Can't Stop Won't Stop (26 page)

Cooper arranged for the Rock Steady to perform at the High Bridge Library. The librarians produced a crude stick-figured flyer for “BREAKING, RAPPING & GRAFFITI, an original blend of dancing, acrobatics and martial arts,” and appended a special note at the bottom: “Young adults especially invited.” Then Chalfant landed a summer show for the Rock Steady Crew in the plaza of the Lincoln Center. This time, DOZE drew a graf-style flyer depicting a ski-goggled, big afroed b-boy smirking and saying, “Breaking or otherwise known as (B-Boy) is a competitive warlike dance, making the opponent look bad.” The news media, including ABC's
20/20
newsmagazine show, came out in droves.

Chalfant had coordinated and filmed a battle between Rock Steady and the Dynamic Breakers at the United States of America roller rink in Queens earlier in the year.
¹⁴
He wanted to restage that battle. “I thought that would really be authentic,” he says. “What I hadn't banked on was that the crews would bring all their neighborhood.”

The Rock Steady Crew rolled out thick, their people from all the boroughs representing fresh and bold in light grey jumpsuits. Their Queens rivals, the Dynamic Rockers, came out just as deep in beige and maroon athletic suits. The plaza was transformed into a massive cipher. A small raised stage was placed at the center and covered with kitchen floor linoleum. Hundreds of seats were set up around it. As the battle intensified, the circle enclosed and most of the audience could no longer see the action. The crowd drifted away.

But as the temperatures rose, so did a few tempers, and the battle deteriorated into small fights. Just as the USA battle had ended, so did this one—with a lot of riffing and posturing about who actually won. “And it ended in a kind of mini-wilding spree,” Chalfant adds. “A few hot-dog stands were kicked over, and on the train that I got onto, the Broadway local, somebody punched out a window.”

To say that Rock Steady's biggest shows had been a little rough around the edges was an understatement. But Chalfant possessed a sense of humor and no
small feeling of responsibility for them. Despite his misgivings about his abilities, he gallantly labored on as their manager. “I was the only one who was kind of like an adult with connections,” he says.

“I was a terrible manager in terms of finding gigs,” he says, smiling and shaking his head. “I got things like the Clearwater Festival, a Pete Seeger thing on the Hudson River in Croton-on-Hudson, which was complete culture clash for everyone. I had a Volkswagen van and we all piled in and we went up. There were all these nice little people. There was somebody trying to do sign language for RAMMELLZEE's rap, Rock Steady looking at the vegetarian food and going, ‘Eccccccch!' It was a big, big culture clash!”

He adds, “I know we tried to get something done with commercials—McDonald's and others. We'd put together a package, like, ‘Here's this amazing dance group!' And—nothing.”

Chalfant's business relationship with Rock Steady would not last much longer. Perhaps the artist in him objected to wringing commerce from the culture, or perhaps he was too old and settled to have the hunger for it. “Crazy Legs and I have often talked about it. ‘Henry, you should have been our manager,' ” Chalfant says with a twinge of sadness, “but I wasn't good enough, or really aggressive.”

When hip-hop finally broke through two years later, its global demand blindsided Chalfant, Banes and Cooper. “Graffiti became huge internationally and I wasn't prepared for that. I never thought that would happen,” Chalfant says. Within a year and a half, Banes and Cooper had to retool their pitches to discuss how b-boying “had drastically changed from a folk art form to the hottest entertainment of New York's nightlife . . . sparking world-wide interest in hip-hop style.”
¹⁵
In their book proposal, they promised to discuss why graffiti, rapping, and b-boying is “not taken seriously because it diverges drastically from the ‘proper' Euro-American high culture our educational system imposes.”
¹⁶
So the rejection letters continued to pile up. The three were still struggling to try to present the youth movements as purely as they had first encountered them.

Separately, Chalfant and Cooper had been shopping graffiti books to no avail. They teamed together and suffered two more years of rejections from New York publishing houses. They were told that Norman Mailer's 1974 book
The Faith of Graffiti
was the last word on the subject. Chalfant says, “The other reason, truly, was that they were scared, and they were afraid that they'd get hell.”

Their book,
Subway Art
, was finally accepted and published in 1984 by a London-based house, Thames and Hudson. The book brought the energy of the Writer's Bench and Chalfant's studio into the world, and became a style canon and study-guide for the third, now global generation of aerosolists.
Subway Art
went on to sell more than 200,000 copies.

With American and British public television, foundation and government arts grants and even support from Nathan Glazer, though not a penny from the William Bennett–run National Endowment for the Humanities, Chalfant and documentary filmmaker Tony Silver put together the classic hip-hop movie
Style Wars
. Shot between 1981 and 1983, it captured the youth movements in a moment of high flux as they stood on the brink of becoming a generation's global culture.

The movie had begun as a short on b-boying, but when Chalfant and Silver ran out of money, Rock Steady blew up on the downtown scene and were no longer available. So after hearing Kathy Chalfant describe the drama Henry was living through with his graffiti-writing friends—it was an aria, he later said—Silver shifted the focus to graffiti. He was convinced that they had a Wagnerian opera on their hands: Here was a street art poised on becoming a legitimate artform; but first it would have to get through Mayor Koch, MTA chief Richard Rav-itch and a snarling graf writer named CAP ONE.
Style Wars
stands as a landmark achievement for hip-hop film, the seminal documentary of graffiti and b-boying.

All these works now evoke an era of Apollonian innocence. But at the time, the downtowners felt they had backed into an ideological wasp's nest. The movie had a successful run on PBS stations across the country, proving especially popular in West Coast markets like Seattle and the San Francisco Bay Area. But after a single showing on the PBS outlet in New York, it never returned. The documentary's sympathetic portrayal of graf artists was deemed irresponsible.

When Silver and Chalfant began screening
Style Wars
for audiences around the country, many people their age thought the two should have known better.
Even some liberals who had survived the ‘60s with their long-hair values intact were upset. Chalfant wrote, “The audience at any showing of
Style Wars
attended by Tony or me always raises the same questions: in one, angry citizens berate us for encouraging vandalism everywhere, and in the other, the purists ask if we regret being part of a process that has destroyed urban folk culture.”
¹⁷

For Malcolm McLaren, all these earnest folkies were only worthy of being pranked. Authenticity was a bad word, exploitation was not.

McLaren was a carrot-topped London art student energized by the Parisian spirit of ‘68, who then embarked on a career of anarchic fun-making. By 1977, with an eye on the Big Idea and a gift for self-promotion, he had succeeded like no other Situationist before him, dropping the Sex Pistols on quaint old England like a blitz bomb. After the spectacular collapse of the Sex Pistols and the postcolonial pop candy of Bow Wow Wow, McLaren's first “serious” project was a sendup of global folk dances called
Duck Rock.

For the project, McLaren positioned himself as a sort of arch-browed, post-modern Alan Lomax. He would go around the world collecting ethnic dance music on a little tape recorder and brand it all with his general dadaist nonsense. “I think it's gonna be the biggest thing that ever happened. I think it's gonna be the most truthful,” he boasted to one journalist. “And I think it's gonna create an awareness that will bring together whatever they're doing in El Salvador or Peru with whatever they're doing in Zululand or Appalachia.”
¹⁸

McLaren had realized the future was in global rhythms, what marketers would later call “world beat.” He owed this new worldview to Afrika Bambaataa. Arriving in New York City the same summer as The Clash, McLaren met Michael Holman, a downtown club promoter and one of Rock Steady Crew's new managers, who took him up to Bronx River Community Center for a Zulu Nation throwdown. Hip-hop was pastiche, bricolage. It was worldly wise and you could dance to it. Best of all, it was dangerous.

McLaren later admitted he was scared out of his wits. At the end of the night, when a fight broke out and the entourage was hustled to a back wall as the fists and knives flew, all of his stereotypes were confirmed, and, typically, he had come up with a plan for how to exploit them. He began by asking Bambaataa,
the Soul Sonic Force and the Rock Steady Crew to open Bow Wow Wow's downtown show at the Ritz. Then, he made plans to visit the Zulu townships of South Africa.

Back in London, his partner, Vivienne Westwood, matched McLaren's musical ambition with a line of “ethnic hobo” clothing, a style that made its models look like raccoons wearing shopping bags. McLaren's young associate in New York, Ruza Blue, opened a nightclub called Negril in the East Village where she booked the Zulu Nation DJs and the Rock Steady Crew. McLaren returned to recruit a DJ crew to front the project, and after lots of heads turned him down, the World's Famous Supreme Team, a two-man crew of Five Percenters named Just Allah the Superstar and Cee Divine the Mastermind who had a rowdy, popular late-night show at WHBI, finally agreed.

In the fall of 1982, he unleashed a stunning little single called “Buffalo Gals.” McLaren's collaborator Trevor Horn tried to replicate the feel of Bam's funky breaks, using brand-new sampling technology to add on Supreme Team show call-ins, township jive groans, Just Allah's rap, and McLaren's interpretation of the old “hilltopper” song. The video, shot in the middle of the freaky Greenwich Village Halloween parade, featured the Rock Steady Crew popping and breaking, Dondi White painting a graf piece and Westwood's models going round the outside and looking like hobos. With a video, a radio show, a nightclub, and a clothing line all ready for consumption, McLaren and his team had come up with hip-hop culture's first corporate synergy plan.

The album that followed,
Duck Rock
, was backwards brilliant. Using hiphop's global vacuum signifier intake as their method, McLaren and Horn brought together popular and religious regional dance music—
merengue
,
mbaqanga,
mambo, sacred Lukumi drumming, the odd square dance and, of course, hip-hop. The Supreme Team's raucous, hilarious radio call-ins held the whole thing all together. In a sense, a hip-hop worldview allowed McLaren to sum up the “world music” genre a decade before its fixture in the First World pop marketplace, and deconstructed it at the same time. In the United States, the record was released by the pioneering “world music” label, Chris Blackwell's Island Records.

The
Duck Rock
video captured scintillating double dutch and township dance performances and gave many outside of New York their first glimpse of graffiti,
b-boying, popping, and DJing. In an inspired signifier mashup, McLaren played a British redcoat mock-shocked, upside down, and bleeding to death on a battlefield—the opening scene of
Zulu
redux. As a
shebeen
-styled guitar beat unfurled, the scene cut to township dancers kicking up dust while wearing Rock Steady–style cotton tees emblazoned with iron-on letters that read,
ZULUS ON A TIME BOMB
.

McLaren told journalists that in darkest South Africa he had regaled the Zulus with tales of the Sex Pistols, which inspired them to pen some of
Duck Rock's
songs. But this was just his crude imperialist fantasy. In fact, far from being “folk” songs he'd discovered in a distant village, the township jive and merengue songs had been local pop hits in the ‘70s, replayed note-for-note by pick-up bands in Johannesburg and New York City. Their inspirations—such as the “Indestructible Beat” of South African guitarist and composer Marks Mankwane, his legendary Makgona Tsohle Band, and the groaner, Mahlathini, and vocal group, the Mahotella Queens—went unacknowledged and uncredited. A flood of lawsuits would follow. Perhaps it was perfectly hip-hop.

On the other hand, McLaren's self-serving pomo-imperialist-as-new-rock-star mythology was annoying. The longform video shredded context, running b-roll of Brazilian carnival over Dominican merengue, even as McLaren gave goofy, lyrical shouts to rock-n-roll, calypso, “m-m-m-mambo” and “discago”—
descarga
, that is. Brain-curdling bushman stereotypical images accompanied the sacred batá rhythms. In the same year
Duck Rock
was released, Robert Farris Thompson's book on the diasporic links between African and African-American art and philosophy,
Flash of the Spirit,
came out. Bambaataa had inducted McLaren into the same world of rhythm and soul that Thompson was describing, but McLaren had returned from his journey with less than half the story, and that portion was scrambled.

Duck Rock
's liner notes mocked folkie earnestness and anthropological “discovery.” Moreover, they seemed to anticipate an academic petrifaction of the hip-hop subject. But the liner notes also revealed McLaren's crassly exploitative desire, the dark underside of his ironic distancing:

The performance by the Supreme Team may require some explaining but suffice it to say, they are d.j.'s from New York City, who have developed a
technique using record players like instruments, replacing the power chord of the guitar by the needle of the gramophone, moving it manually backwards and forwards across the surface of the record. We call it ‘scratching.'