Can't Stop Won't Stop (30 page)

Perhaps the most lasting tribute to the spirit of ‘82 is the movie that Charlie Ahearn, Fab 5 Freddy, and Lee Quiñones gathered to talk about in the abandoned massage parlor in Times Square,
Wild Style
. The movie captured the sense of discovery, the new thing in all its raw, unpolished glory.

Perhaps much of its wonder had to do with its surrender to the culture. Ahearn—whose previous movie,
The Deadly Art of Survival
, had been shot on Super 8, with its main budget expense going to “buying pizza for the kids”—admits,
“I'd never written a script. I really had no connection to the movie business whatsoever. I had never been to film school or been in the film business. But everyone accepted me as a Hollywood movie producer right off the bat. It was a matter of innocence on all sides.”

Ahearn was out, he says, to make a “Bruce Lee movie. A simple hero, a simple story. Lee Quiñones was gonna be the hero. What is his problem? He's in love with this girl but she doesn't know he's the famous graffiti artist. That's it. That's all the movie is. And in a way, it reflected exactly how I saw things—in a comic book fashion.”

The movie's principals were heads in the scene. There were no professional actors. PINK says, “There was a script that we all chuckled about. Picture that, a white guy just introduced to the scene and he's trying to write slang. That was funny!”

But Ahearn also truthfully described the scene's deepening schisms. ZEPHYR says, “The whole thing of the whole sensibilities of the downtown and the up-town, and the woman Neva who wants to seduce Lee—'Oh can I buy your painting? Oh sit down!' All that shit seems like it's laughable when you watch the movie, and yet it all happened. All those things were so real. Charlie didn't say, ‘I'm gonna parody the scene.' ”

By now he was deep in it, enough to understand the subtleties of off-screen realities like PINK and Lee's tortured relationship. Lee had refused to star in the movie until Ahearn made two things clear. If he did it, he would be paid. If he didn't, someone else would have to do the scripted love scenes with PINK. “When we shot the scene where Lee goes to the art collector, and he's supposed to be in bed with this woman, that could have been something else entirely,” he says. “PINK found out that he was shooting this scene. She showed up at that apartment. She sat right between the camera and Lee the entire time. That's why he was so nervous. And like, you know, it was hard to direct!”

During Charlie and Fab's yearlong advanced seminar in the post–”Rapper's Delight” club scene, they walked into a marquee rivalry between Charlie Chase's Cold Crush Brothers and Grand Wizard Theodore's Fantastic Five Freaks, which became a major organizing theme for the movie. They caught the rappers on the stoop and in the limo, at the Dixie and the Amphitheatre, even on the basketball court. Over wickedly exciting dubplate special riddims—cut by
Blondie's Chris Stein with FAB and a downtown session band and recut Bronx-style by Theodore, Chase, DST and KK Rockwell—they captured three of the most electrifying, influential ensemble routines ever committed to tape.

Here was Fantastic's Prince Whipper Whip, channeling H. Rap Brown: “I am the New Yorker, the sweet walker, the woman stalker, the jive talker, the money maker”—bragging about being “the least conceited”. And undefeated, at least until Cold Crush's JDL dispensed him with a shrug: “If you still got money and you wanna bet, well I bet a hundred dollars that I'm not whipped yet.”

The movie's climax was a feverish reimagining of a Bronx park jam, another downtown presentation of the four elements, but with one crucial difference. Instead of taking hip-hop up-market,
Wild Style
went back to the people hip-hop came from. Ahearn had always been concerned about
where
he screened the work as much as
what
was being shown. That was why
The Deadly Art of Survival
and his hip-hop slides always looped back to be shown in their points of genesis: the Smith Houses, the Bronx clubs. His greatest ambition for
Wild Style
had been to screen it in Times Square for the b-boys and b-girls, the street rappers, the Five Percenters, all the folks from around the way. Here, once again, was representation as liberation, art as activism. So the show was staged at an abandoned amphitheater near the Williamsburg Bridge in East River Park.

The cast and crew cleaned it and fixed it up and Lee and others painted it into full hip-hop glory. Then they invited all the neighborhoods to the party. In a sense, it really was a park jam. No permits, no city fees, it was wholly a self-generated creation. The night of the shoot, thousands had gathered and the show was getting into full swing when the law finally showed up. As the police car pulled near the gate, Ahearn ran over, clipboard in hand, and said, “Oh man, I'm so glad you guys showed up. We thought you would never get here. We just need you to stand right here and help us keep this thing together.” The cops took one look at the scene, got back in their car, and drove off, never to return.

Aside from such regular displays of improvisational genius from the producers and performers, the brilliance of
Wild Style
lay in the decision of Charlie and FAB never to cork the ferocious competitive energy, the feverish call-and-response, the phantasmic sense of possibility present in a hip-hop moment.
Wild
Style
remains the only hip-hop film and soundtrack that adequately conveys the communal thrill of merging with the tide, riding the lightning.

The timeless moment of
Wild Style
is the night before Reagan's morning, sad mourning, in America. Shockdell is talking homelessness like a prophet. Ikonok-last panzer RAMMELLZEE strides onstage waving a sawed-off shotgun in one hand, reaching down and pulling rhymes out his pocket with the other. One second he's stepping out at Cypress Hills, beating down a toy with his def graffiti, the next he's signing off with an apple-pie flourish, shouting out the Rock Steady on the linoleum and the cops in the crowd. That ricochet unpredictability, that badder-than-bold, bolder-than-bad chest-thumping, the volatile combo of sociology-shattering disbelief and Sunday-morning faith it inspired in anyone it touched—all this was
Wild Style
's, and 1982's, gift to the world.

Waiting for something to happen: FUTURA 2000 (foreground), Anita Sarko
(background), b-boy, and bobby-soxer at the Roxy.
Photo © Josh Cheuse/WFN

 

 

All the symbols of a new generation—its sense of style, scale and solidarity—are read as evidence of nascent terrorism.

—Richard Goldstein

When the
Wild Style
entourage stepped into the hot quickening buzz of Yoyogi Park in Tokyo's Harajuku shopping district in 1983, they were walking into a battlefield of pop style. In the heart of the crowded city, Japanese youths were deep into their own generational rebellion.

There was a circle of
Bosozoku
rockers, the Wild Drivers—guys with high-pomaded pompadours leaning on their motorcycles, the girls in pink party dresses dancing to Gene Vincent and Jerry Lee Lewis. There was the
Takenokozoku
circle, the Bamboo Shoots—boys and girls with teased-out hair, faces caked with makeup, swinging and posing in loose unisex silk clothing halfway between New Romantic and Kabuki to Yellow Magic Orchestra and Culture Club tapes.

The style tribes had taken over the park and established their turfs. They coexisted in a strange equilibrium with the passing crowds of the Harajuku and each other, a balance between projecting the menace they needed to preserve their space in the park and the flamboyance that attracted the attention they craved. So as they stared at these Bronx boys, they must have felt equally curious and threatened.

Here were the American b-boys in their
Wild Style
T-shirts, Chief Rocker Busy Bee, a white towel draped over his head, scanning the scene sagely from behind dark sunglasses. The crew was deep—FAB 5 FREDDY, DONDI, FUTURA, Double Trouble, the Cold Crush Brothers. Always up for battle, they grabbed their radio and set up their own circle.

“As a group we were so much more than what anyone could understand,” recalls Charlie Ahearn. “We just blew these people out of the park.

“Within three days,” he says, “there were people scratch-mixing. Graffiti was popping up in imitated fashions. And by the time we left, they were so excited.” City by city, country by country, Bambaataa's Planet Rock was being born.

Tom Silverman was a former college radio DJ who had abandoned a doctorate program in environmental geology to move to New York and leap headlong into the disco scene. After scoring three hits with Bambaataa on his Tommy Boy label, he understood exactly what he had to do and who he was doing it for. “My skill is marketing these things and understanding who you're selling records to,” he said, “which in the case of Tommy Boy is [a] thirteen-year-old Black youth.”
¹

When he started, Silverman had planned on releasing only twelve-inch singles. But Bambaataa's success demanded an album. Silverman and Bambaataa began to argue. “He likes rock and calypso and reggae. He wanted every song different. And people wanted more ‘Planet Rock',” Silverman says. The album was delayed as Bambaataa's and Silverman's lawyers tangled. “The record companies would try to tell us what we should make, what we should do,” Bambaataa says. “We said, ‘Listen, we're the renegades, we sing what we want to sing, dress how we want to dress and say what we want to say.”
²
Out of this tension, Afrika Bambaataa would create another manifesto.

“Renegades of Funk” began with a lyric from The Temptations' 1969 Black power anthem, “Message From A Black Man”: “No matter how hard you try, you can't stop us now.” Then, as Arthur Baker and John Robie set off an orchestra of electronic drums that pounded harder than anything they had yet done, the Soulsonic Force invoked the “renegades of their time and age”—Chief Sitting Bull, Tom Paine, Dr. Martin Luther King and Malcolm X—in a wildstyle view of history that connected the high period of the Italian Renaissance with the rise of the Bronx's “Big Street Beat,” and affirmed the power of “everyday people like you and me” to “change the course of history.”

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?

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