HIP-HOP CULTURE
Background
During the late 1970s an underground urban movement known as "hip-hop" began to develop in the South Bronx area of New York City. Encompassing graffiti art, break dancing, rap music, and fashion, hip-hop became the dominant cultural movement of the African American and Hispanic communities in the 1980s. Tagging, rapping, and break dancing were all artistic variations on the male competition and one-upmanship of street gangs. Sensing that gang members' often violent urges could be turned into creative ones, Afrika Bambaataa founded the Zulu Nation, a loose confederation of street-dance crews, graffiti artists, and rap musicians. The popularity of hip-hop spread quickly to mainstream white consumers through movies, music videos, radio play, and media coverage. The resulting flood of attention from wealthy investors, art dealers, movie and video producers, and trend-conscious consumers made hip-hop a viable avenue to success for black and Hispanic ghetto youth. Rap music in particular found a huge interracial audience. After 1985, when the mania for graffiti art and break dancing began to wane, rap music continued to gain popularity, emerging as one of the most original music forms of the decade.
Graffiti Art
Gang graffiti, long a staple of urban life, was elevated to the status of a respected art form in the 1980s. The South Bronx storefront gallery Fashion/Moda, founded in 1978, was the early home of experimental graffiti art, and it soon attracted the attention of downtown artists such as Keith Haring, who began to gravitate uptown to meet other graffitists. Asked to curate an exhibition of graffiti art at the Mudd Club in the East Village, Haring was fired after he invited hundreds of black, white, and Hispanic graffiti artists, who literally covered the club and the surrounding area with their "tags." During these same years, a two-man graffiti team known as SAMO began leaving cryptic, poetic tags and spray-painted social critiques in SoHo and other bohemian neighborhoods. One member of SAMO was artist-musician Jean-Michel Basquiat, who in 1980 was asked to contribute graffiti art to the Times Square Show, an event that brought East Village and Bronx artists together. By this time graffiti-art styles had developed from simple words and symbols into "wild style"—colorful, character-filled art that was at times as beautiful and surreal as it was unintelligible. Some critics hailed graffiti as the first true democratic art form, a style anyone could try. Others decried it as simple vandalism. Alfred Oliveri, head of the New York City Transit Authority vandal squad, sneered, "If this is art, then to hell with art." Gallery owner Tony Shafrazi countered, "It's time to wake up to the fact that we are in a new era. The new artists are the heirs to the continuing tradition of rebellion, play and adventure which is art."
Commercialism
By 1981 graffiti was being featured in public art exhibitions at venues such as P.S. 1, an alternative-art space in a converted school building in Long Island City. Such shows attracted established art dealers and gallery owners. Also in 1981, independent-film actress Patti Astor acted in Charlie Ahearn's underground, semidocumentary movie Wild Style (1982), which features several young graffiti artists, and later that year she and Bill Stelling opened a storefront gallery in the East Village to show the work of her costars, who included Lee Quinones and Lady Pink. Tony Shafrazi, quick to spot any trend, began featuring works by Haring and Basquiat in his SoHo gallery. By 1983 collectors, including Europeans, were buying graffiti art at an astonishing rate. Though Basquiat emerged as the one African American superstar of the form, other black artists such as Futura 2000 and Fab Five Freddy, as well as artists' groups including United Artists, found success in the booming graffiti market. The Fun Gallery continued to attract ghetto kids such as ERO, whose exhibit there led to a subsequent show in Berlin in 1983. By 1984 graffiti art was being prominently featured in Hollywood hip-hop movies such as Beat Street and in music videos such as Madonna's "Borderline."
Break Dancing
A mixture of dancing, tumbling, and gymnastics, break dancing became one of the predominant dance forms of the 1980s, equaled only by the synchrnonized
choreography of music videos. Break-dancers used acrobatic moves—such as splits, headstands, flips, and handsprings—spinning on their shoulders, backs, and heads in an often dazzling display of athletics and choreography. Especially in California, some breakers spun partners overhead or interlocked with other dancers; many danced in pairs. Others incorporated related street moves, such as the robotic electric boogie made popular by Michael Jackson. Most dancing was competitive and, like graffiti art and rap music, performed by young inner-city males. This dance style began in the late 1970s as a. type of mock urban warfare in which members of opposing street gangs, usually Hispanic, tried to one-up each other with hot moves. These teenagers started congregating to perform and compete in graffiti-art venues such as Fashion/MODA in the South Bronx and underground clubs such as the Fun House in New York. DJs such as John "Jellybean" Benitez tried out new records at the youth clubs. Dancers would meet on street corners, spinning on pieces of linoleum or cardboard boxes to the thunderous beats of ghetto blasters. In some inner-city schools, breaking started to replace fighting between rival gangs. "It's a way to be No. 1 without blowing somebody away," said the director of a Denver juvenile-delinquency program, who pushed for a city-sponsored break-dance contest. Said one San Francisco gang member, "If you told me a few years ago that I'd be dancing, I'd laugh. It's like a thing: gangs getting ready to fight, but instead we dance."
Mainstream
Breakers had been featured in Wild Style, released in 1982, but the mainstream breakthrough came in 1983, when Rock Steady Crew of New York performed break-dance moves in the hit movie Flashdance. Soon break-dancing was prominently featured in music videos and television commercials, performed by professional dance groups such as the New York City Breakers. It was also being taken seriously as a new art form: the San Francisco Ballet opened its 1984 season with a gala
featuring forty-six break-dancers, and the Los Angeles Olympic Games used one hundred break-dancers in the closing ceremony. One ballet promoter who began working with breakers commented, "Changing the field of gravity of the dancer is as revolutionary as the addition of sound to moving pictures." In summer 1984 a book called Breakdancing topped The New York Times list of best-selling how-to books. By the time the motion pictures Breakin and Beat Street opened in 1984, Hollywood had six more major break-dance movies in production. Breakin, shot on a shoestring budget and featuring dancers Shabba-Doo and Boogaloo Shrimp, grossed more than $30 million in two months; the soundtrack sold a million copies in six weeks. Beat Street, produced by Harry Belafonte and featuring sixteen-year-old dancer Robert Taylor, showed a slick Hollywood version of the South Bronx far removed from urban grit, gangs, and drugs of Wild Style. By the time Beat Street was released, much of the original style and charm of break dancing had been diluted by excessive commercialization. With how-to videos and break-dance lessons available in towns nationwide and white stars such as Lorenzo Lamas (Body Rock, 1984) and the elderly Don Ameche (Cocoon, 1985) break dancing in movies, the form began to seem both silly and surreal.
Mixing and Sampling
Beat Street featured several prominent urban-music trends of the 1980s, including mixing, sampling, and scratching. Mixing, popularized by club DJs such as Jellybean, required the skillful blending of different records that had similar beats into a single, seamless dance number. When DJs started recording and replaying their best mixes, the major record labels took notice, releasing extended-play dance mixes of big chart hits. By 1984 a third of the standard Top 20 pop singles were available as twelve-inch remixes. Jellybean did a remix for Michael Jackson, while Arthur Baker, the music coordinator for Beat Street, was hired to remix dance versions of songs for Cyndi Lauper and Bruce Springsteen. Mixing was taken a step further by DJs who employed scratching, which involved placing the needle in a record groove and manually turning the disc back and forth in rapid succession to achieve a staccato effect and thereby segue into another song. Sampling was akin to the appropriation used by many visual artists of the decade: samplers took snatches of existing records and wove them into new numbers, usually by scratching the records to cover the transition from one sample to another. In the song "Strictly Business" (1988) EPMD borrowed a familiar riff from Eric Clapton's version of "I Shot the Sheriff." Using two or more turntables to scratch and sample, DJs kept dance floors crowded with sound changes that appealed to MTV attention spans. Mixing, scratching, and sampling were all popular techniques with DJs.
Rap Music
Rap originated in the early 1970s in the South Bronx, where DJs played riffs from their favorite dance records at "house parties," creating new sounds by scratching over them or adding drum synthesizers. A partner, the MC, would add a rhyming, spoken vocal (a rap) over the mix, often using clever plays on words. Most rap songs were braggadocio, the aural equivalent of street gangs' strut and swagger. Boasting about their physical prowess and coolness, rappers used competitiveness with rival males as the motivation for creativity. Some early rap songs promoted global and interracial harmony, including The Sugar Hill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" (1980) and Afrika Bambaataa's "Planet Rock" (1982), which became a crossover hit on the dance charts and sold more than six hundred thousand copies. Other rappers expressed serious political and social messages, often addressing the effects of racism, poverty, and crime on the African American community. One such group was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, formed in the Bronx in 1978 by Joseph Saddler. Flash first attracted attention with the song "Freedom," released on the rap label Sugar Hill in 1980. Their 1981 album was among the first to feature sampling, and in 1982 their seven-minute recording "The Message"—about black ghetto life—became an underground hit. When Flash went solo, another Furious Five member stepped forward to lead the group as Grandmaster Melle Mel. The new group released the antidrug anthem "White Lines (Don't Do It)" in 1983.
Crossover
Rap remained primarily an underground urban style until the mid 1980s, when it exploded into the mainstream with the unexpected popularity of RunD.M.C. Formed in 1982 the trio released their first record the following year and watched it become the first rap-music gold album. Their 1985 LP King of Rock was an even bigger hit, reaching number fifty-three on the Billboard album chart and featuring two videos that achieved significant airplay on MTV. Run-D.M.C.'s heavy metal sampling increased its popularity with young white males, especially after the 1986 recording of "Walk This Way," a remake of an Aero smith song with a video featuring Joe Perry and Steven Tyler of Aerosmith. The song was the crossover breakthrough for rap music, while the album that featured it, Raising Hell, sold more than 3 million copies and became the first platinum rap album. Inspired by the success of Run-D.M.C, MTV launched a daily Yo! MTV Raps program. Female rap artists such as Salt-N-Pepa, MC Lyte, and Queen Latifah began to make inroads in the late 1980s, and even white acts jumped on the bandwagon; in 1987 the Beastie Boys had a major hit with "(You've Gotta) Fight for Your Right (to Party)." By the end of the decade rappers such as L. L. Cool J ("I'm Goin Back to Cali," 1988) and Tone Loc ("Wild Thing," 1989) were regularly appearing in the Top 40, and in the 1990s the rap stars Ice-T, Fresh Prince, and Kid 'N Play were elevated to movie and television stars.
Controversy
While some rap songs were lighthearted and fun—for example, Run-D.M.C.'s "My Adidas" celebrated hip footwear—rap music became increasingly
political as the decade progressed. Sensing nothing but indifference from the Reagan administration and white America to the escalating problems of crime, poverty, drugs, and unemployment in their communities, many rappers openly raged against the police, the government, big corporations, and other bastions of white male power. In response some critics attacked rap music in the late 1980s for the often overt violence, racism, sexual explicitness, and misogyny of its lyrics. In 1986 Tipper Gore of the Parents' Music Resource Center blamed the music of Run-D.M.C. for the eruption of violence at several stops on their summer tour. Others took issue with the militant, seemingly antiwhite stance of rap group Public Enemy, especially on their million-selling 1988 album It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back and in the song "Fight the Power," featured in Spike Lee's controversial 1989 movie Do the Right Thing. Though candid about the evils of bigotry, group members Flavor Flav and Chuck D responded to such criticism by insisting that they advocated improving black life through empowerment. During a concert at Riker's Island Prison in New York, Chuck D announced, "Our goal is to get ourselves out of this mess and be responsible to our sons and daughters so they can lead a better life. My job is to build 5,000 potential black leaders through my means of communication." Also in 1988 the recording "Move Somethin'" by 2 Live Crew ignited controversy when an Alabama store owner was arrested and charged with selling an obscene work. In 1990, 2 Live Crew was again in court, successfully defending their music against obscenity charges.
Messages
Run-D.M.C. sought to be role models for black youth through their involvement in social causes. In addition to decrying the gang fighting at their live shows, they took part in the Live Aid and Artists United Against Apartheid projects, appeared in a promo video for the Martin Luther King national holiday campaign and at an anticrack awareness day, and came out with a strong antidrug message in the song "It's Tricky." Rappers Queen Latifah and N.W.A also spoke out against drugs. Ice-T used his chilling gangland rap "Colors," in the 1988 movie of the same name, as a commentary on the harsh realities of black life in the inner cities. In 1989 leading rappers joined together in the Stop the Violence (STV) movement. Denouncing gang warfare, Chuck D and Flavor Flav of Public Enemy joined KRS-One, Heavy D, MC Lyte, and others to record the single "Self-Destruction," which sold half a million copies. STV donated $500,000 in royalties to the National Urban League to combat illiteracy. "We wanted to reach the kids most affected by black-on-black crime," said Ann Carli, the Jive Records executive who helped organize STV. "Rap records can be a tool that can be used in education today." Black pride was also the message of rappers Sir Mix-a-Lot ("National Anthem"), Big Daddy Kane ("Young, Gifted and Black"), and Queen Latifah, who dressed in African-inspired garb. "Style is Afrocentric," she said, "and my style and music are one."
Fashion
The underground urban fashion and street language of hip-hop had also reached mainstream America by middecade. Inspired by rap performers such as the Furious Five, who sported head-to-toe leather, metal studs, and fur-trimmed coats, ghetto kids modified their street-gang uniforms to include gold rings and chains, personalized belt buckles, and high, knitted ski caps. Furious Five member Kurtis Blow noted, "Not only did our fans want to talk like we did, but they dressed like we did." Spotless jeans, baseball caps, and impeccable Adidas sneakers were standard for hip-hoppers as well. While "b-boys" tended to sport the flashiest clothes, "fly girls" adopted their own version of the look with leather pants and layered sweatshirts. Because of the pervasiveness of hip-hop culture in the mass media, bits of black street vocabulary—including fresh, def chilly and posse —became common even in white suburbia. By the late 1980s white teenagers were as conscious of hip-hop fashion and status symbols as the black and Hispanic kids who had inspired them: the "right" Air Jordan sneakers with the most complex lacing, the hippest bandannas, the perfect layering of shorts over sweatpants. Hip-hop had struck the trendiest nerve in mainstream America—the need to be on the "cutting edge" of fashion.
Sources:
"Break Dancing the Night Away," Newsweek 102 (21 March 1983): 72-73;
"Breaking Out: America Goes Dancing," Newsweek, 104 (2 July 1984): 46-52;
"Chilling Out on Rap Flash," Time, 121 (21 March 1983): 72-73;
Peter Frank and Michael McKenzie, New, Used & Improved: Art for the 80s (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987);
"Graffiti on Canvas," Newsweek, 102 (18 April 1983): 94;
"Some Bad Raps for Good Rap," Newsweek 108 (1 September 1986): 85;
David P. Szatmary, Rockiri in Time: A Social History of Rock and Roll (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1987).
