Can't Stop Won't Stop (18 page)

Most important, the Lessons were an evolving document. They would expand and change as more members came into the fold. By definition, they were open-ended, infinite.

To the ministers and ideologues moving in the Bronx, the Zulus presented a question mark: they were agnostic devotees, skeptical true-believers, noncommittal revolutionaries. The Infinity Lessons seemed a quasi-theological mess, an autodidactic crazy-quilt, a political road map to a nowhere. But to Bambaataa the ideas were less important than the process.

If you are of gods, Bambaataa seemed to say, then it follows that you are just as capable as I am to make this new world. Zulus celebrated the instinct for survival and creation. Living young and free in the Bronx was a revolutionary act of art. To unleash on a social level these vital urges was the surest way to ward off mass death. Bambaataa's message was:
We're moving. There's room for you if you get yourself right
. Perhaps this is why, of all the utopias proffered to the teeming rabbles of outcast youth, Bambaataa's spread through the streets of the Bronx and then out into the world like a flaming wick.

So here they were, Bambaataa's army—the MCs, the DJs, the graffiti writers, the b-boys and b-girls, the crews they brought and the crowds they moved. They were elemental in their creative power—four, after all, was “the foundation number,” representing air, water, earth and fire, and in another sense, the rhythm itself. What they were doing was yet to be named. But in the cooling sunlight of a park jam or the mercury-bursting intensity of an indoor one—from everywhere a crowd rising, the DJ excising and extending the groove, ciphers and crews burning, distinctions and discriminations dissolving, the lifeblood pulsing and spirit growing—Bambaataa took Herc's party and turned it into the ceremony of a new faith, like he knew that this was exactly how their world was supposed to look, sound and flow.

In the cipher at Patterson Projects, the South Bronx, 1982.
Photo © Henry Chalfant

 

 

Style involves conflict, the strain of races, classes, ages and sexes pitted against each other in the arenas of clothing and music and slang.

—Richard Goldstein

It's funny, ‘cause people say, “I practice style.” It's either you got style or you don't!

—Richie “Crazy Legs” Colon

It may be hard to imagine now but during the mid-1970s, most of the youthful energy that became known as hip-hop could be contained in a tiny seven-mile circle.

Take a map of New York City and shift your gaze up from Manhattan to the Bronx. Place the point of your compass in the heart of Crotona Park and trace the circumference. Beginning in the east, there was the Zulu Nation empire; along the northern rim, Edenwald projects and the Valley, where the Brothers Disco and the Funky 4 + 1 More rocked the parties, and the 2 and 5 Train Yard, where thousands of masterpieces by BLADE and TRACY 168 and THE FABULOUS 5 began and ended their subversive circuits; to the west, across the river from Kool Herc's Sedgwick Avenue and Cedar Park cipher, the Ghost Yard, the misty, violent backdrop of graffiti lore, and Inwood and Washington Heights, where TAKI 183 first picked up his pen; further down through southern curve, Harlem, where disco DJs rapped on demand, and Spanish Harlem, where the Baby Kings chapter of the Spanish Kings gang did the outlaw dance on the hard concrete. There were eruptions happening in Brooklyn, Queens, Long
Island's Black Belt and the Lower East Side. But in 1977 this circle felt like a hothouse of style, the tropic zone of a new culture.

Richie “Crazy Legs” Colon, the leader of the Rock Steady Crew, tells this story. One night, when he was a wide-eyed ten-year old, his cousin Lenny Len and a neighborhood buddy Afrika Islam began practicing moves to a new dance in his living room. He had been learning to box, was picking up some martial arts, but this dance, he wanted to know everything there was to know about it. He had to wait until the following summer, the blackout summer, when Lenny took him to his first jam in a schoolyard on Crotona Avenue and 180th Street, near the heart of the seven-mile circle.

“Ah, I was just blown away,” Crazy Legs recalls. “I just saw all these kids having fun, comparing the graf on the wall to their books, checking out the whole scene, and it was my first time watching the dance with the music being played, so it made more sense. I just immediately became a part of it. My cousin started teaching me how to get down, a few moves here and there, and I guess it just kept on going.”

He had just been initiated into a secret Bronx kids' society. Later he would say that jam had made him a witness to the rise of hip-hop's “four elements”—b-boying, DJing, MCing, and graffiti. In time, the story would take on a patina of myth.

The heart of the Seven-MileWorld, 1977–1980 Map layout by Sharon Mizota

In fact, old-schoolers still passionately debate how congruent these youth movements in music, dance, and art really were. Elder graffiti writers like Sandra “LADY PINK” Fabara object to their art being grouped with rap. “I don't think graffiti is hip-hop,” she says. BLADE, SEEN and IZ THE WIZ say their musical tastes were closer to jazz, doo-wop, and rock. The Rolling Thunder Writers, says graf historian Andrew “ZEPHYR” Witten, were influenced by the prog-rock album covers and posters of Roger Dean and Rick Griffin, and the music of Hot Tuna and The Grateful Dead. “Frankly I grew up with disco music,” says PINK. “There's a long background of graffiti as an entity unto itself.”

Perhaps only within the seven-mile circle did all these youth movements come together the way Crazy Legs had experienced it. Regardless, they shared a revolutionary aesthetic. They were about unleashing youth style as an expression of the soul, unmediated by corporate money, unauthorized by the powerful, protected and enclosed by almost monastic rites, codes, and orders. They sprung from kids who had been born into the shadows of the baby boom generation, who never grew up expecting the whole world to be watching. What TV camera would ever capture their struggles and dreams? They were invisible.

But invisibility was its own kind of reward; it meant you had to answer to no one except the others who shared your condition. It meant you became obsessed with showing and proving, distinguishing yourself and your originality above the crowd. It put you on a relentless quest to prove to them that you were bigger, wilder, and bolder than circumstances dictated you should ever be, to try to generate something from nothing, something no one else had, until everyone around you had to admit that you had something they might never have, something that might even make other people—big, important people—stand up and take notice themselves, offer you money, give you power, or try to crush your very soul. That was the key to having style.

When Kool Herc first came on the scene, he stayed ahead of the other DJs with the power of his sound system. Bambaataa changed the game with his programming genius. Both men were titans in the streets, backed up by major crew. But in the beginning, Joseph Saddler didn't have expensive equipment, a deep record collection, or a posse of hardrocks. All he had was his style.

He was the fourth of five children of Barbadian immigrants, a boy in a house of girls, living on Fox and 163rd streets in the heart of Fort Apache amongst Skulls and Spades and Ghetto Brothers. He was less attracted to the street life than he was to the broken radios lying in the street. “I was a scientist looking for something. Going inside hair dryers, and going inside washing machines and stereos and radios, whatever you plugged into the wall,” he recalls. As strung-out junkies plundered arson-devastated abandoned buildings for copper pipes to support their smack habit, Saddler scoured abandoned cars for their radios and speakers. He took them back to his bedroom to see if he could make them sing again.

“I wanted to know what's a resistor? What's a capacitor? What's a transformer? What's AC? What's DC? Why do these things do what they do?” he says. “Although there was crazy violent things happening around me on Fox Street, I was in my own world, in my own room.”

Saddler wouldn't go to a Kool Herc or a Pete “DJ” Jones jam to get high, holler at the girls or be seen. He hung back in the cut and took it all in—the DJ, the crowd, the equipment, the music. Back in his room with his screwdriver, soldering iron and insatiable curiosity, the kid who would be named Grandmaster Flash was theorizing the turntable and mixer, pondering the presentation of the party, trying to figure out how to turn beat-making and crowd-rocking into a science.

The thing that both Herc and Jones did was release the music on the record from linear and temporal constraints. But Herc, Flash felt, was sloppy. The break went around, but it never came back on beat because Herc was dropping the needle all over the place. Flash saw Pete “DJ” Jones seamlessly extending disco records by mixing two copies of the same record, and realized he could apply the same technique to the music he really loved—the breaks Herc was spinning. Flash wanted to lift these slices of recorded time out of the progression of time, to re-enclose a song's break in a perfect new loop.

Apprenticing himself to Jones, he began to work toward the idea at weekend parties in an abandoned apartment in his building. Weekdays, he studied the mixer—jerry-rigging a headphone cue into his cheap set—and the turntable—trying to understand which model and what cartridges and styli were the most durable, which platters had the best torque. He considered Jones's simple circuit—begin break on record 1, cue record 2 on the headphone, end break 1,
begin break 2, recue break 1. Then he understood that each record's rhythm had its own circumference to trace, that the break could be measured from point-to-point, and he developed a theory based on sectioning off the record like a clock. This was he breakthrough, he says. “I came up with the Quick Mix theory, which was like cutting, the backspin, and the double-back.”

After months of study and refinement, Flash finally felt he had perfected the mix. In the summer of ‘75, it was time to take it to the waiting world. But the reaction was not what he had expected. “The first time I did it, the crowd just stood there, just watched me. I was hoping to get, ‘Whoa yes, I love it!' But it was like, no reaction, no movement. Just hundreds of people standing there. They were just trying to understand.

“And I cried for like a week,” Flash says. “Why did things go wrong?”

It was a lesson. You could be smart, you could be good, you could be scientific, but being smart and good and scientific wasn't going to rock a party all by itself. And Flash figured he got off easy that day—if a party wasn't being rocked, violence was always lurking right behind. He was going to have to win his crowds over to his new style. So Flash set his mind to theorizing the rest of his show. “I realized I needed vocal accompaniment to help spark this concept,” he says.

Robert Keith “Cowboy” Wiggins was a former Bronx River Black Spade who had moved down to the South Bronx, and was already a feared street legend known to be nice with the hands. When he started hanging out with Flash, he became known to be nice with the mic. He would praise his DJ Flash, and command the crowd to “Say ho!” and “Throw your hands in the air and wave ‘em like you just don't care!” He linked with two more regulars at Flash's jams, the Glover brothers, Melvin “Melle Mel” and Nathaniel “Kidd Creole,” and together they rewrote Shirley Ellis, the Last Poets, “Hustler's Convention” and the dozens. They devised ever more intricate lines, finishing each other's rhymes, throwing in unexpected melodies and harmonies, exhorting the crowd higher and higher.

In 1976, they moved into a club called the Black Door, where they enlisted the Casanova Crew as their rough-and-ready backup, and then later on to the Dixie. The posse grew. Grandmaster Flash and the Three MCs became the Furious 4 and finally the Furious 5. They also continued to play the parks—St. Ann's, Mitchell, 23 Park, 63 Park. As the DJ scene expanded and the playlists became
more standardized, crowds cared less about speaker size than showmanship and style. DJ AJ says, “Kool Herc couldn't draw a crowd after people saw Flash.”