Planet Rock Mixtape: Exporting Hip Hop Culture
By
Michael A. Gonzales
Growing up in New York City during the early ’70s was an adventure in
sound and vision. As a boy, I can recall seeing the graffiti that
covered the subway as it pulled into the station at 145th Street and
Broadway. Eyes wide, I marveled at the colorful names of the “writers”
and crews spray painted across the metal train cars.
Watching this early incarnation of what would later
be called hip hop was the equivalent of observing Pablo Picasso drawing
stick figures in grade school.
A few years later, in 1977, I witnessed my first rapper/DJ crew when Lovebug Starski and DJ Hollywood
played a block party in my neighborhood. Awestruck by the cutting,
scratching and rapping, I stared at the performers as well as their
turntables, speakers, wires and crates of records stacked in the middle
of the street. Rocking to the sonic-shock beats erupting from the
massive speakers, Hollywood talked much jive over the soulful music
while kick-ass drum beats, beefy basslines and fierce funk served as his
soundtrack. Meanwhile, Lovebug Starski, the lanky dude behind the
turntables, manipulated the rhythmic tracks as the young crowd danced.
Although I didn’t realize it at the time, watching this early
incarnation of what would later be called hip hop was the equivalent of
watching James Baldwin getting his first library card or observing Pablo Picasso
drawing stick figures in grade school. When the dance component of
b-boying – breakdancing – was added a few years later, the four elements
of hip hop culture were in place and soon began to inspire people
across the globe.
As cinematic classics like The French Connection, Taxi Driver and Shaft
have shown, in the ’70s the so-called Big Apple was rotting away. “The
whole city was in disarray,” recalls pioneering DJ and rapper Grandmaster Caz, a former member of The Cold Crush Brothers.
“Back then, everything was corrupt and bankrupt. The Bronx was filled
with burned-out buildings and empty lots, but we were kids, so we didn’t
really realize how things were.”
Although the once-majestic metropolis was steadily sinking from
fiscal decline and rising crime rates, there were signs of artistic life
bubbling beneath the gritty asphalt. Uptown in the Bronx, and later in
Harlem, many of those same kids Caz saw playing on those broke-down
blocks began funneling their energies into becoming virtuoso DJs, MCs,
dancers and artists. Hailing from the ghettos of every borough, they
soon made themselves known, if only in their own scarred neighborhoods.
Futura and Dondi White Credit: Janette Beckman
In the beginning, the visual virus of graffiti began as marker
scribbles on the subway-train walls before transforming into a
full-scale artistic attack on the entire system. Using imaginative
monikers, “tags,” that became their new names, writers Fuzz One, Dondi, Lee
and hundreds of others were becoming citywide legends. Soon the
scrawling horde became spray-painting wild boys whose stunning images
were instant masterpieces.
“In 1973, the most exciting things in art were happening on the trains,” says soft-spoken photographer Henry Chalfant.
Intrigued by “the rebellious underground aspect” of what he was seeing
on the streets, Chalfant began taking photographs of both the trains and
the artists themselves.
During that era, Chalfant snapped a picture of every piece that he
saw. Inevitably, Chalfant, along with his friend and fellow photographer
Martha Cooper, became the primary documentarians of the graffiti scene.
That same summer, Clive Campbell, a hulking 16-year-old Jamaican immigrant who called himself Kool Herc,
dragged his father’s turntables and Shure speakers to the recreation
room in his Bronx housing project basement and began to spin records in a
completely new way. The night of Herc’s first party, his best friend Coke La Rock
picked up a microphone that the DJ left next to the turntables; Coke
started talking trash into the mic. A new form of urban poetics – one
filled with black jive, witty one-upmanship and plenty of humor – was
born.
“Man, when I first started, I didn’t know anything about rapping,”
Coke explains. “I just got on the mic, playing around. I was a quiet guy
but when the music started playing, it brought out another person. The
talking just came out of me.”
Meanwhile, as the Bronx boogie began to spread, kids started adding
dance steps to the music. They called themselves b-boys, short for
breaking boys. Crazy Legs, Frosty Freeze,
Spinner and others began developing the dance aspect of the
still-unnamed art form. As though hearing music through their feet,
these kids were loose, limber and had no problem spinning on their
heads. They gathered in subway stations, seedy parks and the Times
Square streets after dark; The Rock Steady Crew, Young City Boys and other crews battled one another just to get a rep.
Crazy Legs
Credit: Janette Beckman
The combination of these four elements – breakdancing, graffiti
writing, DJing and MCing – became the foundation of a new artistic
revolution. Unaware that their actions would be seen as rebellion, these
youngsters formed the first crews that future pop culturists would call
the Hip Hop Generation.
“For a culture to be a complete form, it has to have art, music and dance,” says artist and filmmaker Fab 5 Freddy.
A native of Brooklyn, Freddy began crossing the river into Manhattan
when he was a teenager, hanging out at clubs and art galleries in Soho
and the Lower East Side.
In 1979, the same year that the first hip hop record, “Rapper’s Delight,” was released on Sugar Hill Records,
Fab 5 Freddy and his friend Lee Quiñones, one of graffiti’s true
visionaries, became the first hip hop artists to put their work on
canvas, exhibiting at the Galleria Medusa in Rome. “Me and Fab would
walk through the streets [of Rome] at night carrying a giant beatbox,”
Quiñones says. “We would be blasting rap tapes real loud and people
didn’t know what the hell was going on.”
Fab 5 Freddy and Rammellzee
Credit: Janette Beckman
The early ’80s became the golden years of hip hop culture, both in the
States and abroad. “‘Rapper’s Delight’ charted in a dozen other
countries,” hip hop historian Bill Adler says. “It was a new genre on an independent label, but still it was a smash all over the world.”
In 1981, filmmaker and musician Michael Holman was instrumental in expanding the movement’s audience by bringing some of the Bronx DJs (including Afrika Bambaataa, Jazzy Jay and Rock Steady Crew)
to the downtown nightclub Negril, where punk rockers and European
tourists first caught a peek of the burgeoning genre and started to
spread the word in their respective countries. “We did our party every
Thursday night and European journalists and filmmakers were always
there,” Holman says. In 1981 Holman was also managing breakdancers The
Rock Steady Crew and The Floor Masters, who later became The New York City Breakers.
By the following year, he became the first journalist to use the phrase
“hip hop” in print, when writing about Bambaataa for alternative
newspaper The East Village Eye.
Further sowing the seeds of hip hop globalization, in 1982 Fab 5 Freddy
had a hand in putting together the influential New York City Rap Tour,
which played ten cities in France and two shows in London. Freddy had
already created the single “Change the Beat” for the small French label Celluloid, so he wasn’t exactly a stranger when he arrived.
Double Dutch jump rope team from the New York City Rap Tour
Credit: Janette Beckman
Double Dutch jump rope team from the New York City Rap Tour
Credit: Janette Beckman
The hip hop artists on the tour included Grand Mixer DST (later known as DXT), The Infinity Rappers, The Rock Steady Crew, Kool Lady Blue, Futura 2000, Dondi, Phase Two, Rammellzee,
a double dutch jump rope team, Lee Quiñones and Afrika Bambaataa.
“There was nothing structured about those performances,” Fab 5 Freddy
remembers. “It was just a free-for-all jam, with all of us performing
for hours. Guys would be on stage rapping all day. It was like some kind
of theater. The people in the audience might not have understood
English, but we knew they were feeling what we were doing. Whatever we
did, we just made sure that we looked cool.”
Years later, French rapper MC Solaar
recounted his memories of the show to an American reporter: “Bambaataa
told us to rap in our native tongue and to reflect local reality. And he
said the same thing in Italy and Japan.”
British writer Vivien Goldman,
one of the first pop journalists to cover rap music in the UK, says,
“The French were the first country in Europe to really get into hip hop.
They’ve always been very enthusiastic when it came to discovering new
styles and subcultures, and they were the ones who began spreading the
word. When hip hop got to England, punk was just ending and people were
looking for something new. Most of the kids had grown up on reggae, so
they were used to seeing DJs.”
When the New York City Rap Tour played in London in November 1982, photographer Janette Beckman asked her editor at the weekly pop paper Melody Maker
for a chance to take pictures. “I actually begged them to let me do
it,” she laughs. An art-school-trained photographer, Beckman spent the
period between 1977 and 1983 shooting punk bands. Yet “punk was on the
wane and here was this exciting new music and culture we were being
exposed to,” Beckman says. “It was all very new. Before meeting Dondi,
Lee and Futura, I had never seen anyone tagging. I got shots of
Bambaataa and DST spinning as well as pictures of b-boys posing. The
first time I ever saw a breakdancer, it was a part of that show. It was
wonderful. I had a feeling that this was going to be the next big
thing.”
Grand Mixer DST
Credit: Janette Beckman
Debbie Harry,
lead singer of Blondie, was another ambassador who helped spread the
word about hip hop culture. While many early fans liked to think of
Blondie as punk – they got their start playing gigs at CBGB alongside The Talking Heads, Patti Smith and Television – in reality they were musical chameleons whose colors were often changing.
When their breakout single “Heart of Glass” became a disco hit, the punks felt betrayed. But Harry and conceptualist/guitarist/boyfriend Chris Stein understood the diverse rhythm of the city; they gave national exposure to the Funky 4 + 1 when they selected the group as a musical guest on the episode of Saturday Night Live that Harry hosted in February 1981. (Contrary to what New York-based proto-rapper Gil Scott-Heron
once proclaimed, that Saturday night the revolution was televised.)
“That was one of the best things that could’ve happened to us,” Funky 4 +
1 group member Jazzy Jeff told me in 1999. “For many people across the world, that was their introduction to hip hop.”
Blondie’s popular 1981 single “Rapture”
name-dropped their buddies (“Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly, DJs
spinnin’ are savin’ my mind / Flash is fast, Flash is cool...”) and was
instrumental in sending out the hip hop message to the rest of the
world.
In 1982, Afrika Bambaataa & Soulsonic Force released the first electro hip hop single, “Planet Rock.” Mating samples from the German electronic group Kraftwerk, Roland 808 beats and an Afro-futurist sensibility. With it, Bambaataa created what filmmaker Charlie Ahearn calls “the theme song for taking the entire movement worldwide.”
Ahearn decided to create his own insider look into the crews that represented the four elements. The end result was Wild Style,
which featured Grandmaster Caz and The Cold Crush Brothers, among many
others. Collaborating with Freddy, who did a little bit of everything on
the film, including producing and acting, and Lee Quiñones, who starred
as the protagonist Zoro, Ahern’s movie was shown the following year in
Germany. “We had gotten funding from a German television station, so
they aired it first,” Freddy says. “We had also sold the foreign rights
to Channel Four in England, so there were later a lot of pirate VHS
tapes floating around the UK which eventually found themselves all over
Europe.”
In 1983 in Bristol, England, a crew of multiracial teenagers that included artist Banksy, future members of Portishead (Geoff Barrow), Massive Attack (Daddy G, Mushroom and 3D), DJ Milo, Tricky and Soul II Soul’s Nellee Hooper saw Wild Style at a local theater and lost their collective minds. A few of them united under the name The Wild Bunch, a band of renegades that set their sights on the sounds and culture of the underground.
.With dub beats, sampled sounds and surreal lyrics, Massive Attack’s brilliant debut Blue Lines
became the blueprint of a new generation. The dreamy, sample-heavy
music they made was called trip hop. As 3D said in 1998, “We were blown
away by the entire New York scene. At that time my entire life was
writing graffiti and hanging at The Dug Out.” (The Dug Out was Bristol’s equivalent to Wild Style’s Dixie Club.)
Tricky, another influential trip-hop figure said, “We learned all we could from Wild Style, Run-DMC, Slick Rick and Public Enemy. We were influenced, but applied those lessons to our own sound.”
Future turntablist and mixmaster Matt Black, who began his career as one-half of famed duo Coldcut, whose “Paid in Full”
remix changed the British hip hop game in 1987, remembers meeting The
Wild Bunch posse when he was in Bristol in 1984, shortly after
graduating from Oxford. “My first exposure to rap music was listening to
‘Planet Rock’ and ‘The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel,’” Black says. “But it wasn’t until I hung out in Bristol that I saw Brits that were so devoted to hip hop.”
Having grown up listening to progressive rock like Pink Floyd and Emerson, Lake and Palmer,
Black found the new grooves from The Wild Bunch crew mind-blowing.
“Those guys in Bristol were so much more advanced than what we were
doing in London,” he says. “When we met The Wild Bunch, Nellee
challenged me to a DJ battle. I remember he was cutting up ‘It’s Yours’
by T-La Rock. I was just having a laugh, but Nellee was so intense. Of
course, he won – but when I got back to London I bought my first
Technics turntables and became as serious as he was.”
After the initial success of Coldcut in the ’80s, Black cofounded Ninja Tune,
which has been in business for 23 years. Since its inception, the label
has served as a home for many international hip hop and breakbeat
artists. “Once the English groups realized they didn’t have to pretend
to be American to be hip hop, that was
when they finally got it right,”
says Brooklyn native and DJ Andrea Rose Clarke, who moved to London during the rise of British hip hop.
Another landmark event in bringing hip hop to London was when Basquiat exhibited at the ICA in 1984. New York City artist Jean-Michel Basquiat
was a genius and a junkie, but was also part of the hip hop generation.
He got labeled a graffiti artist because he tagged as SAMO and wrote
bizarre sayings on walls, but he wasn’t really. Basquiat dug what Al Diaz, Keith Haring, Lee, Futura and Dondi were doing in the tunnels and on the sides of subways cars, but his stuff was different.
Equally inspired by William Burroughs, Charlie Parker
and Grandmaster Flash, Basquiat’s layered paintings were filled with
bizarre images: dollar signs, crashed cars, burning buildings,
skeletons. He was friends with Fab 5 Freddy, had a band (Gray) with
Michael Holman and collaborated with fellow b-boy visionary Rammellzee.
When Grandmaster Flash didn’t show up to Blondie’s “Rapture” video
shoot, which would be the first hip hop clip played by MTV, Basquiat
manned the turntables. “The first time I saw a Basquiat, I was in a
gallery in Japan and his work became such a big influence on me,”
Massive Attack’s 3D says.
3D was also a major fan of the photographs Henry Chalfant and Martha Cooper published in their graffiti-themed 1984 book, Subway Art, which featured the vibrant work of Dondi, Blade, Seen and other legendary artists.
Subway Art has been an inspiration from the Bronx to Bangkok
and has never been out of print. Over the years, diverse posses of
pop-culture outlaws have praised the book as having an effect on their
creative lives. Since most subway cars were cleaned within days of being
“bombed,” Chalfant and Cooper’s photos are the only remaining evidence
of those long-gone days.
During this same period, Chalfant’s images and interviews were also the basis for the game-changing PBS documentary Style Wars. Produced by Chalfant (his friend Tony Silver directed), both Subway Art and 1983’s Style Wars have been seminal in the development of a new, truly global hip hop generation.
“Across the world, [Subway Art and Style Wars]
really shined a light on the possibilities,” Chalfant says. “When they
saw people who were basically like themselves making music and creating
art. This was a big revelation for so many people. Filmmakers, writers,
and other artists have told me what kicked it off for them was the book
and the film. That means a lot to me.”
More than 30 years after hip hop’s introduction overseas, the planet is still rocking.
Header image: Janette Beckman
