by Jeff Chang
That work included thirty-six entries from art-gallery favorites Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring, as well as subway painters Lee Quiñones, FUTURA, CRASH, DAZE, BEAR, KOOR, TOXIC, RAMMELLZEE and A-ONE. Marc Brasz, who said he was influenced by the “South Bronx Graffiti tradition” which expressed “a cartoonization of everyday life,” did an acrylic of a Latino waiting for a subway train, wincing as if there were a fly on his nose. LADY PINK went aerosol O’Keefe with a full-bloomed rose. Her artist statement read, “My paintings are usually about the dying culture of the underground teenage art movement.”14
On the chic stretch of West 57th Street, fur-coated and business-suited patrons rubbed elbows with the artists they referred to as “the kids.” LADY PINK and CRASH smiled and shook hands with the patrons. Upper Manhattanites and lowdown taggers stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting for something to happen. The scheduled b-boying and rapping demonstration got started late because the kids were quarrelling, so old Sidney himself got up to break the ice, doing the fox trot to a warm round of applause.15
When the reviews came in during the following weeks, some might have wondered what drugs were in the punch bowl. New York Times critic Grace Glueck declared graffiti “a scourge,” and the “Post-Graffiti” show a condescending gesture at best. “Apart from its illegality, the very idea of enshrining graffiti—an art of the streets impulsive and spontaneous by nature—in the traditional, time-honored medium of canvas, is ridiculous,” she wrote. “By and large, their products are as much an eyesore on canvas as they are on the trains.”16
The Janis Gallery show was the beginning of the end of the graffiti writers one-sided affair with the rich and famous. Sidney Janis himself would later dis-avow the writers, saying, “They were young, unreliable, and always broke no matter how much money they made.”17 Elizabeth Hess, who had been to the Fashion Moda’s “Graffiti Art For Success” show at the beginning and was there at the end, summed up the era:
It appeared at graffiti’s high tide, that the art world was integrated for the first time. . . . But this was illusory. In retrospect, many artists think that they were used. “We provided the atmosphere,” says Futura, “and that’s it.”18
The romance was over. The locks were changed.
Several years later, Hess found Quiñones repairing wheelchairs and FUTURA delivering messages by bike. Done with the subways, sustained only by the occasional patronage of European collectors and American universities, art for them had become a more solitary process than it had ever been. Meanwhile, their friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring had become stars.
Mugging the Liberals
Crown-happy Basquiat seemed to be on a mission to king himself in the art-world. Inside, he spiraled.
On canvas, he displayed a Bambaataa-sized appetite for signifiers, harnessing and redeploying them in Twombly-meets-PINK assaults of texture, repetition and color, and negating them like Lee “Scratch” Perry in the last days of the Black Ark.19 He constantly toyed with names and classifications, exploring how science defined and ranked difference, how capital affixed weight and value. But his life was a high-wire act. As the biggest Black visual artist of the twentieth century, he spent his career in the minefield between white and Black expectations.
The white art world treated him as an exotic, a cipher onto whom they could project their fantasies. Basquiat had fun with the idea—posing alongside the pale aging Warhol as a hungry young boxer, mocking his patrons’ God complex with paintings like the “Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta” series. Even his dark, laughing figures seemed to be having a grand time with the white art-world’s perennial “return of representation” crisis.
Yet Basquiat also felt alienated from “Tartown,” his own name—part nostalgic, part dismissive—for the African-American, Haitian and Puerto Rican Brooklyn neighborhoods of his childhood. Like FAB 5 FREDDY, he had been liberated by the graffiti movement and hip-hop culture, and looked to the careers of the be-bop pioneers—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis—as metaphor and roadmap.
Basquiat’s only attempt at a record—called “Beat Bop,” featuring rappers RAMMELLZEE and K-Rob, with music by Al Diaz, released on his Tartown label—was, in the words of music critic Jeff Mao, “the grand-daddy opus of hiphop experimentalism.” Indeed, these ten minutes of funk brought the aesthetic tensions of graffiti into rap: representation versus abstraction, roots-rocking versus avant-vanguardism. The same dialectics had played out between “The Message” and “Planet Rock,” and would continue with Chuck D and Rakim, Marley Marl and the Bomb Squad, NWA and De La Soul, Mary J. Blige and Erykah Badu, and in Outkast, Black Star and Quannum.
The tensions were real. FAB 5 FREDDY had brought Basquiat, RAMMELLZEE and K-Rob together in an “interrogation,” RAMMELLZEE shared many writers’ opinions that because Basquiat had never hit a train, he was a fake. Mao writes:
During the course of the ‘interrogation,’ a battle of one-upsmanship developed between Rammel and Jean-Michel that eventually extended from challenges within one discipline of hip hop culture, graffiti, to another—rhyming. Initially, “Beat Bop” was to be Basquiat’s attempt to prove that he could conquer the art of emceeing. But after he submitted his lyrics to Rammel and his Bronx cohort K-Rob at the recording session, Rammel discarded them brusquely . . . Basquiat was never allowed to rhyme on the record. Rammellzee doesn’t credit Basquiat with actually producing the song either—only putting up the money to finish it.20
The fraught exchange would lead to one of Basquiat’s most pointed works, “Hollywood Africans,” painted during a wild trip they later took to Los Angeles, name-checking “Zee” and graf writer TOXIC near the center of the canvas. While he was between art dealers, Basquiat exhibited at Patti Astor’s Fun Gallery and kept RAMMELLZEE and other train writers in his party circle. But Basquiat dumped them as he moved closer to Warhol and the powerful art dealers Bruno Bischofberger and Mary Boone. RAMMELLZEE would later say, “Jean-Michel is the one they told, ‘You must draw it this way and call it Black man folk art,’ when it was really white man folk art that he was doing.”21
Yet even as Basquiat’s career soared, his demons would not rest. Suzanne Mallouk, one of Basquiat’s lovers, noted that while on cocaine binges Basquiat became paranoid. “He thought the CIA was going to kill him because he was a famous Black man,” she says.22 When Michael Stewart was killed, he was inconsolable, repeating to Mallouk over and over, “It could have been me, it could have been me.”23 His heroin addiction could no longer cynically be dismissed as an homage to Bird and Diz; it was serious.
Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, the opposite of Tartown, and had come to New York to seek his artistic destiny. He made his reputation as a chalk artist in the subways, with an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary—the barking dog, the glowing pyramid, the radiant child rising from the two-dimensional wasteland of the Radiant City. He surged on the graffiti wave into art-stardom. Soon he opened the Pop Shop to mass-market his art-as-product, and branded his radiant children across consumer goods, billboards, theaters, nightclubs, public and corporate sponsored murals, and high fashion and design.
At the same time, Haring maintained a highly visible profile as an activist. In an anguished 1985 painting entitled “Michael Stewart—USA For Africa,” he pictured Stewart’s death as a symbol of racial violence that linked New York City with Johannesburg, literally drowning the world in blood. The sick green hand of big money loomed behind, ready to squeeze the corpse dry once the killing was done.
When Basquiat suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 1988 and Haring succumbed to AIDS complications in 1990, these two artists—for whom innocence and encounter, desire and celebrity, cartoon and property, childhood and commodity had been obsessive themes—vaulted into lasting art-world respectability. Shortly after their deaths, the values of their paintings escalated into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.24 Haring’s 1988 tribute to Basquiat seemed prophetic: one black crown alone sits precario
usly atop a pyramid-shaped heap of tossed and overturned crowns, a graveyard of kings.
By then something had changed. On a cold December day in 1985 in a crowded subway car, Bernhard Goetz shot four Black boys—two in the back—after one had asked him for five dollars. Then he disappeared into the downtown station, a face in the crowd. When he emerged two weeks later he was welcomed as a hero, the silent majority’s avenger. Thousands of dollars poured in for his bail and defense. Without a trace of irony and perhaps more than a little delight, Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson said, “In New York City there are no liberals anymore on the crime and the law-and-order issues. All the liberals have been mugged.”
To a hip-hop head, recent history looked a lot different. Neglect had become seduction had turned to fear. Rescuing graffiti artists from the subway was the folly of rich liberals, an act of temporary insanity. But when the subway was rescued from graffiti, it was celebrated as an all-American victory.
On May 12, 1989, the MTA declared that it had achieved the ultimate buff, the final solution—a graffiti-free subway system. 6,200 clean cars were a powerful symbol. “When you’re sitting in a graffiti-covered car, you don’t feel safe. There was a sense that the system was out of control,” said David L. Gunn, the Transit Authority president echoing the logic of Nathan Glazer and Bernhard Goetz.25
Pundits greeted the MTA announcement as if it were a Martin Luther King Jr.–sized achievement. “Free at last!” read one editorial headline.26 Lee Quiñones had a different opinion. “I think if you buff history,” he said, “you get violence.”27
The Twilight of the Old School
After Beat Street, every kid across the country wanted to breakdance and every city council and shopping mall official wanted to ban it. But the only thing that put a stop to the dance was its marketing overkill. Within a year, the Bronx Rock had gone the way of Pet Rocks.
Rap continued to explode, but its center had forever shifted away from up-town. By 1984, the biggest rap crew was a trio from Queens. When Run DMC were getting started, they had to take long trips to perform in the Bronx and Manhattan. Managed by an energetic ex-Seven Immortals gangbanger named Russell Simmons, they dressed like Busy Bee and rapped like the Furious Five. But as they became more confident, their look and sound became a reaction to the old school. Using booming drum machines, their echoing raps contrasted sharply with the house-band disco rhythms that had fueled most of the early records and the crisp electro polyrhythms that replaced it. Their plaid suits gave way to a black-on-black presentation. Everything about them was stripped down, as if all the color of the old school was reduced back to its basic elements.
Run DMC had signed to a single deal with Profile Records for two thousand dollars. That single, “It’s Like That”/“Sucker MCs,” sold 250,000 copies. The subsequent albums established the crew as rap’s hardest, and through the tag-team genius of Simmons and a Jewish NYU student from Long Island named Rick Rubin, they would become the most successful. Simmons and Rubin went on to start their own label, Def Jam. The pair had their eye on the big crossover, and in a short period of time, they signed a million-dollar deal with Columbia, the first time a rap indie had gone major. They signed a cocky teen idol from Queens named LL Cool J and a trio of privileged young white ex-punkers who embraced the downtown hip-hop clubs as religion and called themselves the Beastie Boys.
But the uptown b-boys who had set downtown on fire in the first place found themselves becoming men. They had taken a roller-coaster ride beyond all their wildest dreams, and given the expectation—unreasonable, perhaps—of making a career from their teenage thrills. Just as quickly, it was all gone. Hip-hop had taken over the world, and left them behind. Crazy Legs was angry. “I didn’t even want to bother looking at rap videos,” he says. “I felt people had no respect for us. We helped you come up into the rap game.”
After the gigs and the money dried up, FABEL retreated to El Barrio. “I was just going with the flow,” he says. “Had I a long term plan it’s a possibility that I could have spared myself a lot of pain and misery from hitting rock-bottom.” With his twin brother, he latched onto the hardcore punk scene. “I was into politically conscious stuff, even though I was destroying my body and my mind. It was a strange trade-off. I’d listen to great rhymes about all of the injustices but wait, while I’m doing that let me take five hits of mescaline and down a fifth of Jack Daniels, smoke up an ounce of weed,” he says.
DOZE had graduated from cocaine to freebase. “My check started going there, and then all the money I made from the tours started to going into the habit. My so-called friends who were down with me started turning their back, they’re trying to sell me it,” he says. He became homeless.
Many of the hip-hop heads who had come downtown were now nomads cut loose from the clubs and the entertainment industry. Drugs gave them back some structure. They could loop back to the drug spot like it was the only cipher they remembered how to close. Smoke, get money, score some more, smoke. As they fell deeper into the grip of a new kind of rock, drugs also seemed the only viable financial option, a way to chase the status they once had just like they were now chasing the high.
“See, this is what happened. A lot of us didn’t want to be drug dealers. A lot of us did it by necessity,” says DOZE. “But then a lot of them did want to be drug dealers. A lot of them said, ‘You know what? Fuck this b-boying shit. We’re all bummy and shit.’ It went from camaraderie to like, ‘Yo, I gotta get mines.’ It just turned. The pulse shifted. I didn’t want to fucking destroy anybody’s life, if I was gonna destroy anybody’s life it would be my own. That was my attitude. So I said, ‘Fuck it, I’m not going to be a drug dealer.’ I’m just going to live as a hermit. I’ll live as an artist down in the Village. I had big illusions.”
Crazy Legs, FABEL and DOZE survived. Others—Buck 4 and Kuriaki of Rock Steady, Cowboy of the Furious Five and so many others—did not.
The Blow-Up
Here was the other Planet Rock, born of a much different kind of worldview.
At the beginning of the century, heroin and cocaine were both off-the-shelf pharmaceuticals, manufactured and marketed as cure-alls. Heroin was sold as a cough suppressant and a stronger form of aspirin. Cocaine was available in soft-drinks like Coca Cola. Before long, both were recognized as deadly. In 1913, the New York Times reported a rash of heroin addictions in the South Bronx, the neighborhood’s first known epidemic.28 A decade later, both substances had been banned. Production shifted overseas, and distribution moved to the criminal syndicates. During the last half of the twentieth century, an ugly, illicit nexus between war and drugs developed.
When World War II raged, Alfred McCoy recounts in his epic history The Politics of Heroin, heroin importation dropped dramatically, the number of smack addicts plunged from 200,000 to 20,000, and the heroin problem was disappearing.29 But in the all-or-nothing logic of the Cold War that followed, opium and coca products became the perfect commodities to advance coups or counterrevolution. The new Central Intelligence Agency often aligned itself with local movements that supported themselves through drug smuggling syndicates. Such was the case with the French Corsican and Italian Sicilian anticommunist fronts, who, through a combination of strategic CIA neglect and support and the enterprising wiles of American mobland deportees like Salvatore “Lucky Luciano” Luciana, soon reopened heroin trading lanes into the American ghettos.
By 1968, the battle against Communist China and Vietnam had led to the creation of what would become known as “the Golden Triangle”—the lawless zones of Burma, Thailand and Laos that came to fill a third of the global market for heroin. The yield of this extraordinary boom in heroin production was often pushed through air and sea transports run by the CIA and its foreign assets. Heroin addiction exploded amongst American troops—some reports claimed one in seven GIs were hooked—and in American ghettos.30 In turn, the profits reverted back to anticommunist military operations in Southeast Asia. Wars halfway around the globe were hel
ping create the world of pushers and junkies that the Bronx gangs walked through, the world against which Bambaataa would imagine his Planet Rock.
A decade later, cocaine was moving through routes that had sometimes been facilitated by U.S. right-wing interests in Latin America. It was a different kind of drug for a different kind of era. Heroin drove you inward and secluded you in the depths of your dreaming. Cocaine strengthened the shakiest of your convictions and made you feel powerful before the world.
Postwar cocaine trafficking began with wealthy Cuban counterrevolutionaries fleeing Castro.31 As they plotted the removal of Castro and financed military attacks on the island with cocaine profits, U.S. intelligence agents looked the other way. By the late sixties, another group of favored anticommunists, the Corsicans, had set up in the southern hemisphere and were working with smugglers in Chile, Paraguay and Colombia to establish French connections north for illegal goods, including coca and marijuana. Entrepreneurs, like the American hippie George Jung and his Colombian partner Carlos Rivas Lehder, plugged in from the other end, marketing coke as a hip, aspirational drug to white American baby boomers.
At the same time, criminal syndicates consolidated coca farming and cocaine production in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. In the case of Bolivia’s “narcocracy,” an anti-leftist government put in place by what would come to be known as “the Cocaine Coup,” syndicates ran the country.32 In Colombia, the cartels shifted from working with the military to exterminating leftist guerillas who threatened their trade, or killing crusading government officials.