hip-hop exploitation flicks. The two biggest movies—Breakin’ and Beat Street—were the first out of the box, rushed to meet an early summer opening. Body Rock, Fast Forward, Krush Groove, Delivery Boys, Turk 182, Rappin’, even Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo followed—and failed—in short order.
Breakin’ expanded Rock Steady’s Flashdance cameo into a full-length feature: aspiring female dancer finds herself and love via a journey through the scary, streetwise—but not too scary or streetwise—postindustrial Los Angeles pop-locking scene. Beat Street had a more ambitious scope. Prowling the Roxy, the producers—Harry Belafonte and David Picker—gathered a DJ, rap and dance A-list: DJ Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, Jazzy Jay, Zulu Queens Lisa Lee and Sha Rock (performing with Debbie D as Us Girls), Melle Mel, the Treacherous Three, Doug E. Fresh, Rock Steady Crew, New York City Breakers, the Magnificent Force. On paper, this was the historical equivalent of landing Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Billie Holiday, the Nicholas Brothers, Honi Coles and Cholly Atkins and Whitey’s International Hoppers for a feature film about jazz.
Beat Street’s dramatic thrust was fed by the main themes of Wild Style and Style Wars—the competitive drive of the culture’s devotees, the generational, racial and class tensions the culture fueled, the perilous negotiations between uptown and downtown. The original script had been written by the highly respected Steven Hager, one of the first journalists to cover the rap and graffiti scenes for the New York Daily News and alternative papers like The Village Voice, East Village Eye and the Soho News. Hager made explicit what most other journalists had not, that the subcultures of b-boying, rap and graffiti were related. He wrote a book called Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music and Graffiti, tying together the three. Hager’s book and David Toop’s more rap-oriented book, The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip Hop, would together constitute the Old Testament of hip-hop, the foundational works of hip-hop journalism and scholarship.
Hager had approached Harry Belafonte with a concept for a script. He says, “I wanted to get the story told as accurately as possible, and I knew the influx of money was rapidly changing the scene.” Belafonte, whose commitment to Afrodiasporic folk arts was unquestionable, loved the idea, and hired Stan Lathan, an African-American director with extensive experience in film musicals, to direct it. Beat Street hit the theaters in June, just weeks after Breakin’ had already clocked an amazing $30 million. But Hager says his script had been completely rewritten. “Not a single word of anything I actually wrote made it into that unfortunate film,” he says.
Despite some riveting scenes shot at the Roxy, including a classic battle between Rock Steady and New York City Breakers, Beat Street proceeded from form the assumption that hip-hop needed to be dumbed down for the kids. Most of the graffiti—including a lousy replica of the Fabulous Five’s famous “MERRY CHRISTMAS” train—was painted by a theatrical union crew. Professional actors spoke like Shakespeareans stranded by their agents in the concrete jungle. Afrika Bambaataa’s Zulu Nation saga became inconsequential backstory for the lead character, Kenny. Lee Quiñones’s angst-ridden ZORO and Jean-Michel Basquiat’s Magic Marker alter-ego SAMO were conflated in the Puerto Rican train writer RAMO. The main antagonist, based on CAP ONE, was renamed SPIT and, like Pam Grier’s wordless character, Charlotte, in Fort Apache: The Bronx, stripped of a voice. Martha Cooper’s Washington Heights b-boy encounter became a choreographed, klieg-lit uprock battle devoid of any tension. In Beat Street, stickup kids never came to the party and cops never swung their batons, they only served up annoying sermons.
Although almost universally panned, the movies of the summer of 1984 kicked the “breakdance” fad into high gear. The New York City Breakers, now managed by Michael Holman, donned bodysuits to spin at the Summer Olympics in Los Angeles, peddled how-to-break books, high-fived Gene Kelly at the Lincoln Center, and earned an ovation from Ronald and Nancy Reagan at his second inauguration. Rock Steady Crew, now managed by Kool Lady Blue, signed a recording contract with Malcolm McLaren’s British label, Charisma, and were immediately forced to take singing lessons. The Dynamic Breakers commanded performance fees that started at $10,000 and lent their name to a line of “Breakdance Fever” toys, including branded plastic jewelry, wristbands and headbands, and sunglass/visor sets. Toy stores sold thousands of “break-dancing” linoleum mats. Thom McAnn ordered 17,000 shell-toed “Wild Style” brand shoes that, despite their name, were not a movie tie-in. McDonald’s finally did a hip-hop-themed commercial, but not with the Rock Steady.6
Melle Mel’s rap in Beat Street had climaxed with the chant, “If you believe that you’re the future scream it out and say, ‘Oh yeah!’ ” Then the rap gave way to a slickly produced musical number, fronted by a gospel-styled singer and anchored by the same mbaqanga baseline Malcolm McLaren had l
ifted for “Double Dutch.” Dozens of dancers took the Roxy dressed in a glitter-glam history of American pop fashion shook, swung and spun simultaneously.
Hip-hop had been reduced to a kid-friendly Broadway production, scrubbed clean for prime-time, force-fitted into one-size-fits-all. But the style tribes of the Harajuku would have scoffed at this stuff. Hollywood had broadcast hip-hop onto tiny islands in the Pacific and into teeming working-class ethnic suburbs in Europe, but the spitshined thing only increased the craving for the real thing.
All for a Tag
Michael Stewart was slim, Black, about six feet and 140 pounds, a handsome twenty-five-year-old with ambitions as an artist and model. He wrote graffiti. His name would capture more fame in death than in life.
In the early morning of September 15, 1983, he left the Pyramid Club in the East Village and headed into the subway station at First Avenue and 14th Street to catch the L train back home to Clinton Hill in Brooklyn. He was alone but feeling good. He’d had a six-pack’s worth of beers, it was warm out. No one else seemed to be on the platform. Perfect time to tag. He pulled out a marker and scrawled “ROS” when a white Transit Authority policeman walked up to arrest him. At this point, it was about ten minutes to three in the morning.
At twenty minutes after three, Michael Stewart was prone facedown on a gurney in the Bellevue Hospital emergency room. He had bruises all over his body. His face and hands were turning blue. His neck was scarred below his Adam’s apple. There was swelling around his eyes, back to his temples and behind his ears. He was still hogtied—the cops had handcuffed him, secured his ankles with tape and then tied his wrists to his ankles with cord. He had no heartbeat, no pulse, no blood pressure. He was not breathing.
The medics were yelling for assistance. They could not remove Stewart’s clothes because he was still handcuffed and bound. The head nurse tried to turn him sideways in hopes of helping him to breathe. She would later testify that the transit police had fumbled around for nearly five minutes trying to find the key to the cuffs. Finally, the medics were able to get Stewart breathing again. But he lay comatose.
The news of Stewart’s condition came just as a group of ministers and Black community activists—including Minister Benjamin Chavis and the Reverend Calvin Butts—that called itself the Committee Against Racially Motivated Police Violence was announcing a congressional hearing to examine police brutality against communities of color. MTA spokesperson Edward Silberfarb hastened to let the press know that Stewart had become violent and had to be subdued. Stewart had been charged with criminal possession of cocaine and marijuana, and resisting arrest.
Thirteen days later, never having regained consciousness, Stewart died in his hospital bed. A spokesman for the MTA told the press, “We deny that he was beaten, but we are cooperating with the investigation.” What had happened during that half-hour would bring down the city coroner’s office, put the MTA and the policemen’s union on the defensive, rattle the district attorney, the mayor and the governor and set off a new grass-roots Black power movement.
The public would learn that eleven transit cops had been involved with Stewart’s arrest. But it was a mystery why so many were needed to subdue a 140-pound man. Stewart did have a half-smoked joint, and what looked to be cocaine paraphernalia—a straw, a mirror, and an empty baggie—in his pockets. Yet hospital tests on Stewart revealed not even a trace of drugs in his body. The MTA quietly dropped the cocaine charge.
The swelling around Michael’s eyes and the mark on his neck were evidence that he had been choked by a nightstick. Other bruises indicated he had suffered serious blows to the head. Stewart’s family suspected foul play, and immediately demanded that a doctor of their choosing examine him. “I removed the sheets,” Dr. Robert Wolf said, “and it was obvious that he had incurred trauma to all major portions of his body, without exception. I determined that the most likely source of the wounds was a beating.”
When the city’s chief medical examiner, Dr. Elliot Gross released his autopsy the Stewart family was shocked. He hadn’t been strangled, Gross said, Stewart died of a heart attack. Moreover, he said, “There is no evidence of physical injury resulting in or contributing to death.”
The Stewarts’ lawyer, Louis Clayton Jones, accused Gross of working in “some sort of collusion” with the transit police. The New York Times issued a four-part investigative report alleging that Gross had “produced a series of misleading or inaccurate autopsy reports on people who died in custody of the police.”7 According to the Times, Gross had mishandled the autopsy report in the controversial case of Eleanor Bumpurs, an elderly Black woman shot dead by police during an eviction proceeding in the Bronx. Before the Stewart case was over, Gross would change his opinion of the cause for Stewart’s death at least three more times.
In 1982, police misconduct complaints in New York City had hit a new high. The gap between police and communities of color was growing. In response to the congressional inquiry, the police department found that an overwhelming number of cases of police brutality involved white officers and citizens of color. More worrisome was the fact that nearly half of those cases had resulted in death.8
Yet it still took District Attorney Robert Morgenthau seven months to go through a grand jury hearing process that would result in the indictments of only three of the transit officers for second-degree manslaughter charges. “If this had been a white boy who had been beaten by eleven Black officers, you would have had murder indictments within two days,” Jones said.9 At least now, the Stewarts thought, the truth would come out. And the prosecutors’ account, based on interviews with some forty eyewitnesses, was indeed shocking.
Officer John Kostick had arrested and cuffed Stewart for tagging the subway station wall. Stewart suddenly made a dash for the stairs leading to the street and Kostick tackled him. Four other officers hastened to help Kostick pin Stewart, facedown on the ground. One of the cops pulled Stewart’s head up and punched him. Then they put him in their van and drove him to the precinct headquarters at Union Square station.
Stewart again tried to escape. But he was caught by the officers and thrown to the ground. They beat him and choked him with their nightsticks. Witnesses said they saw Stewart facedown on the ground, screaming. They said the cops kicked him until he became silent. He was then hogtied, picked up and tossed into the back of the van like a bag of seed, and driven to Bellevue Hospital about thirteen blocks away for “psychiatric examination.” In the van, he apparently struggled again, and one of the officers beat him until he stopped. His body was dangled partly over the back seat when the van pulled up to Bellevue’s emergency entrance. Only after Stewart was on the gurney did the officers realize he was not breathing.
But before the case went to trial, a judge dismissed the indictments against the three transit police officers on the grounds that one of the grand jurors had been tainted. One juror, Ronald Fields, became convinced that the prosecutors were not going far enough in making their case and was moved to launch his own investigation. After the mistrial, Fields remained so disturbed by the prosecutors’ conduct that he presented his version of the case to Governor Mario Cuomo’s office.
In February 1985, District Attorney Morgenthau tried again, indicting transit police officers—six this time—in the killing of Michael Stewart. But his case rested on an untested, highly risky legal theory—that Stewart’s death constituted “criminally negligent homicide” on the part of the police. Jones was convinced Morgenthau had no chance of winning the case, and indeed did not seriously want to win. Many seemed to agree. A day later, an early-morning bomb went off in the bathroom of the Patrolman’s Benevolent Association, seriously damaging the bathroom and the offices. A group calling itself Red Guerilla Defense said in their messages to news organizations, “Tonight we bombed the offices of the PBA, which promotes racist murder and killer cops. The 10,000 racists are not worth one hair on the heads of Eleanor Bumpurs, Michael Stewart.”
The trial began almost two years
after Stewart’s death and riveted New York City. Prosecutors mustered dozens of witnesses before the all-white jury—students from a nearby dorm who had witnessed the beating at Union Square, nurses and doctors from Bellevue, even Dr. Gross. On the stand, Gross agreed that the injuries contradicted the transit cops’ testimony that Stewart had not been beaten. But he now had no official opinion on what had caused Stewart’s death.
After three months of testimony, the defense rested without calling a single witness. “You quit while you’re ahead,” a defense attorney told the press. “As far as we’re concerned, there is reasonable doubt in this case.”10 His hunch was solid. On November 24, 1985, the six officers were acquitted of all charges.
“What we have witnessed has been a farce,” Jones said. “And all the players happened to be white. The six defendants, the six defense lawyers, the two prosecutors, the twelve jurors, the judge, and even every court officer in the well of the courtroom was white. The only Black person there was the victim, and he was unable to testify.”11
The Stewart case—in which truth and justice both proved elusive—pointed toward the division to come.
Closing Time
Less than three months after Michael Stewart wrote his fatal tag, the renowned Sidney Janis Gallery opened its “Post-Graffiti” show. Janis had vaulted Pop Art into notoriety two decades before. Now, as the art market grew comfortable in its long boom, it was placing a big bet on graffiti. Could graffiti be rescued from the subway? The curator, Dolores Neumann, an idealistic art-lover who had married into one of the world’s most famous art-collecting families, thought that it could.
For months, Neumann had opened her home to the writers and closely advised them on how to make their work presentable to the gallery crowd. In the introduction to the catalogue, she wrote: “In many ways the Post-Graffiti artist depicts tragedy and joy at the very source. Springing from a youthful conscience, its optimism addresses itself to a hope for future mankind.”12Voice critic and subway art advocate Richard Goldstein wasn’t sure this I-believe-that-children-are-the-future thing was going to work. But he did his part, writing, “The work is beginning to live up to its hype.”13