Can't Stop Won't Stop (25 page)

Many of the paintings were little more than tags, albeit with a buff-proof, overglowing impertinence that came with the “for sale” sign. And although collectors oohed and awed at the novelty of it all, dealers pushed the writers to give them more complex work, to make statements. Some of them did. As journalists and the media gathered to watch, ZEPHYR painted an unfurling American
flag. Then he slammed a big, wildstyle “Z” across it, daring critics to embrace a new idea of “American graffiti.”

PINK, the youngest of the gallery writers, displayed a feminist take on war, psychological repression and sex work. CRASH fostered the link between Pop and graffiti, sampling Lichtenstein, Warhol and Rauschenberg. Lee Quiñones moved toward an intense social realism, abandoning words and cartoons for harrowing scenes, such as the lonely, desparing junkie shooting up between the Statue of Liberty and an American flag in “Society's Child.”

The most influential—DONDI, PHASE 2, RAMMELLZEE and FUTURA—developed new visual languages. PHASE 2, whose 1973 canvases had been widely recognized as defining the early genre, continued deconstructing the letter into hard lines, third eyes, horns, drills, spikes, arches, Egyptian pharoahs and dogs, pure geometrics. RAMMELLZEE's canvases swirled with forces locked in struggle, a visual analogue of his insurgent theories about the letter and word as armored vehicle in a militarized world. DONDI, the high priest of wildstyle, played with letters, arrows, often faceless head and bodies, constantly commenting on the various representations of himself in the world—names, diagrams, checking account numbers, currency.

The most visually accessible of the artists, FUTURA, provided critics with a target they could interpret. Some called him the Watteau or Kandinsky of graffiti; others used him to deride the entire movement as empty and directionless. He combined a militant, almost architecturally precise line and an understanding of industrial design and fonts with a nonpareil spatial sense of the abstract and the fantastic. He became the most famous in-house performance graffiti writer of the “Wheels of Steel” night at Negril and the Roxy, and his best work perfectly captured the atom-crashing, buzzsaw energy of the time, the rapture of the cipher, the cut, the light, the truss and the arc.

The graffitiists' work was remarkable for their outsiderness, the way in which they completely collided with the big-money gallery sensibility. Art critic Elizabeth Hess called the moment “a genuine disruption of form in the history of art.”
⁶
In a
People Magazine
feature, Claudio Bruni, the man who had set off the frenzy by bringing FAB 5 FREDDY and Lee Quiñones to Italy in 1979, said, “To me, it was not just vandalism. It was the new expression of art, unsophisticated but very real. An art so strong it hurt people.”
⁷

Cynics thought the art world's embrace of graffiti represented the worst kind of white liberal guilt, a bizarre flirtation with the repressed Other. But the artists remained hopeful. ZEPHYR said, “People might say graffiti looks really out of place in a gallery. But I think it's good if graffiti is out of place. Sneaking into these places is just what graffiti is supposed to do.”
⁸

As the Reagan era commenced, hip-hop was a force that had begun reintegrating the downtown clubs, and vaulted society's outcasts into the rarified art world. But these places still represented the fringes of the avant-garde. On the streets, reality was still as color-coded and divided as ever.

FAB FIVE FREDDY says, “Things were relatively polarized. There was a term called ‘bridge-and-tunnel,' which was the people that came from the outer boroughs that were really just dumb, ignorant white kids that were really racist. And they would cause problems for everybody. They would want to fight, you know what I mean? Like tough, kinda street white kids that was really not on some creative shit.”

At the same time, across the Atlantic, punk's great idealists, The Clash, were so enchanted with rap that they recorded one in early 1980 called “The Magnificent Seven” for their epic
Sandinista!
album. When they arrived in New York the following summer, they were thrilled to find it had become an unlikely hit on the Black radio station, WBLS. With Don Letts, their partner and documentarian, they took a video camera to Times Square to film graf writers, b-boys, rappers and boombox renegades.

The Clash had come a long way, ideologically and musically, since they had issued “White Riot,” a naive, revolutionary statement of solidarity with the West Indian immigrant rebels of the 1976 Nottinghill Carnival riots. That record had paradoxically left many wondering whether the record wasn't expressing neo-Nazi sentiments. “White riot!” they had shouted, “I wanna riot, a riot of my own!” In fact, they were searching for audiences who, as Strummer rapped on “This Is Radio Clash,” recognized Sugar Minott's ghettology as Afrika Bambaataa's Lil' Vietnam.

They were set to play eight nights in June 1981 at an aging Times Square disco, the Bonds International, and they announced their stand with a dramatic
unfurling of a magnificent banner painted by FUTURA. But on the eve of their opening, the fire department threatened to shut down the club for overselling the shows, and their fans finally had their white riot when mounted police stormed down Broadway to meet the punks in the streets.

The Clash compromised by agreeing to perform eleven additional gigs, and hurried to find opening acts. In yet another naive act of solidarity, they booked Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. But, as Michael Hill wrote in
The Village Voice
, “Rather than achieve a cultural crossover, it threatened to widen the gap.”
⁹

When Flash and the Furious Five stepped onstage on The Clash's opening night, the white punks stood bewildered as Flash began his “Adventures on the Wheels of Steel” routine on three turntables. Then the Furious Five, dressed in fly leather suits, jumped onstage and started rapping and dancing. Some in the crowd began shouting their disgust. They hadn't come to see no disco. When Flash paused so that the Five could try to regain the crowd, the crew found themselves ducking a hail of beer cups and spit. The next night, dressed down this time in street clothes, they suffered the same reception. They left the stage angrily, with Melle Mel admonishing, “Some of you—not all of you, but some of you—are
stupid
,” never to return.
¹⁰

The Clash responded by excoriating their own fans in interviews, and future Bronx-bred openers, The Treacherous Three and ESG, received marginally better treatment. But in 1981, the American punks clearly wanted the riot to remain exclusively their own.

While the British punks learned something about American racism, the downtowners found their own liberal assumptions being tested.

Henry Chalfant was managing the Rock Steady Crew. It had begun in an innocent, fortuitous way. A couple of months after the O. K. Harris show, Martha Cooper and he were in his studio and she showed him pictures of her next project. Cooper explained that a year before, she was called on assignment to a “riot-in-progress” at a Washington Heights subway station. When she got there, she encountered a group of kids in Pro-Keds and transit cops who were still scratching their heads. Whatever had happened was apparently over, so the
cops told the kids to show her what they were doing. A kid stepped up, went down and spun on his head. Cooper was stunned. She said, “I called
The Post
and said, ‘Well, this is more interesting than a riot—they were dancing!”

For the better part of the following year, she and NYU dance professor Sally Banes had tried to track down b-boys and b-girls, frequenting high school dances and rap shows to see if they could find anyone who did it. “Everybody said, ‘Ah, we don't do that anymore. It's finished, over,' ” Cooper recalled. When they caught back up with the High Times Crew, the members said they were now into roller-skating.

With Cooper's story in mind, Chalfant later asked some graffiti writers at his studio if they had ever heard of folks who did a dance called “rocking.” TAKE ONE said he knew the best in the city. He happened to be in a crew called Rock Steady. The next day, TAKE brought Crazy Legs and Frosty Freeze to Chalfant's studio. Chalfant saw them dance, and asked them if they would like to perform at a graffiti slide show he was doing at a Soho loft performance space near his studio called The Common Ground, a name which would later prove rich in irony.

Chalfant had been at FAB's “Beyond Words” show the month before, and he invited FAB FIVE FREDDY and RAMMELLZEE to come and rap. He, too, wanted to present graffiti, DJing, rapping, and b-boying together. The term “hip-hop” was not yet being popularly used to describe the youth movements, so Chalfant called the show “Graffiti Rock.” On the Common Ground's promotional postcard, which also advertised a performance-painting event and a Chekhov reading, the event was described this way: “Using music, rapping, and dance, graffiti artists transform the static image into a unique performance dynamic. Scupltor/photographer Henry Chalfant coordinates graffiti artists in a multifaceted performance event.”

Rock Steady decided to stage a battle. They split their crew into two, and he, Banes and Cooper bought them t-shirts customized with iron-on letters. They began energetic rehearsals. DOZE recalls being stunned by RAMMELLZEE's bizarre freestyling. “I was like, ‘Who the fuck is this?' This fucking guy was like, ‘Werrnnnnnt werrnnnnnt! Rock rock! Plop plop fizz fizz, oh what a relief it is! Bob! Jellybeans! Spam! Ham!' ” he laughs. “I figured, this guy is off his wig.”

More important, Banes and Cooper landed a cover story in
The Village
Voice
. Titled “To the Beat Y'all: Breaking Is Hard to Do,” it was the first major story on b-boying. Cooper's photos from the Graffiti Rock practices were evocative: Frosty Freeze in a leftward feint, Ty Fly suspended in a back-flip. Banes, for the first time in print, speculated on b-boying's origins:

For the current generation of B Boys, it doesn't really matter that the Breakdown is an old name in Afro-American dance for both rapid, complex footwork and a competitive format. Or that a break in jazz means a soloist's improvised bridge between melodies. For the B Boys, the history of breaking started six or seven years ago, maybe in the Bronx, maybe in Harlem. It started with the Zulus. Or with Charlie Rock. Or with Joe from the Casanovas, from the Bronx, who taught it to Charlie Rock. “Breaking means going crazy on the floor. It means making a style for yourself.”
¹¹

The article was also perhaps the first to link graffiti, rapping and b-boying—which Banes called “forms of ghetto street culture” that were all “public arena(s) for the flamboyant triumph of virility, wit, and skill. In short, of style.”
¹²

The line that most captured the liberal imagination was this one:

[B]reaking isn't just an urgent response to pulsating music. It is also a ritual combat that transmutes aggression into art. “In the summer of ‘78,” Tee [of the High Times Crew] remembers, “when you got mad at someone, instead of saying, ‘Hey man, you want to fight?' you'd say, ‘Hey man, you want to rock?' ”

Rocking instead of fighting—the idea would become one of the most enduring myths of hip-hop—but history would once again belie it.

Many around town seemed to be talking about the “Graffiti Rock” event, including Rock Steady's envious rivals. The afternoon before the show, Chalfant had gathered everyone for a dress rehearsal at the Common Ground. They were interrupted by a Dominican crew from Washington Heights. “We had a war with this crew called the Ball Busters back then ‘cause we were Zulus,” says DOZE. Afrika Bambaataa remembered the beef as one “between Puerto Ricans and Dominicans.” Chalfant says that he later pieced together that the beef had
begun in a violent dispute over graffiti turf between affiliates of the Rock Steady Crew and the Ball Busters, and that it had likely spilled over along ethnic lines. Whatever the case, this wasn't something that would be settled with a rhythm and a dance.

The Ball Busters walked into the Common Ground loft, and while a number of white downtowners looked on, the words began to fly. Someone shouted that there was a gun, RAMMELLZEE and his DJ crew pulled out machetes, Chalfant called the police, and the Ballbusters chased a Rock Steady–affiliated graffiti writer out of the loft toward the subway station.

The next day, one of Chalfant's graf-writing friends called him and said, “We've got it all worked out. We've got a lot of back. We've got shotguns in the car. We've got a nine millimeter for you. The Salsoul Brothers are gonna come and police it.” But when large crowds, including many of the East Village art and nightclub elite, gathered to see the show that afternoon, Chalfant stood at the door to send them away. The violence had caused the Common Ground's owner to pull the plug.

Hip-hop's future was still unclear. It might be a folk art, a cultural expression whose authenticity needed to be preserved. Or it might be a youth uprising, a scream against invisibility that wanted nothing more than to be heard by the world.

One future offered a nicely trimmed path to folk art museums and cultural institutions that might nurture hip-hop in a small safe world. The other was a bumpy, twisting road, which might lead to cultural, economic and social significance, but also to co-optation, backlash and censure. Hip-hop's downtown advocates, especially the older ones, understood the tensions. They favored authenticity over exploitation, and they vacillated between being protective of the culture and championing it.

Cooper and Banes made presentations at folk-culture and academic conferences, met with corporate event planners and civic arts programmers, and pitched stories to magazines like
The Smithsonian
and
National Geographic World
. Cooper recalls that her folklorist peers were “genuinely excited and enthusiastic.” But they also had their limits. Cooper and Banes attended one mind-numbing meeting with a city-funded arts group interested in doing a film series
on forms of New York City street dance. After much struggle, the group accomplished nothing other than arrive at this yawner of a definition: “Street dance is nontheatrical participatory dance in environments available to the public.”
¹³
Predictably, the project fizzled. Meanwhile, the file of rejection letters from magazine and book editors got fatter.