Can't Stop Won't Stop (17 page)

Racialized calls to redemption gave Bambaataa's anger a focus: “I wasn't agreeing with what white people was saying. You start questioning all that and you start traveling and meeting other people and seeing the struggles everybody had. Everybody is talking about what the white man did from country to country. You start believing strongly what the Honorable Elijah Muhammad was saying, that the white man is the devil. But as you get older and wiser, you see why he did that—to clear off Black people's thinking that they was inferior and whites are superior and start saying they are of gods.

“What the Nation was saying was, ‘When you're ready to come, we'll be waiting for you.' And that always stuck in my mind and heart. I said I have to do some type of change to get the mindset of the masses that was following me to lead them to another way,” he says.

Months before Soulski's passing, Bambaataa won a Housing Authority essay-writing contest. The prize was a trip to India. “You had to write an essay on why you would want to go to India. So I won, but when it was time for me to meet up with the people that send you off to go, I was outside giving out flyers for the next party I was giving and forgot all about it. So I lost the trip, which was great, because the following year I won the trip to go to Africa and Europe,” he says.

For a youth who had known nothing but the streets of the Bronx, the trip was life-changing. “I saw all the Black people waking up in the early morning, opening their stores, doing the agriculture, doing whatever they have to do to keep
the country happening,” he says. “Compared to what you hear in America about, ‘Black people can't do this and that,' that really just changed my mind.”

His head bursting with ideas, Bambaataa came back to the Bronx ready to transform The Organization. “My vision was to try to organize as many as I could to stop the violence. So I went around different areas, telling them to join us and stop your fighting,” Bambaataa says.

As the summer of 1975 drew closer, the word began getting out. Jazzy Jay says, “I remember my friend came up and said, ‘Yeah you heard that cat Bambaataa? He's calling himself Afrika Bambaataa and the Zulu Nation now. He got some movement called the Zulu Nation.”

Movement was literally at the heart of the organization, in the form of the Zulu King dancers. “The Zulu Kings started with five main guys: Zambu Lanier, Kusa Stokes, Ahmad Henderson, Shaka Reed, Aziz Jackson. Then came the Shaka Kings and Queens. And it was just as many women that could tear guys up on the dancefloor as there was men,” Bambaataa says. Then the rappers came in. “We had Queen Lisa Lee and Sha-Rock, who was the first two females that was blowing it up, then Pebblee Poo.”

Zulu Nation was returning the Bronx to an era of style, celebration and optimism. “It was no more where you had the Hell's Angels looking type jackets or you rolling around in dirt-stank shit just to show you were an outlaw and you could be the most dirtiest bastard out there,” he says. “It almost flipped back to the fifties gangs where they was wearing the nice satin jackets and the nice names. As you got into the graffiti artists, then you had the aerosol paintings on the jackets. People was getting more cool. It just started switching the whole culture around into this whole ‘party and get down' atmosphere.”

At the same time, Bambaataa recast the Organization's credo. “What is the job of a Zulu?” his Infinity Lessons would later ask. “The job of a Zulu is to survive in life. To be open-minded dealing with all walks of life upon this planet Earth and to teach [each] other truth (Knowledge, Wisdom, and Understanding). To respect those who respect them, to never be the aggressor or oppressor. To be at peace with self and others, but if or when attacked by others who don't wish peace with the Zulus, then the Zulus are ordered in the name of ALLAH, Jehovah to fight those who fight against you.”

But Bambaataa's moves were not received well by all. “You had members who were like, ‘What is this? Stop all this Zulu thing,' ” Bambaataa says. “Some of The Organization didn't like what we was doing. They became known as the Gestapos. Other ones became the Casanova Crew and other crews that were out there.”

Strands of Nazi symbolism, a remnant of the Hell's Angels influence, had run through the gangs of the early ‘70s. They kept private “Gestapos,” inner-core cliques of their fiercest warriors who would act as elite intelligence and battle units. As the gang era gave way, early graf writers like BONANZA and SANTANA 204 were known to draw swastikas next to their names.
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One writer even named himself HITLER II. Bambaataa describes the new Gestapos and other similar breakaway crews as “the stickup kid, gangsta style that caused a lot of havoc in the city.”

Authorities had long abandoned large parts of the Bronx; renegade party-starters never had to worry about permits and police. But crowd control was always going to be an issue. There were still turfs, Bambaataa says, and “you still had violence.”

So DJs backed themselves with area crews who kept the peace, and, often, other crews out. Grandmaster Flash, for instance, secured the Casanovas. As big as DJ Kool Herc was, he would not play Bronx River unless Bambaataa extended an invitation. On the other hand, only at Bambaataa's parties could the rawest rival crews come together, their tensions transmuted into raucous energy.

“Sometimes you'd be at parties and they'd start their chanting and we'd start our chanting,” he chuckles. “It'd be like, ‘Zulu! Gestapo!' And that became known as the ‘War Chant.' Sometimes there might be other crews there that might get smart and they end up getting it from both sides!”

This adrenaline-pumping unpredictability held an allure—girls, music, dancing, guns, anything could happen. “Sometimes when DJs played against other DJs, you might have lost your whole system if you didn't win and you didn't have a large group backing you up,” says Bambaataa. “But if somebody didn't do right and did wrong in our area, they had to really think, because it was a large percentage of areas that was down with Zulu.

“In the early seventies, there used to be a big thing for [angel] dust. And I
started a big campaign on my flyers—'Stop smoking that dust y'all.' I had my little cliches, had my rappers doing it, and the dealers in Harlem didn't like that. They sent some Hitlers to come out and hammer us. But they made a mistake. They find out that at a Bambaataa party, everyone at the party is down with Afrika Bambaataa, so they must have ain't done research to find out what's up.”

He laughs, “They were history, whatever.”

But if Bambaataa was to expand his vision beyond his sphere of influence, he would need to convince brown youths on the other side of the Bronx River that the peace was for real. During the early ‘70s, while white gangs had pressed the Black Spades from the east, the Puerto Rican gangs—especially the Savage Skulls and the Savage Nomads—were a buffer on the west. The Bronx River remained a dividing line between African-American and Puerto Rican youths.

Ray Abrahante—who would later become an original member of the Rock Steady Crew and gain fame as the graffiti writer named BOM 5—was then an eleven-year-old Baby Skull. He had followed his older cousin, a shot-caller, into the gang. Soon after he joined, two young Skulls ended up dead, and the fingers pointed to the Black Spades.

The Baby Skulls' hangout spot was in the East Tremont neighborhood near the west bank of the river, right where the Bronx River Parkway cut through a hook in the Cross-Bronx Expressway, under a high, rusting Amtrak train layup. There they scrambled up the lattice of steel girders into the high reaches under the layup to hang ten-foot ropes from the beams. They would mount the ropes, dangling three stories above the ground, and swing themselves at each other, trying to knock the other down just for kicks.

When the Baby Skulls came out from under the layup, dusting the dirt off their colors, maybe bloody and bruised from a nasty thirty-foot plunge, they could see the towers of the Bronx River Houses scraping the sky to the south. Everything that lay in between—the tagged-up bus yard, the train repair track and the commuter line, the furious Parkway and Expressway—might as well have been a DMZ. Traffic from everywhere rushed through there and over them, but never across. They'd go back under the layup and swing madly at each other again in a kind of metronome limbo.

A few blocks away, the 174th Street Bridge connected East Tremont with the Bronx River Houses, but this was no-man's land, a no-crossing zone. Abrahante was a reckless kid. One day he wandered onto the bridge on his bike. A burly Black tagger was spraypainting BAM 117, WRITERS INC. Abrahante, who was the Baby Skulls' tagger, took the spraycan, and wrote his own tag, SPIDER. He wasn't wearing his colors, and by the size of this guy, he knew not to write SKULLS next to his name. He handed the spraycan back to the tagger, and they gave each other an unspoken recognition. Then they went back their separate ways.

A few days later when Abrahante went across the bridge again, he had it in his head to try to tag the Skulls name deep in Spades territory. He headed across the Bridge in full colors, and cruised into the Bronx River Houses. A group of Spades came out from the basketball courts, hurled bottles at him and chased him back across the bridge. He noticed that the tagger he had met on the bridge was with them, simply watching.

By the time the summer ended, things had changed. The Savage Skulls were falling apart, turning on each other, snitching out each other to the cops. The leadership wasn't stable. Abrahante was ready to take on more responsibility in the gang. But his cousin had made up his mind and told him, “Fuck that, that shit ain't no good for you. That shit ain't good for me.” Abrahante says, “He told the Skulls, ‘I'll fight whoever to get me and my cousin out.' He pushed me out by beating me up.”

In September, Abrahante received a flyer for a party in the Bronx River Houses. The promoters had been going through the neighborhoods, shouting, “Free jam! Come one come all, leave your colors at home! Come in peace and unity.” His cousin didn't believe it. “Don't go,” he said, “it's a set-up. The Spades will pound you.”

It was a warm afternoon when he and some Skulls and Nomads walked across the bridge. They joined the crowd heading toward the Community Center. Abrahante noticed a lot of gang members, maybe even the ones who had bottled him, but he was surprised to see a lot of Puerto Ricans as well. At the door, they lined up to be searched by a pair of big bouncers. But the mood was one of anticipation, not tension as he had expected.

The music was blasting. Onstage, a DJ worked two turntables. He recognized
the music and the dances from the gang parties and the park jams, but it was like he was experiencing it again for the first time. When the room filled, the DJ stopped the music. Then that guy from the bridge got on the microphone.

“Bambaataa talked,” Abrahante recalls. “He was saying how happy he was that people came out. That this gang thing, the cops put us up to this stuff. Society put us all in here to fight against each other and kill us off, and we're not getting nowhere.”

Abrahante was impressed. “A week later, I was meeting more and more kids, and he was trying to open Bronx River to everybody. I mean it was inspiring.” With the Zulu Nation, Bambaataa was integrating a new generation in the Bronx.

Zulu chapters proliferated throughout the tri-state area as quickly as had the Black Spades. To be down with the Zulus conferred street power and respect, but perhaps just as important, the promise of good times. While gang legacies remained, Bambaataa steadfastly pushed the organization in the direction of his new motto: “Peace, Love, Unity and Having Fun.” By the early ‘80s, he had largely succeeded. But without the military hierarchy of the gang structure, the Zulu name was still prone to being tarnished by knuckleheads.

Bambaataa says, “We had to come up with something to get the order back. That's when I started thinking, and it was coming back to me, all the teachings and everything I experienced. I started sitting down and writing things from my head. Other people started saying, ‘Well this is a belief that I've had.' So then I started taking from all people of knowledge to make up our lessons. And it started catching on and keeping people in check.”

In place of a set of beliefs or a ten-point platform, the Universal Zulu Nation offered Seven Infinity Lessons, which formed the basic foundation of principles for a member. The lessons established a fundamental code of conduct and gave broad directives to the Zulu “way of life.”

Like a Bambaataa DJ set, the Infinity Lessons followed a ranging eclecticism, mixed a bit of the familiar with a lot of the arcane. They touched on the origins of Universal Zulu Nation and its South African antecedents, and offered a Bronx River view of the origins of hip-hop. They highlighted esoterica like Elijah Muhammad's dietary pronouncements and Dr. Malachi Z. York's racial interpretations
of Biblical history. They were presented in the same question-and-answer studies and keyword glossary forms used by the Nation of Islam and the Nation of Gods and Earths, better known as the Five Percenters.

The Infinity Lessons drew on the Black Muslims' evocation of a glorious, original African past, but not their impulse to racial separation. And although the Lessons leaned hard on the language of the Nation of Islam, they disdained dogma and orthodoxy. “The religion of the Universal Zulu Nation is truth wherever it is,” reads Infinity Lesson #4. “So our way of life is knowledge, wisdom and understanding of everything, freedom, justice and equality.”

The Lessons picked up the Black Panthers' call for self-defense, but they dropped the programmatic demands for housing and employment. Formed at a time when the arc of Black Power was dropping precipitously, the Universal Zulu Nation was not about politics. As Elijah Muhammad had preached, Zulus first had to come to know themselves, attain knowledge of self. Consciousness did not come from the unmasking of social forces, but from having a true reckoning with one's god within. The revolution did not emanate from mass organizations struggling against systems and institutions, but in one's personal transformation. Only then could one “overstand,” that is, comprehend and confront the injustice of the world by manifesting one's power.