1) Introduction Central Idea and Thesis: The first paragraph should grab the reader’s attention. The thesis (i.e. what you will argue) is clearly stated. Show the reader why the topic matters.

2) Organization: The essay should be well-organized. One idea follows another in a logical sequence with clear transitions.

3) Understanding of Text: The essay should clearly lay out the main argument of the authors you are reading. Demonstrate a clear grasp of a difficult concept with a good example. Pay attention not simply to the content of the author’s argument but also the methods by which they address an issue.

4) Critical Evaluation of the Text: Critical evaluation is not always negative it can be positive. On the negative side you can briefly step outside a view and raise an objection to it from a different perspective. After raising an objection you may offer a response that tries to minimize the force of an objection. On the positive side you can try and extend someone’s view and apply it to a different situation or you could show why the argument is original or a good reminder or may point out various strengths in the author’s argument or approach. Whether you show limitations of a view or its strengths or both you must give reasons in support of your evaluations. Please try and give a sophisticated response to the text that is clear and demonstrates that you “got what he/she tried to say” and you critically thought about it.

5) Mechanics: Try and have few, if any, spelling, punctuation, organization, grammar or usage errors.

THaT’S THE

JOInt!

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ROUTLEDGE New York • London

THaT’S THE

JOInt! The Hip-Hop Studies Reader

Murray Forman & Mark Anthony Neal E D I T O R S

Published in 2004 by Routledge 270 Madison Avenue New York, NY 10016 www.routledge-ny.com

Published in Great Britain by Routledge 2 Park Square Milton Park, Abingdon Oxfordshire OX14 RN www.routledge.co.uk

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group.

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper. Typesetting: Jack Donner, BookType.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

That's the joint! : the hip-hop studies reader / edited by Mark Anthony Neal and Murray Forman. p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-415-96918-2 (hardback : alk. paper) — ISBN 0-415-96919-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)

1. Rap (Music)—History and criticism. 2. Rap (Music)—Social aspects. 3. Hip-hop. I. Neal, Mark Anthony. II. Forman, Murray, 1959-

ML3531.T43 2004 782.421649'09—dc22

2004015140

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Dedicated to the memory of

Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizzel,

R.I.P.

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Foreword xi

Acknowledgments xv

Introduction 1 MURRAY FORMAN

Part I Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop: 9 Hip-Hop History and Historiography MURRAY FORMAN

1 Breaking 13 SALLY BANES

2 The Politics of Graffiti 21 CRAIG CASTLEMAN

3 Breaking: The History 31 MICHAEL HOLMAN

4 B-Beats Bombarding Bronx: Mobile DJ Starts Something 41 with Oldie R&B Disks ROBERT FORD, JR.

5 Jive Talking N.Y. DJs Rapping Away in Black Discos 43 ROBERT FORD, JR.

6 Hip-Hop’s Founding Fathers Speak the Truth 45 NELSON GEORGE

vii

Contents

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Part II No Time for Fake Niggas: Hip-Hop Culture 57 and the Authenticity Debates MARK ANTHONY NEAL

7 The Culture of Hip-Hop 61 MICHAEL ERIC DYSON

8 Puerto Rocks: Rap, Roots, and Amnesia 69 JUAN FLORES

9 It’s a Family Affair 87 PAUL GILROY

10 Hip-Hop Chicano: A Separate but Parallel Story 95 RAEGAN KELLY

11 On the Question of Nigga Authenticity 105 R.A.T. JUDY

12 Looking for the “Real” Nigga: Social Scientists Construct the Ghetto 119 ROBIN D.G. KELLEY

13 About a Salary or Reality?—Rap’s Recurrent Conflict 137 ALAN LIGHT

14 The Rap on Rap: The “Black Music” that Isn’t Either 147 DAVID SAMUELS

Part III Ain’t No Love in the Heart of the City: 155 Hip-Hop, Space, and Place MURRAY FORMAN

15 Black Empires, White Desires: 159 The Spatial Politics of Identity in the Age of Hip-Hop DAVARIAN L. BALDWIN

16 Hip-Hop am Main, Rappin’ on the Tyne: Hip-Hop Culture as a 177 Local Construct in Two European Cities ANDY BENNETT

17 “Represent”: Race, Space, and Place in Rap Music 201 MURRAY FORMAN

18 Rap and Hip-Hop: The New York Connection 223 DICK HEBDIGE

19 Uptown Throwdown 233 DAVID TOOP

viii • CONTENTS

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Part IV I’ll Be Nina Simone Defecating on Your Microphone: 247 Hip-Hop and Gender MARK ANTHONY NEAL

20 Translating Double-Dutch to Hip-Hop: 251 The Musical Vernacular of Black Girls’ Play KYRA D. GAUNT

21 Empowering Self, Making Choices, Creating Spaces: 265 Black Female Identity via Rap Music Performance CHERYL L. KEYES

22 Hip-Hop Feminist 277 JOAN MORGAN

23 Seeds and Legacies: Tapping the Potential in Hip-Hop 283 GWENDOLYN D. POUGH

24 Never Trust a Big Butt and a Smile 291 TRICIA ROSE

Part V The Message: Rap, Politics, and Resistance 307 MARK ANTHONY NEAL

25 Organizing the Hip-Hop Generation 311 ANGELA ARDS

26 Check Yo Self Before You Wreck Yo Self: 325 The Death of Politics in Rap Music and Popular Culture TODD BOYD

27 The Challenge of Rap Music from Cultural Movement 341 to Political Power BAKARI KITWANA

28 Rap, Race, and Politics 351 CLARENCE LUSANE

29 Postindustrial Soul: Black Popular Music at the Crossroads 363 MARK ANTHONY NEAL

Part VI Looking for the Perfect Beat: 389 Hip-Hop Aesthetics and Technologies of Production MURRAY FORMAN

30 Airshafts, Loudspeakers, and the Hip Hop Sample: 393 Contexts and African American Musical Aesthetics ANDREW BARTLETT

CONTENTS • ix

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31 Public Enemy Confrontation 407 MARK DERY

32 Hip-Hop: From Live Performance to Mediated Narrative 421 GREG DIMITRIADIS

33 Sample This 437 NELSON GEORGE

34 “This Is a Sampling Sport”: Digital Sampling, 443 Rap Music, and the Law in Cultural Production THOMAS G. SCHUMACHER

35 Challenging Conventions in the Fine Art of Rap 459 RICHARD SHUSTERMAN

36 Hip-Hop and Black Noise: Raising Hell 481 RICKEY VINCENT

Part VII I Used to Love H.E.R.: 493 Hip-Hop in/and the Culture Industries MARK ANTHONY NEAL

37 Commercialization of the Rap Music Youth Subculture 497 M. ELIZABETH BLAIR

38 Dance in Hip-Hop Culture 505 KATRINA HAZZARD-DONALD

39 Wendy Day, Advocate for Rappers 517 NORMAN KELLEY

40 The Business of Rap: Between the Street and the Executive Suite 525 KEITH NEGUS

41 Contracting Rap: An Interview with Carmen Ashhurst-Watson 541 TRICIA ROSE

42 Black Youth and the Ironies of Capitalism 557 S. CRAIG WATKINS

43 Homies in The ’Hood: Rap’s Commodification of Insubordination 579 TED SWEDENBURG

44 An Exploration of Spectacular Consumption: 593 Gangsta Rap as Cultural Commodity ERIC K. WATTS

Permissions 611

Index 615

x • CONTENTS

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“Sir, please turn around and face me,” the airport security employee directed me. As I complied, he continued to methodically search me at the security checkpoint. He reminded me of my son, a tall taffy-faced figure who’d barely left his youth behind. As I caught his eyes when he frisked my outstretched arms, he whispered to me while keeping his professional demeanor.

“Man, I really feel your work on Pac,” he gently stated, referring to my book Holler If You Hear Me: Searching for Tupac Shakur. “Plus, I’ve seen Thug Angel and Tupac Vs.”—two documentaries on the slain rapper in which I’d participated—“and you be puttin’ it down.”

“May I please place my hands on your chest since my detector went off?” he quizzed me more formally without missing a beat. “Sure, no problem,” I replied. “That’s where my suspenders are. And I’m glad you like the work.” “Fo’ sho, fo’ sho’,” he said as he effortlessly slid back into his vernacular voice. “I’m just glad to know that somebody from your generation cares about Pac and hip-hop, and takes the time to listen to what we’re saying.”

“Alright, sir, I’m finished. You’re done. But could you do me a big favor?”“What’s that?” I asked. The young man retreated to a portable booth tucked away at the end of the security line

and fetched a dog-eared paperback copy of my book. “If you don’t mind, please sign this before you go.”

I was moved by his heartfelt compliments. I was even more touched by his eloquent rebuke of the view that his generation is illiterate and wholly fixed on destruction and mindless mate- rialism. We weren’t in school, and he wasn’t reading my book for a good grade or for extra credit. Like the best students, he read for passion, and for the pleasure and pursuit of critical stimulation. It seemed that he was hungry for a sign among intellectuals and older folk that the huge importance of hip-hop hadn’t been smothered by contempt, or just as bad, squandered by undiscriminating enthusiasm. And his delight in me taking Tupac seriously was an unspoken nod to the fierce crosswinds in which hip-hop is presently caught. There are some who dismiss hip-hop as the dead letter of brazen stereotype-mongering among the severely undereducated and their gaggle of learned and over-interpreting defenders. Other critics claim that the deficits of hip-hop are amplified because they blare beyond the borders of ugly art to inspire youth to even uglier behavior. And others protest that, stripped of politics, history, and racial conscience, hip-hop is little more than sonic pathology that blasts away all the achieve- ment of the civil rights struggle.

Foreword

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The academic study of hip-hop— like hip-hop itself— has been the subject of complaints even from its earliest days. By now, many of the complaints are familiar, even tired. But that hasn’t stopped their being repackaged every so often to track the sensational headlines that trumpet the moral transgressions or violent deaths that rattle the rap world. John McWhorter, who’s made a career in the public arena by twisting anecdotes of perceived black misbehavior into a questionable analysis of contemporary race, eloquently weighs in with lopsided moral- izing in the summer 2003 issue of City Journal. “By reinforcing the stereotypes that long hindered blacks,” McWhorter argues, “and by teaching young blacks that a thuggish adversarial stance is the properly ‘authentic’ response to a presumptively racist society, rap retards black success.” That’s an awfully big burden to carry—the fate of black success—especially for black youth (at least the ones who make a cameo in the anecdote that fronts McWhorter’s essay) who appear to McWhorter to embody the “antisocial behavior” encouraged by hardcore rap that preaches “bone-deep dislike of authority.”

Many critics, including McWhorter, don’t account for the complex ways that some hip-hop artists play with stereotypes to either subvert or reverse them. For instance, amidst all the pimp mythologies and metaphors that weigh heavily on branches of contemporary hip-hop, rappers like Common seize on pimpology’s prominence to poke fun at its pervasiveness. But its critics often fail to acknowledge that hip-hop is neither sociological commentary nor political criti- cism, though it may certainly function in these modes through its artists’ lyrics. Hip-hop is still fundamentally an art form that traffics in hyperbole, parody, kitsch, dramatic license, double entendres, signification, and other literary and artistic conventions to get its points across. By denying its musical and artistic merit, hip-hop’s critics get to have it both ways: they can deny the legitimate artistic standing of rap while seizing on its pervasive influence as an art form to prove what a terrible affect it has on youth. There are few parallels to this heavy- handed wrong-headedness in the criticism of other art forms like films, plays, or visual art, especially when they are authored by non-blacks. These cultural products are often conceded as art—even bad art, useless art, banal art, but art nonetheless—while there is a far greater consensus about hip-hop’s essential artlessness. That cultural bias—and unapologetic igno- rance—informs many assaults on the genre that reinforce the racial gulfs that feed rap’s resent- ment of the status quo.

Of course, not all the barbs aimed at hip-hop are meant exclusively for its artists. Some are directed at the post-civil rights era generation of Black academics who have been prominent in practicing the academic study of hip-hop. Thus, revered intellectuals and writers like Martin Kilson react angrily when they think intellectuals who engage hip-hop don’t embrace the values and styles of the civil rights movement. In an online journal of opinion, The Black Commentator, Kilson points to several articles from the post-civil rights black intelligentsia to prove that they are “tossing poisoned darts at African Americans’ mainline civil rights tradi- tion and its courageous leadership figures.” Kilson’s criticism of the post-civil rights era black intelligentsia includes a section taking me to task for an op-ed piece I wrote for the New York Times about the controversy surrounding the movie Barbershop (in which a character jokes about such civil rights era figures as Martin Luther King, Jr. and Rosa Parks). Kilson was part of that chorus of voices decrying the movie for its perceived “irreverence toward African- American civil rights leadership.”

Kilson’s view that movies like Barbershop—as well as hip-hop more generally—“serve as anti-Black ammunition for conservative opponents of African-Americans’ civil rights agenda.” is not unrepresentative of many older—and truth to be told, younger—black folks’ beliefs about hip-hop and those scholars associated with its defense. Many agree with Kilson that “there’s nothing whatever that’s seriously radical or progressive about hip-hop ideas and

xii • FOREWORD

Au: “every so often” meant?

Au: Not sure what is meant by “engage hip hop”

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values.” Many support Kilson’s view that hip-hop is politically empty, and is little more “than an updated face on the old-hat, crude, anti-humanistic values of hedonism and materialism.”

Critics of hip-hop like Kilson make a point, of course—and it’s not a point that’s hard to make—that hip-hop is full of problematic expressions. It reeks of materialism; it gorges with stereotypes and offensive language; it spoils with retrogressive views; it is rife with hedonism; and it surely cannot always be said to side with humanistic values. But this argument demands little engagement with hip-hop; these views don’t require much beyond attending to surface symptoms of a culture that offers far more depth and color when it’s taken seriously and crit- icized in proper fashion. It is odd that gifted intellectuals should so resolutely stick to super- fluous observation, as if afraid of the intellectual credibility or complex truths they might find in a comprehensive study of hip-hop. It would be outlandish to comment on, say, metaphysical poetry without interacting critically with its most inspired poets. At least read Donne. And if one were to make hay over the virtues or deficits of nineteenth-century British poetry, or twen- tieth-century Irish poetry, then one should encounter the full range of Tennyson’s or Yeats’s work before jumping, or slouching, to conclusions.

Unfortunately, much of the source material for such a study of hip-hop is diffuse and hard to come by. Instead of meaningful critical inquiry we argue about op-eds—and not books. The major points in my New York Times op-ed on the brouhaha over Barbershop—stirred largely by civil rights leaders—were that films are not scholarly monographs; that folk have the right to express themselves, and if we don’t like it, we can criticize them or make our own films; that one film can’t possibly represent the entire black experience; that recent scholar- ship focused on mass movements in the civil rights era veered toward group dynamics being just as important as charismatic leadership; that civil rights organizations at their worst shut down free speech; that at their best barbershops offered politically incorrect black speech as a bonus of sheared hair; and that art is supposed to get in our faces and not simply soothe or reas- sure us. What critics of hip-hop miss by neglecting to make concrete engagement with hip- hop culture is the complexity of that culture. I’ve written a book on rapper Tupac Shakur and one on Dr. King. I don’t despise civil rights; I take it so seriously that I engage it at fair length, concluding that, despite his faults, King is the greatest American produced on our native soil!

Critics of hip-hop from an earlier generation, like Kilson, often work from an uniformed view of hip-hop culture and its critics—after all, those of us who study and write about hip-hop aren’t just fans. In fact, we sometimes make some of the same criticisms that Kilson and others make, but hopefully from a more informed perspective. What we need are more informed and extended analyses of hip-hop culture, and, for that matter, of civil rights leaders and move- ments. Unfortunately, there is little serious work from the critics of hip-hop that engages hip- hop with intellectual rigor, rather than knee-jerk negativism.

This opposition to the study of hip-hop is shared by other writers like Hugh Pearson, a Brown University graduate who is appalled by the fact that Ivy League schools would dare offer hip-hop courses. Writing in Newsday in the late summer of 2003, Pearson condemns Harvard for housing a hip-hop archive because its scholars deem the art form and culture on which it rests to be an important cultural phenomenon that is worthy of study. Pearson rails at rappers with “a tendency to compose ungrammatical lyrics flowing from the ungrammatical speech patterns that are standard for too many African-Americans.” Unlike earlier funk musicians, who “in those days no one considered . . . worthy of ‘study’ at a serious university,” Pearson is galled that the Ivy League “will now treat hip-hop as respectable.” Pearson has no sense of irony when he pinches a phrase from a man of manifest mediocrity—George W. Bush  who, in accepting the Republican nomination for the presidency at its 2000 convention, spoke of the “soft bigotry of low expectations.” It was an unintended autobiography in précis to be sure.

FOREWORD • xiii

Au: Personal attack appro- priate?

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Pearson samples the line to suggest that that’s what studying hip-hop in the academy amounts to, instead of a course of study that “extol[s] the positive elements of the African-American community,” and that, instead of “[raising] cultural standards . . . prefers to make chicken salad out of chicken necks.”

In putting down the study of hip-hop—and African-American Studies as well—critics like Pearson believe that it is simply unworthy of serious examination. But we should be willing to take a scholarly look at hip-hop for no other reason than the art form and culture has grabbed global attention and sparked emulation in countless different countries and among widely varied ethnicities. For example, when I was in Brazil recently and went to the “Black Six,” a hip-hop club in Rio, I might as well have been in Harlem or Philadelphia. We need to study the way that cultures of articulation and representation have traversed international boundaries and been adopted in fascinating manner in the languages and accents indigenous to their regions—this phenomenon alone is a cause of intellectual curiosity. Because they appear to be ashamed of hip-hop—a feeling shared by many blacks and others who decry the sordid images of hip-hop as the detritus of the culture that should be swept away with the garbage—critics of hip-hop culture are incapable of acknowledging just how interesting and insightful the study of rap has proven in various intellectual settings around the world. Pearson’s demand for an exemption from this trend in our nation’s most prestigious universities is an odd cry for remedial provincialism—a return to a climate of academic curiosity where only a narrow range of subjects could be legitimately pursued.

This brief genealogy of conflicts should show just why the book you hold in your hand is so critical. By taking the time to present a feverishly productive intellectual accounting of an equally fertile culture of expression, Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal have placed at our disposal some of the most intriguing engagements with hip-hop culture. The writers in this volume don’t shy away from probing the complex varieties of black identity, even those that skirt close to stereotype as they undress its mauling effects. The contributors to this volume dig deep into hip-hop’s rich traditions of expression to generate a criticism equal to the art that inspires it. And these writers have no shame in poring hard and long over hip-hop; assuming its intellectual value without being unduly defensive about its critical status is a shining virtue of the book.

Hip-hop is being studied all over the globe, and the methodologies of its examination are rightfully all over the map. They are multidisciplinary in edifying, exemplary fashion, borrowing from sociology, politics, religion, economics, urban studies, journalism, commu- nications theory, American studies, transatlantic studies, black studies, history, musicology, comparative literature, English, linguistics, and many more disciplines besides. This book makes it plain that hip-hop is no fad, either culturally or intellectually, and that its best artists and intellectuals are as capable of stepping back and critiquing its flows and flaws as the most astute observers and participants in any other genre of musical or critical endeavor. As the academic study of hip-hop enters a new phase—as it matures and expands, as it deepens and opens up even broader avenues of investigation—it needs a summary text, one that captures the many sided features of a dynamic culture that demands rigorous criticism and considera- tion. That’s what you’ve got in your hands. This is an intellectual mix-tape that heads from all over can feel and learn from each time they take a listen and give a read. It has the same features of the best hip-hop: seductive rhythms, throbbing beats, intelligent lyrics, soulful samples, and a sense of joy that is never exhausted in one sitting. So, like the hottest joints, sit down and savor the vibe of this heady and heartfelt compilation.

Michael Eric Dyson

xiv • FOREWORD

Au: “raff” cor- rect word?

Au: Most, not all?

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We are grateful to the numerous individuals who expressed their encouragement and offered their assistance in preparing the manuscript for That’s the Joint! In assembling the essays, we have attempted to be as inclusive as possible; our apologies to several authors who offered their permission to include previously published articles but whose work was ultimately excluded due to prohibitive reprint costs. Thanks are due to the authors who, when contacted, went out of their way to personally assist us, or helped in negotiations with their publishers: Andrew Bartlett, Todd Boyd, Mark Dery, Greg Dimitriadis, Juan Flores, Paul Gilroy, Michael Holman, Cheryl Keyes, Bakari Kitwana, Gwendolyn Pough, Tricia Rose, David Toop, and Rickey Vincent.

Shout outs to: Marcyliena Morgan of the Hip-Hop Archive at Harvard University (espe- cially for hosting the symposium “All Eyez on Me: Tupac Shakur and the Search for a Modern Folk Hero,” where several of the authors represented in these pages convened), Knut Aukrust (Oslo, Norway), Michael Eric Dyson (Philadelphia), Emmett Price III (Boston), and Tony Mitchell (holding fort Down Under). “Big Up” to the Northeastern University Hip-Hop Studies Collective: E. P. III, Paul K. Saucier, Geoff Ward, Alan West-Duran, and Nadine Yaver.

The Department of Communication Studies, Northeastern University, provided support in the book’s early stages, and we thank the department chair, P. David Marshall, and the admin- istrative staff and work study students for their assistance in the manuscript’s preparation. Thanks to Amy Rodriguez for editing assistance, and Matt Byrnie and Mark Henderson of Taylor and Francis for shepherding the project through. Special thanks to Zamawa Arenas for her enduring grace.

Murray Forman Boston

Acknowledgments

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These words we say, we want y’all to hear We’re gonna make a lot of sense—we’re gonna make it clear . . .

. . . We’re gonna rock this record and don’t you forget Ah, that’s the joint

“That’s the Joint” by The Funky Four + One (1980, Sugar Hill Records)

In his 1995 paean “Old School” (1995, Interscope), Tupac Shakur pays tribute to hip-hop’s formative stages and its pioneers with detailed references to everyday teen practices, clothing styles, and a general attitude or way of being as the cultural underpinnings of hip-hop took shape almost twenty years prior. Calling out to New York City’s boroughs, he identifies the locus of hip-hop’s origins, proclaiming gratitude to rap music’s innovators and citing the essential contribution of local radio stations, DJs, or nightclubs. He also explicitly describes the urban perambulation and mobility of subway rides between Brooklyn and Harlem and the social cohesion of neighborhood block parties “in the projects,” noting in his lyrics that early hip-hop was the product of overlapping influences as teens from different neighborhoods moved across the city, mingling in formal and informal urban spaces—literally inhabiting both aboveground and underground environments.

When Shakur intones the phrase “Forget the TV, about to hit the streets and do graffiti / Be careful don’t let the transit cops see me,” he explains that early hip-hop was characterized by public actions that were, in many cases, simultaneously accompanied by risks of varying severity. From this vantage, hip-hop can be seen as a series of practices with an evolved history and the ongoing potential to challenge both social norms and legal stricture; in hip- hop, there are always stakes of crucial importance. The song’s hook, woven throughout the track in the sampled voice of MC Grand Puba of the rap group Brand Nubian from their recording “Dedication,” summarizes the debt and gratitude owed to hip-hop’s creative trailblazers and its early supporters: “What more can I say? I wouldn’t be here today if the old school didn’t pave the way.”

In ways similar to those uttered in Shakur’s “Old School,” contemporary scholars might recognize their own debt to hip-hop’s pioneering authors and cultural critics. Since hip-hop’s

Introduction

Murray Forman

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inception in the uptown boroughs of New York, there has emerged a considerable body of written work about the cultural practices and informing attitudes that comprise a hip-hop way of life. For example, in 1978, Billboard, the music industry’s main trade magazine, printed a short article about the localized phenomenon of DJ street parties and the growing prestige of pioneer DJ Kool Herc, whose music and performance innovations were generating excite- ment among uptown audiences at the time. Appearing under the title “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx,” Robert Ford, Jr.’s, auspicious article reported that, following Herc’s lead, “other Bronx DJs have picked up the practice and now B-Beats are the rage all over the borough and the practice is spreading rapidly” (1978: 65). Although it took a few more years for academics to catch on, journalists working the culture beat began following this underground music (even before it was known as “rap”) and the attendant cultural practices of break dancing (or B- boying) and graffiti. Attesting to the swift increase of mainstream media coverage, Judy McCoy’s library reference guide Rap Music in the 1980s (1992) provides a date-specific list graphically displaying the proliferation of rap reviews, artist interviews or profile pieces, and industry analysis.

In their writing, journalists charted the entrepreneurial and artistic personalities involved, the rise of a vital and ever-shifting club scene, and rap and hip-hop’s gradual expansion beyond the narrow enclaves of the Bronx and Harlem. The contributions of several of these pioneering authors, including Robert Ford, Jr., Nelson George, Sally Banes, and Michael Holman, are included in That’s the Joint! Today, this trend continues in the writing of, to name but a few, Jon Caramanica, Davey D, Kevin Powell, Kelefa Sanneh, and Toure who write about hip-hop for the daily press, specialty magazines, and dedicated Web sites. Benchmark films such as Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style and Tony Silver and Henry Chalfant’s Style Wars, both released in 1982, or The Show (1995), directed by Brian Robbins, and Peter Spirer’s Rhyme & Reason (1997), further circulated the images, sounds, and sensibilities of early hip-hop, providing important documentation of the era, as does Doug Pray’s more recent production, Scratch (2002), a documentary about early DJs and contemporary “turntablists.”

The emergence of academically oriented approaches to hip-hop culture is most often traced to the 1984 publication of David Toop’s Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop and Steven Hager’s Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. They, and others in rapid succession, presented a focused examination of the cultural contexts within which hip-hop evolved and flourished. Though there was often a limiting sense of analytic scope (with many early writers fixating on the culture’s marginal status, advancing disputable claims about hip-hop’s ostensibly organic roots in a ghetto poverty that were, some argued, disconnected from systems of commerce), these first scholarly forays remain valuable to the contemporary perspective on how hip-hop was viewed at the time and the prevailing sense of its impact and importance in that nascent era. Far from simply seeming outdated, this initial writing on hip-hop still offers historical information that is worth contemplating as today’s scholars and young hip-hop “heads” attempt to appraise the current cultural land- scape and, tentatively, predict hip-hop’s next phase of reinvention.

Paraphrasing Chuck D of Public Enemy, despite relative antagonism and constraint through the 1990s, hip-hop rapidly “bum rushed” the halls of higher education. When, in regard to rap recordings, Paul Gilroy admits, “I don’t think anyone actually knows what the totality of its hyperactivity looks like . . . I can’t keep up with the volume of hip-hop product anymore” (1992: 309), he could just as easily be addressing the contemporary outpouring of articles and books about rap and hip-hop that have circulated into the public sphere through scholarly journals and academic presses. In the eyes of some traditionalists and conservative intellectuals, this new area of study posed a challenge to the hegemony of prevailing academic standards and disrupted disciplinary norms, facilitating comparisons with the far earlier stance of critic Bernard Rosenberg (1957), who cautioned against the worrisome academic

2 • MURRAY FORMAN

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incursions of popular culture research in the 1950s, or Allan Bloom, whose 1987 book The Closing of the American Mind focused specifically on what he perceived were the erosive influ- ences of popular music among students. Today, having gained a certain respectability and reputation for analytic rigor—having paid its dues and earned its keep—scholarly work on hip-hop is considerably less marginalized within the university.

The “new black intelligentsia,” of which Todd Boyd, Michael Eric Dyson, Robin D. G. Kelley, Mark Anthony Neal, and Tricia Rose are among the most conspicuous members, demonstrates a clear understanding of, and affinity with hip-hop. In the writing and lectures of a growing number of progressive black thinkers—not all of whom toil in the university system—there is general concurrence that hip-hop represents an extension of specifically African American cultural traditions but, importantly, it also poses challenges and introduces ruptures to prevailing notions of an unbroken cultural continuum; in this context, Boyd’s The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop (2002) is a particularly compelling text. Displaying intellectual dexterity while holding hip-hop itself under a harsh critical light, contemporary scholars across the cultural spectrum frequently employ many of hip-hop’s inherent strategies that include appropriating and reincorporating academic theo- ries and elucidating the contemporary cultural condition in language that is simultaneously learned and hip. A further prominent indicator of the academic embrace of hip-hop may be witnessed in the establishment of various institutes and research centers, including the founding of the Hiphop Archive housed in the W.E.B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research at Harvard University. Drawing on the institution’s deep resource base to host hip-hop luminaries such as pioneering DJ Afrika Bambaataa and scholars from across the United States, the Harvard-based archive illustrates that hip-hop’s social impact and cultural contributions are far too important for teachers and students to ignore and, moreover, avoiding them would be irresponsible since literally millions of people world wide are influenced by hip-hop on a daily basis.

With That’s the Joint!, we assert that research and writing, whether in journalistic or academic contexts, is absolutely part of the wider hip-hop culture. Analyzing, theorizing, and writing about hip-hop are also forms of cultural labor and should accordingly be regarded as consequen- tial facets of hip-hop. Hip-hop’s first chroniclers were always more than dispassionate objec- tive observers. They were in many cases fully implicated in the emergent culture of hip-hop, circulating within the same social circles as the prime innovators and entrepreneurs, and they counted themselves among the earliest audience members who cohered at both formal and informal events. Many of today’s hip-hop scholars started as journalists, covering hip-hop in their local press, spinning records on campus–community radio stations, writing record reviews, or documenting the proliferating national hip-hop scenes, and many continue to navigate between the media and academia. As a generation of scholars steeped in hip-hop’s cultural influences graduated into tenure track positions, teaching students in their teens and twenties who have never known a world without hip-hop, the dynamic interrelations and productive overlay between academic and nonacademic spaces have become more obvious. That’s the Joint! ideally inhabits this liminal zone where the ’hood and the university converge.

A cursory search of the Internet reveals dozens of undergraduate courses and graduate seminars exclusively focused on hip-hop, and there are scores of single-class modules in a wide range of contexts addressing hip-hop themes and issues. The subtitled reference to “hip- hop studies” in That’s the Joint! is intentional, advanced with full awareness that, although there is not yet an institutionalized subdiscipline called “hip-hop studies,” there is a plethora of hip-hop research across the disciplines and the volume and sophistication of work in various university departments is consistently increasing. Although hip-hop is most frequently analyzed and discussed within the disciplinary contours of African-American studies or popular music studies, it also represents a growing area of research in American studies,

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cultural studies, communications and media studies, English, ethnic studies, performance studies, sociology, and women’s studies. Published writing on rap and hip-hop culture consti- tutes the new entrant in these fields, jostling against more conventional works. The majority of essays and articles in That’s the Joint! were selected by surveying references and citations in published hip-hop research in order to gauge the utility of specific essays. This approach was augmented by a review of roughly seventy-five course syllabi and an assessment of readings assigned to students across academic disciplines.

Still, despite its gains in the academy, hip-hop scholarship often remains a peripheral concern among those outside the university—the students enrolled in advanced seminars in “the school of hard knocks”—who tend to experience hip-hop most intensely and who most ardently reproduce the cultural practices and discourses “in the ’hood,” which remains the center of hip-hop’s production and its symbolic source of meaning and value. There is frequently a defensive attitude expressed among the youth of the extended and variegated hip- hop community that is articulated as skepticism for scholarly engagements with hip-hop. For youth who are most explicitly identified with hip-hop’s cultural forms, claims made for and about hip-hop by professors occupying academia’s “ivory towers” or “hallowed halls” are frequently met with suspicion, if not outright derision. It is not rare, for instance, to hear critiques among young constituents of “the hip-hop nation” who are convinced that profes- sors with little or no connection to “the ’hood” and, thus, lacking in “street credibility” in their view, are exploiting the culture in order to identify with something cool, exciting, “fresh,” or “phat.” This viewpoint, inscribed at its worst with a palpable anti-intellectual disdain, suggests that university and college teachers are often most interested in translating hip-hop’s cultural forms and practices into abstract theoretical jargon, building their academic careers on the backs of MCs, DJs, B-boys and graffiti artists who forge the objects of scholarly research.

These criticisms are not always without merit; the main criticism voiced among the self- appointed guardians of hip-hop is that scholars, whether consciously or not, often exert their relative authority when conducting research and publishing their findings, and they are eminently capable of appropriating dimensions of hip-hop according to personal or profes- sional agendas. As hip-hop has evolved as a significant—and lucrative—facet of the enter- tainment industry, emerging as a profoundly influential commercial and cultural force, it has been taken up as a topic of academic inquiry with greater enthusiasm. Yet just as a new gener- ation of artists capitalized on the enhanced value of, for example, rap music or ’hood films in the popular market, so, too, did hip-hop’s journalists and scholarly writers proliferate, attaining social status as hip-hop commentators, cultural critics, and professional experts. Mirroring patterns in the recording and film industries and the magazine publishing sector throughout the 1990s, scholarly research on hip-hop also constituted a growth sector among academic publishers and university presses. Hip-hop scholarship, then, is not simply an unin- vested or benign study of cultural formations and social practices; it cannot be excluded from the commercial corporate systems through which hip-hop has been constructed, projected, or amplified on the local, regional, national, or global scale. As Tupac Shakur’s “Old School” reminds us, hip-hop’s cultural practices are thoroughly traced with stakes of varying conse- quence, and the same holds true for hip-hop scholarship.

The university is surely (and thankfully) not the central site or driving force in contempo- rary hip-hop culture, yet the work that is taking place in its classrooms is not without stakes. As hip-hop evolves as a regular facet of university curricula it is essential to acknowledge and critique the role of academics in shaping public knowledge about hip-hop. Academics and journalists—in their own ways and in their own far-too-disconnected domains—function as gatekeepers of sorts; gatekeepers of knowledge certainly, but also gatekeepers of discourse. This is to concede that, whether aggressively or through more passive forms, boundaries of language and expression within which the world is made meaningful are being circumscribed.

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As hip-hop passes the first quarter century of existence, it is important to address the ways in which knowledge of the culture is constructed, how the character of hip-hop’s myriad prac- tices are framed and conveyed both to a general public and to a core of deeply invested partic- ipants who, for those working within the academy, are also our students. The articles selected for That’s the Joint! reflect the disparate discursive patterns through which hip-hop has been addressed, presenting ideas and terminology that may converge in a form of dialogue, but that may also collide and conflict.

Another outcome of hip-hop’s academic study is the formation of what might reasonably be termed a “hip-hop canon,” encompassing key written works and dominant research themes that are identified with influential scholars. Rap music is so sufficiently established that few hardcore defenders of hip-hop would dispute that, for example, Eric B and Rakim’s Paid in Full (1987, Island Records) or Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back (1988, Def Jam) are hip-hop classics, essential listening, must-have cultural commodities, but it is unlikely that the same would be said of Tricia Rose’s go-to text Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (1994). The hip-hop “canon” is not a widely discussed topic, but it is emerging in much the same way that rock or jazz studies evolved, with several key texts becoming enshrined in various forms, not least of which includes course syllabi and academic reading lists. Just as the durability and tenacity of hip-hop and rap annoyed and impressed individuals in the culture industries, so, too, has hip-hop endured in relation to the academy. In this context, if hip-hop’s cultural producers and earnest constituents “bring the noise” in a maelstrom of beats and rhymes, then academic writers in corresponding fashion “bring the canons.” This notion of a hip-hop research canon isolates attention on the academic literature that attempts to explain, define, theorize, and culturally locate hip-hop in relation to myriad factors such as industry structures, policy and regula- tions, social practices, and collective and subjective identity formation.

Lillian Robinson writes that the canon “is the set of books that make up the Book. This inclusion has a basis in scholarship, the application of certain standards . . . to a text” (1997: 142). For Henry Louis Gates, Jr., a canon serves a unifying function as “the commonplace book of our shared culture” (1992: 21), although rigorous and sophisticated analytical perspectives must prevail, for as Gates emphasizes, the canon is also structured on a firm foun- dation of intellectual “soundness” (1992: 39). Examples of speculative or anecdotal texts on hip-hop abound, and some of these (Light, 1999; Fricke and Ahearn, 2002) are invaluable sources of information, but there is also a solid research corpus displaying rigor, analytical sophistication, and “intellectual soundness.” These brief definitions of canonicity are impor- tant to hip-hop and the study of its cultural practices because, for whatever else can be said of canon formation, it is a productive enterprise: it produces a sense of history and evolution and it also produces values.

In assembling the articles in That’s the Joint! we have remained mindful of the complexi- ties of adjudicating the “soundness” of hip-hop writing, self-reflexively assessing our own biases in the evaluation of “standards.” This process also reminds us that there are important stakes involved in scholarly writing about hip-hop and in the inclusion of books and articles in course syllabi and curricula, reinforcing the awareness that power is a factor of crucial importance in the “the distribution of cultural capital” and the attendant processes of “exclu- sion” and “selection” (Guillory, 1993: 6). As university and college educators labor over the definition of their own standards of research rigor or, in preparation of course syllabi, they debate the value and utility of one book or article over another, it is imperative that the power and authority infused in this process is not ignored.

The term “hip-hop nation” has emerged as a cultural commonplace, employed in reference to a relatively coherent social entity founded in shared interests or values and collective prac- tices that bind constituents within a symbolic unity. This “nation” is not precisely placed,

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lacking agreed-upon boundaries or other demarcating features, but is, in its fuller sense, akin to Benedict Anderson’s (1983) concept of “imagined communities.” In Anderson’s view, national consciousness has been historically related to the rise of “vernacular print markets,” “print capitalism,” and publishing initiatives supporting a sense of shared identification. As he explains, in more recent times educational systems and the mass media have figured promi- nently in the manufacture and circulation of nationalist ideologies, diffusing the dominant ideals of “the nation” and establishing its resonant discourses, symbols, and icons.

If there is to be any more talk of the hip-hop nation, then it might be time to speak also of an emergent national literature and press and the possible—even accidental—formation of a canon within which themes and symbols, the circulation of shared knowledge and tradi- tions, are identified, analyzed, and disseminated. As Stephen Gray explains, there is a process by which a literature “comes into its own”:

not just in terms of a prescribable number of acceptably “great” works, but in terms of the whole nexus that supports a literature—its own publishing industry, including newspapers, magazines, and journals, its own self-referencing use of language, its mutual understanding of a set of enfolded norms and values, its own context of myth about the past and the present, its theoretical wing of evaluators like ourselves, its sense of settling in to keep doing a job that has to be continually done, and—most important of all—its own community of readership or audience, which receives the work and feeds back into it reciprocally. (Gray, 1984: 228)

That’s the Joint! is conceived within this elaborated cultural framework that shapes the thinking and writing about hip-hop. This book is deliberately heterogeneous, reflecting the diverse and complex character of hip-hop culture, and in presenting historical, theoretical, and journalistic assessments, it adheres to themes and patterns that have defined the study and analysis of hip-hop since its inception. By integrating writing from the popular and acad- emic realms, a clearer picture emerges of what hip-hop is and how it is socially meaningful among its active producers and, in the commercial contexts of the culture industries, among its active audiences.

That’s the Joint! includes essays both by authors who are renowned in the area of hip-hop studies and others who, in the early stages of their careers, are lesser known. Some of the work published here is widely acknowledged among hip-hop scholars as groundbreaking research, yet we have also seen fit to reproduce more obscure essays and journalistic reports in order to provide a comprehensive and well-rounded compendium. The articles included in That’s the Joint! fall under two categories: scholarly writing that is frequently cited in hip-hop research, and popular reporting that is exemplary in its capacity to convey the character or contempo- raneous impact of hip-hop practices at particular moments.

The first part of this book simultaneously isolates hip-hop history and its historiography. Encompassing journalistic and historical research, these chapters establish a setting within which to conceive hip-hop’s formative stages and to observe the manner in which early writers approached the emergent culture and its diffuse practices. In the second part, the persistent theme of authenticity in hip-hop is under analysis. As hip-hop has evolved into an important commercial enterprise within the entertainment industries, the authenticity debates have intensified; similarly, as a growing number of individuals identify themselves in and through hip-hop’s customs, the question of cultural rites of passage, commitments, and belonging urgently arise. The issue of authenticity is most often articulated within the discourse of “the real,” a ubiquitous expression that encompasses material and symbolic essences and that is, as these chapters illustrate, primarily traced across the social variables of race, class, and location.

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The spatial politics of hip-hop are the object of analysis in the third part. Although hip-hop has always displayed a pronounced spatiality, there has been an ongoing process of transfor- mation, particularly as the identification with localized places and the cultural sphere of “the ’hood” have attained greater importance and urgency. As the chapters in this part suggest, urban space and place are inscribed with competing social values and are sharply defined by the expression of power and authority. The manner in which hip-hop’s cultural practitioners portray these cultural spaces and the struggles occurring within them is, thus, a pressing issue in hip-hop scholarship.

Women in hip-hop and the enunciation of gender politics comprise the analytical core of the fourth part. Hip-hop’s masculine expressivity is well documented, constituting the domi- nant voice in the articulation of gender identities. Indeed, the most ferocious attacks on hip- hop often focus on gender issues, with the most vehement opposition targeting rap lyrics and film or video images that feature sexist or misogynist content. The authors in this part adopt an important feminist critique that probes the social characteristics informing black female prac- tices or identities and, through their interrogation of power relations and social structures of male hegemony, they extend the range of perspectives through which hip-hop is rendered meaningful.

The fifth part focuses on the political realities and future political potentials of “the hip-hop generation.” Hip-hop has maintained a striking capacity for political insight and social critique, evident in such rap recordings as the 1980 single “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise?” (Clappers) by Brother D and Collective Effort, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s classic track “The Message” (Sugar Hill) from 1982, or the posse cut “Self- Destruction” (Jive) recorded in 1989 by a fellowship of MCs united under the title The Stop the Violence Movement. Through the 1990s, hip-hop’s political qualities emerged as a major force, influencing youths across racial, spatial, and class boundaries. The chapters in this part isolate the issues of cultural struggle and resistance as they are expressed by the hip-hop gener- ation, exploring the political conflict and collaboration that have, at various times, determined hip-hop’s development.

Hip-hop aesthetics and technology and cultural production are the main themes in parts six and seven, respectively. In the sixth part, the essays explore hip-hop’s creative processes and the various aesthetic considerations influencing rap music production, elaborating on both the kinds of technology employed and the logic of technological appropriation that are fundamental to the sonic construction of rap tracks. In the seventh part hip-hop’s prodigious creative output is associated with the rationalized apparatuses of the culture industries. Through political economic analyses and interviews with key representatives of the enter- tainment industry, these chapters present a thorough assessment of hip-hop as a living culture and as a commodified set of cultural practices, detailing the fundamental issues as hip-hop is incorporated into the global flow of commercial sounds and images.

That’s the Joint! is not the final word on hip-hop scholarship; rather, it is an accumulation of essays and articles that, from the first written words on hip-hop, have addressed its main themes and debates. This book is designed to introduce students to some of the prominent authors in hip-hop studies and to provide a coherent collection of writing that reflects a wide range of issues and the diverse ways of contemplating them. In our efforts to produce a concise, usable text for hip-hop scholars we have attempted to represent the impact of hip-hop on multiple sectors of social life and its significance in multiple academic disciplines.

References

Anderson, Benedict. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. New York: Verso.

Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon and Schuster.

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Boyd. Todd. 2002. The New H.N.I.C.: The Death of Civil Rights and the Reign of Hip Hop. New York: New York University Press.

Ford, Robert, Jr. 1978. “B-Beats Bombarding Bronx.” Billboard (July 1): 65. Fricke, Jim, and Charlie Ahearn. 2002. Yes Yes Y’All: The Experience Music Project Oral History of Hip-

Hop’s First Decade. Cambridge, Mass.: Da Capo Press. Gates, Jr., Henry Louis. 1992. Loose Canons: Notes on the Culture Wars. New York: Oxford University

Press. Gilroy, Paul. 1992. “It’s a Family Affair.” In Black Popular Culture, edited by Gina Dent, pp. 303–316.

Seattle: Bay Press. Gray, Stephen. 1984. “A Sense of Place in New Literatures, Particularly South African English.” World

Literature Written in English, 24, no. 2 (Autumn): 224–231. Guillory, John. 1993. Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Chicago: University of

Chicago Press. Hager, Steven. 1984. Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti. New

York: St. Martin’s Press. Light, Alan, ed. 1999. The Vibe History of Hip Hop. New York: Three Rivers Press. McCoy, Judy. 1992. Rap Music in the 1980s: A Reference Guide. Metuchen, N.J.: Scarecrow Press. Robinson, Lillian. 1997. In the Canon’s Mouth: Dispatches from the Culture Wars. Bloomington: Indiana

University Press. Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover:

Wesleyan University Press. Rosenberg, Bernard. 1957. “Mass Culture in America” In Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America,

edited by Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White, pp. 3–12. New York: Free Press. Toop, David. 1984. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop. Boston: South End Press.

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“Back in the day” has emerged as a common expression within hip-hop, most frequently employed to describe the past and to mark moments in the evolution of the hip-hop culture. The phrase is often imbued with a certain nostalgia, acknowledging benchmarks, transitional phases, or influential aesthetic innovations realized within general historical contexts. Yet for all of its rhetorical potency and casual utility it remains an inexact expression, like a form of shorthand that communicates information but lacks precision or accuracy. Over the years the phrase has been applied widely and wildly, and it is not rare to hear narratives about 1970s Bronx block parties, the 1982 release of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (Sugar Hill), the 1988 rise of N.W.A., or the 1993 launch of Bad Boy Entertainment, all framed as occurrences from “back in the day,” depending on one’s generational vantage.

Although hip-hop’s formation is the topic of considerable scholarly analysis (Toop, 1984; Hebdige, 1987; Rose, 1994; Forman, 2002) there is significant value in revisiting hip-hop’s histo- riography, including articles published in an industry trade magazine such as Billboard or in the popular press, including The Source (which bills itself as “the magazine of hip-hop music, culture, and politics”). Essays and social commentary written about the New York City hip-hop scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s offer what Mark Anthony Neal describes as “a real time feel,” evoking the crackling energies and broader sensibilities of an emergent cultural sector. Although they may opt for a temporal perspective—positioning the erupting hip-hop phenomena within a historical context—these writings benefit from an immediacy and proximity to events, detailing transitional forces at the instant they occur. They isolate key elements of innovation and sociocultural change, providing insights on the undulating composition of the cultural terrain and identifying the ruptures from which hip-hop’s alternative practices emanated.

The evolution of hip-hop corresponds with cultural theorist Raymond Williams’s observation that the process of “formal innovation” is gradual, and although “residual” cultural practices from prior eras continue, new “emergent” cultural forms and practices may arise that challenge or disrupt the cultural dominant. Hip-hop constitutes an emergent cultural form, but so, too, does early writing about hip-hop, for as Williams explains in reference to innovation and emer- gent cultural forms,

there are always important works which belong to these very early stages of particular forms, and it is easy to miss their formal significance by comparison with preceding or succeeding mature examples.... It is then easy to miss one of the key elements in cultural production: innovation as it is happening; innovation in process. (1981: 200)

Part I Hip-Hop Ya Don’t Stop:

Hip-Hop History and Historiography

Murray Forman

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Though written well before hip-hop’s influence and authority were guaranteed—when the shouted declaration “hip-hop, it don’t stop” expressed a combination of defensiveness and willful optimism—the articles featured here reflect an awareness that change was stirring. They offer a chronicle of an era when hip-hop still constituted an unknown “emergent” force that was being processed and aligned with prevailing cultural experiences and meanings. These arti- cles and essays are, thus, also crucial facets of hip-hop’s emergent cultural practices.

The chapters in this section are written by some of hip-hop’s earliest commentators who observed and participated in its cultural manifestation. They present documentation of hip- hop’s formative moments while reacquainting us with the operative discourses and visual descriptions of hip-hop in its primary stages. This is not abstract history written from secondary sources, but a series of accounts framed by writers and critics whose immediate environments were under radical revision as hip-hop’s style, vernacular, and sensibilities spread, soon informing the lingua franca of an entire generation.

Sally Banes was an early commentator during hip-hop’s formative stages, reporting in the New York press on the rise of breaking and the convergence between B-boying and the related elements of hip-hop including “graffiti” and “verbal dueling” (Banes, 1981: 32). As she observes, breaking began as an articulation of physical presence featuring equal doses of competition and visual display. It was—and remains—an expression of style, which, among its young B-boy leaders, is clearly related to status and social profile. From its beginning, breaking formed a link between the street and the nightclub, and it was a crucial factor in hip-hop’s transition from the underground environment, including subway platforms and neighborhood parks, to the mass-mediated realm of mainstream culture. Breaking rapidly ascended in the popular imagination following a barrage of media exposure, first on the pages of urban news- papers and later in several low-budget Hollywood films (such as Flashdance, 1983; Breakin’, 1984; Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, 1984; and Beat Street, 1984). Banes also emphasizes the communal character of early B-boy crews and the formation of organized collectives that devel- oped within a coherent system of training, competitions, and show-downs. Arguably faster than any other aspect of hip-hop, breaking acquired a formal infrastructure that was as dynamic as some of the floor moves executed by the young B-boys.

Craig Castleman provides an impressively explicit synopsis of graffiti’s rise and evolution in New York City, commencing with the obscure but ubiquitous tags by “TAKI 183” in 1971. As he explains, graffiti rapidly expanded from a casual urban youth practice to a fully evolved cultural pastime, simultaneously acquiring the status as a point of crisis and moral panic among civic authorities. As graffiti was politicized, its young perpetrators were concurrently demonized, pathologized, and criminalized, leading conservative critic Nathan Glazer to claim:

while I do not find myself consciously making the connection between graffiti-makers and the criminals who occasionally rob, rape, assault, and murder [subway] passengers, the sense that all are part of one world of uncontrollable predators seems inescapable. (1979: 4)

Castleman’s chapter offers a convincing explanation of the processes by which young black and Puerto Rican youths were defensively positioned against state power and, as graffiti evolved, its youth practitioners were increasingly placed under police surveillance and constraint. Indeed, this narrative offers a detailed account of the tensions between New York’s youth and the city’s authority structure that has endured in hip-hop to this day and that has been reproduced throughout the nation and in urban centers around the world wherever hip-hop has taken root. Castleman’s perceptive analysis also links the antigraffiti crusade to a narrow, genteel urban aesthetic and internal administrative agendas involving, among other things, budgetary battles pertaining to New York’s Metropolitan Transit Authority expenditures. The harsh punitive measures targeting mainly blacks and Latinos through much of the 1970s and

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early 1980s, along with the implementation of subway “buffing” and cleaning technologies, altered the cultural climate and eventually ended the “golden age” of subway graffiti in New York.

Offering a concise overview of breaking (or B-boying), Michael Holman’s historical analysis connects the athletic practice to dance styles and cultural traditions spanning several conti- nents and two centuries. He conjoins the global and the local, indicating the ways in which cultural influences flow across borders and are appropriated in highly particularized conditions. Holman, who reported on the early hip-hop scene and promoted performances at the infamous Negril nightclub, was ideally situated to observe the formation of pioneering B-boy crews who reveled in the simultaneous development of new, innovative moves and the opportunities to show them off in aggressive B-boy competitions with other New York crews. Through his words, the image of a complex system of urban movement and participation emerges. Holman also profiles several of the B-boy innovators whose skill and artistry were influential in opening new opportunities for MCs, DJs, graffiti artists, and B-boys throughout New York.

In two brief articles that were among the first reports on hip-hop in the music industry’s primary trade magazine Billboard, Robert “Rocky” Ford, Jr., provides first-person accounts of the nascent DJ scene in the Bronx. The location and character of DJ and MC parties, as well as record stores selling the recorded material underlying the DJ’s work, are locally situated and Ford’s reports reinforce the fact that, in 1978–1979, there already existed a vibrant cultural infra- structure encompassing nightclubs, independent record retail outlets, and audiences. Ford’s articles served notice to the music industry that DJ and MC practices were thriving in New York’s upper boroughs, and although it took almost another five years for the major entertain- ment conglomerates to acknowledge hip-hop’s cultural legitimacy and importance, black entre- preneurs in the Bronx, Harlem, Queens, and elsewhere nurtured an active scene. Ford’s observations reflect the extent to which hip-hop was already part of an entertainment and leisure economy and was, thus, a commercially oriented phenomenon almost from the start. It is also interesting to note how the early MCs did not yet envision rapping as an end in itself but as a bridge to future endeavors in the broadcasting industry.

The Nelson George interview with three of rap music’s originators—Afrika Bambaataa, Kool DJ Herc, and Grandmaster Flash—presents a reflective look at the atmosphere within which hip-hop evolved, while detailing the competitive nature of their relations within localized commercial market conditions. George, who for over twenty years has provided astute journal- istic and cultural analysis of hip-hop, elicits descriptions of urban social change, technolog- ical issues, and aesthetic innovation from hip-hop’s “founding fathers” and, through their words, it is evident that the early hip-hop scene was a fragmented amalgamation of practices, interests, and objectives. Rap is a highly appropriative music, borrowing inventively from myriad sources in the creation of new sonic forms. Moreover, rap music relies on the appropriation and rechanneling of music technologies, especially the turntable, mixer, and vinyl record, which, in the hands of DJ trailblazers, were invested with new meanings and applications. Describing the merging of electronic technologies with new lyrical styles and stage craft, George elicits a valu- able profile of early hip-hop performance and the formation of what are today acknowledged as established hip-hop conventions. In this interview, one of the more resonant features is the emphasis on family and community as nurturing forces that provide an essential foundation for the work and play among hip-hop’s first professional DJs.

REFERENCES Banes, Sally. 1981. “Breaking Is Hard to Do: To the Beat, Y’All.” The Village Voice (April

22–28): 31–33. Forman, Murray. 2002. The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop.

Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press. Hebidge, Dick. 1987. Cut ’n’ Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. London: Methuen.

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Glazer, Nathan. 1979. “On Subway Graffiti in New York.” Public Interest, no. 54 (Winter): 3–11.

Rose, Tricia. 1994. Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Hanover: Wesleyan University Press.

Toop, David. 1984. The Rap Attack: African Jive to New York Hip-Hop. Boston: South End Press.

Williams, Raymond. 1981. Culture. London: Fontana Press.

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Break dancing is a style of competitive, acrobatic, and pantomimic dancing. It began as a kind of game, a friendly contest in which black and Hispanic teenagers outdid one another with outrageous physical contortions, spins, and back flips, wedded to a fluid, syncopated, circling body rock done close to the ground. Breaking once meant only dancing on the floor, but now its definition has widened to include electric boogie, up-rock, aerial gymnastics, and all sorts of other fancy variations.

Although breaking is the newest part of hip-hop culture, it’s the part that has made hip hop a media obsession. Five years ago the only people who had ever heard of breaking were the kids in New York’s ghettos who did it. They didn’t even have a definite name for the form—they sometimes called it “breaking,” but they also referred to it as “rocking down,” “b- boy,” or just “that kind of dancing you do to rap music.” By 1980—when the form had already been around for a few years—they weren’t even very interested in it anymore. This kind of dancing was a passing fad, they felt, that would soon be replaced by roller disco. But history was to prove them wrong. Not since the twist, in the early sixties, has a dance craze so captured the attention of the media.

By 1984 only a hermit could not have known about breaking. It had arrived, not only in the United States but also in Canada, Europe, and Japan. Breaking had been featured in the 1983 Hollywood film Flashdance, the independent hip-hop musical film Wild Style, and the docu- mentary Style Wars (which aired on PBS), served as the inspiration for the 1984 films Breakin’ and Beat Street, and was rumored to be the subject of fifteen forthcoming Hollywood movies. Countless how-to books and videos had hit the market. Breaking had been spotlighted on national news shows, talk shows, and ads for Burger King, Levi’s, Pepsi-Cola, Coca-Cola, and Panasonic. One hundred break dancers heated up the closing ceremonies of the 1984 summer Olympics in Los Angeles. And Michael Jackson had given the form national currency.

Breaking made the cover of Newsweek in 1984. Newspapers all over the country regularly carried stories on its latest ups and downs. The paradox emerged, as you flipped the pages of the Washington Post or the Los Angeles Times, that break dancers who’d come up in the ghetto were banned from city streets and shopping malls for causing disturbances and attracting undesirable crowds, while at the same time middle-class housewives and executives could learn to break dance in their spare time at classes proliferating throughout the suburbs. Doctors added to the form’s acceptability by giving medical advice on how to survive it unbruised. And the New York Times began using breaking as a metaphor even in articles that had nothing to do with hip hop.

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By now, break dancing was happening at bar mitzvahs, children’s dance recitals, high- school proms, college dances, in prison talent shows, at ballet galas, and on Broadway, as well as in clubs and discos—and, in a second-generation revival, in city parks and on the streets once again. Even President Reagan was delighted by breaking when he saw the New York City Breakers perform in Washington, D.C., at a Kennedy Center gala.

The media hype about break dancing has changed both its form and its meaning. So to talk about break dancing you have to divide it into two stages: before and after media. Before the media turned breaking into a dazzling entertainment, it was a kind of serious game, a form of urban vernacular dance, a fusion of sports, dancing, and fighting whose performance had urgent social significance for the dancers. After media, participation in break dancing was stratified into two levels: professional and amateur. For the pros, break dancing had become a theatrical art form with a technique and a vocabulary that, like ballet’s, could be refined and expanded. On this level, competition took on new meaning. It was no longer a battle for control of the streets, for neighborhood fame, or to win your opponent’s “colors” (tee-shirt with crew insignia). Now cash prizes, roles in Hollywood movies, and European tours were at stake. For the amateurs, the element of competition had diminished. The appeal was a mixture of getting physically fit, tackling the challenge of breaking’s intricate skills, and even becoming more like street kids, who’ve suddenly become stylish thanks to the meteoric vogue of hip hop.

Breaking first entered media consciousness when Martha Cooper, a photographer who had for years been documenting graffiti, was sent by the New York Post to cover “a riot” and found some kids—members of the High Times Crew, friends and relatives from West 175th Street— who claimed they’d been dancing, not fighting, in a subway station. One kid demonstrated some moves to a policeman, who then called in the others one by one. “Do a head spin,” he commanded as he consulted a clipboard full of notes. “Do the baby.” As each crew member complied, performing on cue as unhesitatingly as a ballet dancer might pirouette across a stage, the police had to admit defeat.

Or so the story goes. But, like ballet and like great battles (it shares elements of both), breaking is wreathed in legends. Since its early history wasn’t documented—the Post never ran Cooper’s photos—it lives on only in memories and has taken on mythological form.

The heroes of these legends are the b-boys, the original break dancers, black and Hispanic teenagers who invented and endlessly elaborate the heady blend of dancing, acrobatics, and warfare that is breaking. Like other forms of ghetto street culture and like the other elements of hip hop, breaking began as a public showcase for the flamboyant triumph of virility, wit, and skill. In short, of style.

The intensity of the dancer’s physicality gives breaking a power and energy even beyond the vitality of graffiti and rapping. If graffiti is a way of “publishing,” of winning fame by spreading your tag all over the city, breaking is a way of claiming the streets with physical pres- ence, using your body to publicly inscribe your identity on the surfaces of the city, to flaunt a unique personal style within a conventional format. The body symbolism makes breaking an extremely powerful version of two favorite forms of street rhetoric—the taunt and the boast. The razzing takes the form of insulting gestures aimed at your opponent, while the bragging is expressed through acrobatic virtuosity. Breaking is a competitive display of physical and imaginative prowess, a highly codified dance form that in its early stages served as an arena for both battles and artistic invention and that allowed for cracking open the code to flaunt personal inventiveness.

The High Times Crew told the cops they were dancing, not fighting, and as breaking captured mainstream attention it was touted in the media as a transfiguration of gang warfare. Breaking may be a stylized, rhythmic, aesthetically framed form of combat—but it still escalates, at times, into

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actual violence. Peace is volatile when honor is at stake, and the physical heat of the form itself makes for situations that are highly combustible, as scenes from both Breakin’ and Beat Street show.

Until breaking became frozen and legitimated by media hype, it was, like much of kids’ culture in our cities, self-generated and nearly invisible to outsiders, especially adults—who just didn’t want to even think about it or know about it, much less watch it. It was both liter- ally and figuratively an underground form, happening in the subways as well as in parks and city playgrounds, but only among those in the know. Its invisibility and elusiveness had to do with the extemporaneous nature of the original form and also with its social context. Breaking jams weren’t scheduled; they happened when the situation arose. You didn’t get advance notice of a breaking “performance”; you had to be in the right place at the right time. In other words, you had to be part of the crew system that provided social order among the kids of the Bronx, Manhattan, and Brooklyn ghettos.

Since May 1981, when Henry Chalfant presented the Rock Steady Crew at Common Ground in SoHo as part of a graffiti rock show, breaking has taken to theatrical presentation like a duck to water. The first article on the form, by Sally Banes with photos by Martha Cooper, appeared in the Village Voice just before the concert, giving breaking instant visibility. By the end of that summer, break dancers had appeared outdoors at Lincoln Center and at other festivals, and endless filming had begun. The Rock Steady Crew signed up for an appear- ance in Flashdance, and kids were already learning to break not from older brothers and cousins on the street, but from watching Rock Steady on TV. Breaking had entered the public eye and left the underground for the mainstream, and this new theatrical context, with a style largely disseminated by the Rock Steady Crew, quickly crystallized the form for spectators.

Through breaking, in its original form, all the pleasures, frustrations, hopes, and fears of adolescence were symbolically played out in public spaces. Breaking was inextricably tied to rapping, both in terms of its style and content and because the rap provides the insistent percussion that drives the dance.

The format of the dance was at first quite fixed. The dancers and onlookers formed an impromptu circle. Each person’s turn in the ring was very brief—ten to thirty seconds—but packed with action and meaning. It began with an entry, a hesitating walk that allowed him time to get in step with the music for several beats and take his place “onstage.” Next the dancer “got down” to the floor to do the footwork, a rapid, slashing, circular scan of the floor by sneakered feet, in which the hands support the body’s weight while the head and torso revolve at a slower speed, a kind of syncopated, sunken pirouette, also known as the helicopter. Acrobatic transitions such as head spins, hand spins, shoulder spins, flips, and the swipe—a flip of the weight from hands to feet that also involves a twist in the body’s direction—served as bridges between the footwork and the freeze. The final element was the exit, a spring back to verticality or a special movement that returned the dancer to the outside of the circle.

The entry, the footwork, and the exit were all pretty formulaic, with very little room for showing off personal style, although some dancers created special versions of these elements—Frosty Freeze, for instance, often exited “on point,” walking on the tips of his sneakers. The entry, the footwork, and the exit were like the stock expressions and nonsense syllables that sandwich narrative content in a rap. They provided a rhythmic frame for the freeze, an improvised pose or movement, which broke the beat. They also provided a nicely textured, comfortably predictable backdrop against which the freeze stood out in bold relief. And besides their aesthetic function, these segments were a way for the dancer to “tread water” between strokes, to free the mind for strategizing while the body went through familiar, unin- ventive paces.

The simplest combination of a breaking sequence was entry-footwork-spin-freeze-exit. But turns in the center could be extended by inserting more footwork-spin-freeze segments.

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In other words, you might get: entry-footwork-spin-freeze-footwork-spin-freeze-exit. And so on.

The entry, the footwork, and the exit framed the freeze, a flash of pure personal style, which was the most important part of the dance. The main thing about the freeze was that it should be as intricate, witty, insulting, or obscene as possible. “You try to put your head on your arm and your toenails on your ears,” explains Ken of the Breakmasters crew. “When you spin on your head,” says another b-boy. “When you take your legs and put them in back of your head out of the spin.” A dancer might twist himself into a pretzel, or strike a cocky salute. He would quote the sexy poses of a pinup girl, or perhaps present his ass to his opponent in a gesture of contempt. Through pantomime, he might extend the scatological insult even more graphi- cally, pretending to befoul his opponent. Or he might hold his nose, telling the other guy he stinks. He might put his hand to his spine, signaling a move so good it hurts. Sometimes the dancers in the opposing crew joined in, razzing the performer from the sidelines.

Some of the freeze motifs prophetically rehearsed possible futures for the b-boys. Several images quoted sports actions—swimming, rowing a boat—and even more suggested the mili- tary. The freeze celebrated the flexibility and budding sexuality of the gangly male adolescent body, and looked forward to sexual adventures or commemorated past ones. The gun imagery of the military pantomimes doubled as phallic imagery. A dancer would often grab his crotch or hump the floor for a memorable finale.

Another important set of motifs in the freeze section was the exploration of body states in a subjunctive mode—things not as they are, but as they might be—comparing and contrasting youthful male vitality with its range of opposites: women, animals (dogs, horses, mules), babies, old age, injury and illness (e.g., a heart attack à la Richard Pryor’s routines), and death.

Various dancers had their specialties, especially in the freeze, but also sometimes in the other sections of the dance. Crazy Legs got his name from his rubber-legged way of walking into the ring, a move descended from the Charleston, and he also takes credit for the W, both face-up and face-down. Kip Dee claims he invented the elbow walk. As breaking moved from the streets to the stage, dancers teamed up to make group freezes, a development that has been elaborately extended over the past two or three years.

In the broadest sense, freezes were improvised. Few were devised on the spot; they were imagined and worked out in advance. But they allowed for the greatest range of individual invention, and the choice of which freeze to use at a given time was often an extemporaneous decision. The b-boys used a variety of methods to create new freezes, including techniques, such as accidents and dreams, preferred by shamans and by the Dadaist and Surrealist painters and poets. Not all freezes have names, but to name your speciality—and to write it as graffiti—was a way of laying claim to it, a kind of common-law copyright.

In breaking as street competition, the freeze was the challenge that incited, a virtuosic performance as well as a symbol of identity. As each dancer repeatedly took his turn and, through a series of strategic choices, built excitement with a crescendo of complicated, meaning-packed freezes, he won status and honor for himself and for his group.

The b-boys organized themselves according to neighborhood or family ties into crews, which were networks for socializing, writing graffiti, and rapping, as well as dancing, held together by a strict code of ethics and loyalty. Crews performed in a spirit of friendly compe- tition at jams where the crew leader directed the group’s moves. One kid would set up a chal- lenge, and a b-boy from the opposing crew would try to top him, or “burn” him. The crew leader was in charge of sending in new players to spell someone who had run out of moves. Onlookers—more friends, relatives, and neighbors—would judge the contest by consensus. B-boys learned to dance in a system of master-apprentice, referring to each other as father

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and son—even though the “father” was usually only a few years older than his “son”!—and even chose names that reflected their relationship, like Ty Fly and Kid Ty Fly.

In those days, although there were some girls who joined in, most of the break dancers were boys from the ages of about eight to sixteen. One reason that girls were the exception was that breaking was a specific expression of machismo. Part of its macho quality comes from the physical risk involved—not only the bruises, cuts, scratches, and scrapes, but also the risk of real fighting that might erupt. And part of it is the deliberate attempt to impress the girls.

Breaking was one kind of “rocking,” which also included up-rock, a more pantomimic, narrative style of dancing done jumping down and up to standing level, kicking, jabbing, and punching right in a rival’s face, without actually touching. In up-rock every move is intended to insult the opponent, and besides actual fighting gestures, a dancer might mime grabbing his rival’s private parts, smelling his hand, making a face, and then throwing the offending odor back. Up-rock is funny, but like a rapper’s boast it has a mean edge.

The break dancer’s “costume” was born of necessity as well as style. Tee-shirts and net over- shirts provide traction on the spins, and sneakers are important to the footwork. Their crit- ical role in the dance is emphasized by making the feet look gigantic and by nearly fetishizing the shoes with embellishments like wide, bright laces loosely tied so that the tongues stick out. The insignia of the crew, as well as colors and outfits that coordinate with those of fellow crew members, play a part in intensifying group solidarity. And the overall look of militarized athleticism creates an image of power and authority. The other accessory for break dancing is a mat, made of cardboard or linoleum, that originally protected the dancers from scraping against concrete.

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. Or that break is a technical term in Haitian voodoo, referring to both drumming and dancing, that marks the point of possession. Katherine Dunham defines the term as “convulsive movements and sharp temporary changes in a ceremonial . . . rhythm.” Or that in a different Afro-American culture, in French Guiana, there is an old dance called, in Creole, cassé ko (translation: breaking the body). All these connections have obvious links with break dancing as we now know it. For the b- boys, memory is short and history is brief; breaking started in the mid-seventies, maybe in the Bronx, maybe in Harlem. It started with Afrika Bambaataa’s 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,” one b-boy explained back in 1980. “It means making a style for yourself.”

As Fab Five Freddy (Fred Braithwaite), the musical director for Wild Style, remembers it, breaking began when rapping did, as an intuitive physical response to the music. “Everybody would be at a party in the park in the summer, jamming. Guys would get together and dance with each other, sort of a macho thing where they would show each other who could do the best moves. They started going wild when the music got real funky “—music by groups like SuperSperm and Apache. As the beat of the drummer came to the fore, the music let you know it was time to break down, to freestyle.” The cadenced, rhyming, fast-talking epic mode of rapping, with its smooth surface of sexual braggadocio, provided a perfect base for a dance style that was cool, swift, and intricate. The structure of the rap, with its play of quick, varying rhythms going on and off the beat within a steady four-square pulse, is like the off-balance, densely packed, lightning-speed pace of the breaking routine. The sense of inclusiveness, of all being in on a fun time together (“Everybody say ho!” “This is the way we rock the house!” “I am! We are!”), of turn-taking, is there both in the rap and in the dance. At times the lyrics of

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the rap even dictate the break-dancing moves, as the MC calls out the names of the dancers and the steps.

For the current generation of b-boys the history of breaking may reach back only to recent memory—and even those stories conflict—but of course in a broader sense the history of breaking goes back to the slave trade, when Afro-American dancing was born. Breaking is something new and original, born of American ghetto culture in the seventies and (in its latest manifestation) in the eighties, but its basic building blocks are moves from the Afro-American repertory, which includes the lindy and the Charleston and also includes dances from the Caribbean and South America. Capoeira, a Brazilian form of martial art that, since slaves were forbidden to practice it, evolved as a dance to disguise itself, bears a striking resemblance to breaking, with its crouching, circling, cartwheeling moves. And, as the Africanist Robert F. Thompson has pointed out, capoeira is a pretty direct descendant from Angolan dance. But while breaking is not capoeira, but something unique, and while breakers may never have seen capoeira until others pointed out to them the similarities of the two forms, the two dance/sport/fight forms have the same roots, just as rapping and the collage of music that comes with it are new and at the same time firmly rooted in a tradition of black and Hispanic music and verbal style.

The main source of the movement in breaking is black dance, but like the rest of hip hop, breaking is an exuberant synthesis of popular culture that draws on everything in its path. Some moves can be traced to the Caribbean, some to the black church, some to the Harlem ball- rooms of the twenties and thirties, some to such dances as the lindy and the Charleston, and others to such diverse sources as kung-fu movies—which were immensely popular in the seventies—Playboy magazine, French pantomime, cartoons, comics, and TV.

Like any form of dance, breaking is more than the sum of its movements; it is also the way movements are combined, as well as the costumes, music, setting, audience, and the interac- tion between dancers and spectators. And its context. As an integral part of hip hop, breaking shares many stylistic features with graffiti, rapping, and scratching. Like wild-style graffiti, it emphasizes flamboyance, and the embellishment of the tag finds its parallel in the freeze. The act of writing graffiti is, despite its acceptance on canvas at the Fifty-seventh Street galleries, an act of defacement, and breaking, in its days before media hype, was an act of obscene gestures, a threat. In both graffiti and breaking, each piece or freeze is a challenge, a call to rivals to try to top this, and at the same time a boast that it is unbeatable. Graffiti, rapping, and breaking alike celebrate the masculine heroes of the mass media—Superman and other comic- book heroes, the Saint of detective book and TV fame, athletes, kung-fu masters, and great lovers. The obscure gestural ciphers of breaking find their parallels in the (deliberately) nearly unreadable alphabets of wild-style graffiti, the (deliberately) nearly unintelligible thicket of rap lyrics, and the (deliberately) barely recognizable music that is cut up and recombined in scratching.

Graffiti writers make up new names for themselves, choosing tags partly on the aesthetic grounds that certain letters look good together; break dancers, too, rename themselves, either after their dancing specialty or style—Frosty Freeze, Kid Glide, Spinner, Little Flip—or, like rappers and DJs, with an alliterative name that sounds good—Eddie Ed, Nelly Nell, Kip Dee. And they name their crews in a similar fashion: Breakmasters, Rock Steady, Dynamic Breakers, Magnificent Force, Rockwell, Floormasters, Rockers’ Revenge, Supreme Rockers, Furious Rockers. Just as graffiti writers mark off city territory and lay title to it with their tags, breakers claim space by tracing symbols on the streets with their dancing and penetrating public space with their ghetto blasters. To write on subway trains, to strike obscene poses, to wear torn clothing, to scratch records, to talk in secret codes, and to sing one’s sexual exploits and other praises are transgressive acts. But it is a mark of our times that even such acts, vivid, proud, and aggressive, transmuting destruction into imaginative creation, can be defused as main-

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stream culture adopts them. Instead of dreaming of becoming revolutionaries, as they might have in the sixties, in the eighties the b-boys aspire to be stars. And at least for some of them, the dream has already come true.

After media exposure, the form of break dancing immediately began to change as theatrical and other experiences—such as a panel at a conference on the folklore of the Bronx—were brought back to “home base.” The folklore conference arranged a jam at a roller disco in the Bronx, and soon after, Henry Chalfant and Tony Silver, the directors of Style Wars, shot a battle between the Rock Steady Crew and the Dynamic Rockers (later Dynamic Breakers) at a roller disco in Queens. The stage was set for the scene at the Roxy, a roller disco in Chelsea, in Manhattan, that soon replaced the Negril as the venue for Wheels of Steel hip-hop nights. When Style Wars was being filmed, the owner of the Queens disco kept clearing out the circle so the cameramen could get in. The next time Rock Steady was break dancing in the park, the crew’s president, Crazy Legs, was walking back and forth saying, “Open up the circle.”

By now, the circular format has opened up so far it’s become linear, for greater theatrical legibility. Less improvisation takes place as well-worn popular moves become standard. As is often the case in the development of a dance form, acrobatic transitions are elaborated, while the freeze, which once concentrated personal expression, competitive gestural dialogue, and group style into a single significant image, has dwindled away to almost nothing and sometimes even merges with the exit. What once was a dance for adolescents is now the terrain of young adults, professionals whose bodies are less gangly and whose higher level of skill is commen- surate with their years of practice. Group choreography and aerial spins, reminiscent of the spectacular balancing acts of circus gymnasts, have added to breaking’s theatrical brilliance, as has the influx of electric boogie, popping, locking, ticking, King Tut, the float, and other moves that are not break dancing per se, into the genre.

Locking is a comic dance that creates the illusion that a person’s joints are stuck in one place while his extremities are swinging in wild, rapid circles. It was originally popularized in the early seventies by dancers on the popular black dance television program Soul Train, which spawned a dance group called the Lockers, whose flamboyance made locking and the related popping—where one segment of the body moves while others stay still—nationally known. Fred Berry, star of the seventies television comedy series What’s Happening!!, Jeffrey Daniels, ex-member of the pop-funk vocal group Shalamar, and choreographer Toni Basil were key members of the dance troupe. Berry’s bouncy body and beefy face were symbolic of locking’s comic appeal. Daniels, a willowy stick figure with an enormous Afro, not only locked and popped, but did a mean robot (the moves look like they sound)—and, along with Michael Jackson, helped spread the moonwalk, a pantomimed illusion of walking backwards, via Shalamar tours and videos. Basil, a choreographer since the sixties, when she worked on the television series Shindig! and the legendary film The T.A.M.I. Show, worked throughout the seventies and eighties integrating the Lockers’ moves into progressive film and video projects, such as her contribution to the Talking Heads’ trailblazing “Once in a Lifetime” video. Another noteworthy ex-Locker is the Latin dancer Shabbadoo, who went on to star in the break dance film Breakin’.

The electric boogie is a mimelike movement of the entire body, full of wiggles and robotic head turns, that refined the Lockers’ movements into a more fluid, less jerky style. It was inspired by moves seen on a summer replacement television show hosted by mimes Shields and Yarnell. Kids picked up on it from TV, as they had locking, and embellished it, though the mime artists’ white gloves are often worn by street dancers. Also via television came the King Tut and its kissing cousin the Egyptian after comedian Steve Martin appeared on Saturday Night Live in mock Egyptian garb to perform his hit single “King Tut.” With his arms aimed out at sharp right angles, Martin resembled a talking stone carving, and this move was quickly assimilated by youngsters.

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All these moves—locking, popping, the electric boogie, the King Tut, and the Egyptian— were similar in that each emphasized arm and upper-body motions, and unlike break dancing, kept the dancers in basically upright positions.

As kids began to learn break-dancing moves by watching the pros on TV or at dance classes, instead of from breakers on the street, the performance style became homogenized. There’s now more of a tendency to copy personal style directly instead of making one’s own signature. Amateur breaking still happens—in fact, more than ever, as children as well as adults of all classes and ethnic backgrounds get down at school dances, country clubs, shopping malls, in living rooms, and even on street corners, not in the original competitive mode, but as a money- earning public performance.

The flexibility and resilience of breaking is evident in the way it incorporated electric boogie and other new moves, rather than letting itself be replaced by them. B-boys vow that it will never die out but, like ballet, become an honored tradition. Interviewed by the New York Times, Kid Smooth, sixteen years old, imagined having a son and that son having a conversation someday with his friends: “One kid says, ‘My father is a doctor.’ The other kid says, ‘My father is a lawyer.’ And my kid, he says, ‘My father spins on his head.’ ”

At a time when youth culture is again taking center stage in America, the rest of the country is fascinated by black and Latin kids’ street life precisely because of its vivid, flamboyant, ener- getic style. It symbolizes hope for the future—born of a resourceful ability to make some- thing special, unique, original, and utterly compelling out of a life that seems to offer very little. As Fab Five Freddy puts it, “You make a new style. That’s what life on the street is all about, just being you, being who you are around your friends. What’s at stake is a guy’s honor and his position in the street. Which is all you have. That’s what makes it so important, that’s what makes it feel so good—that pressure on you to be the best. Or to try to be the best. To develop a new style nobody can deal with. If it’s true that this stuff reflects life, it’s a fast life.”

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In 1972 subway graffiti became a political issue in New York City. In that year and the two following, a variety of elected and appointed city officials, particularly Mayor John V. Lindsay, devised and debated graffiti-related policies and programs and issued numerous public state- ments on the subject.

In examining the progress of subway graffiti as a political issue, New York’s newspapers and magazines serve as a revealing and important resource, for not only did they report the graffiti policies of public officials but seemingly played a role in motivating and shaping them as well.

By summer 1971 the appearance of the mysterious message “Taki 183” had sufficiently aroused the curiosity of New Yorkers to lead the New York Times to send one of its reporters to determine its meaning. The results of his search, published on July 21, 1971, revealed that Taki was an unemployed seventeen year old with nothing better to do than pass the summer days spraying his name wherever he happened to be. He explained, “I just did it everywhere I went. I still do, though not as much. You don’t do it for girls; they don’t seem to care. You do it for yourself. You don’t go after it to be elected president.”1 The reporter interviewed other neighborhood youths, including Julio 204 and Ray A.O. (for “all over”), who were following in the footsteps of Taki, to whom they referred as the king, and he spoke with an official of the MTA who stated that more than $300,000 was being spent annually to erase graffiti. Patrolman Floyd Holoway, a vice-president of the Transit Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association questioned by the reporter as to the legal machinery relating to graffiti writing, explained that graffiti was barred only by MTA rules, not by law. Thus writers under the age of sixteen could only be given a lecture, not a summons, even if they were caught in the act of writing on the walls. Adult writers could be charged with malicious mischief and sentenced to up to a year’s impris- onment.

Taki confessed that as he grew older, he worried more about facing adult penalties for writing graffiti but admitted, “I could never retire . . . besides . . . it doesn’t harm anybody. I work. I pay taxes too. Why do they go after the little guy? Why not the campaign organiza- tions that put stickers all over the subways at election time?”2

The Times article presented Taki as an engaging character with a unique and fascinating hobby, and this seemed to have a profound effect on the city’s youth. Taki became something of a folk hero, and the ranks of the graffiti writers increased enormously. However, though each day brought numerous new writers to the walls and the subways were marked with names from top to bottom, 1971 brought no further press coverage of graffiti.

2 The Politics of Graffiti

Craig Castleman

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In spring 1972 another article on graffiti appeared in the press. It was intended not to help famil- iarize New Yorkers with the writers but to declare war on them. On May 21 city council president Sanford Garelik told reporters, “Graffiti pollutes the eye and mind and may be one of the worst forms of pollution we have to combat.” He called upon the citizens of New York to band together and wage “an all-out war on graffiti” and recommended the establishment of a monthly “antigraf- fiti day” on which New Yorkers, under the auspices of the Environmental Protection Agency, would scrub walls, fences, public buildings, subway stations, and subway cars.3

The Times’s management followed up on Garelik’s statement by printing an editorial denouncing the “wanton use of spray paint to deface subways.” They praised Garelik’s “noble concept” of an antigraffiti day but questioned its lasting appeal. Rather than burden the popu- lace with the responsibility for cleaning up graffiti, the Times called upon the city adminis- tration to ban the sale of spray paint to minors and thus stop graffiti at its source.4

Taking his cue from both the Times’s and Garelik’s suggestions, Mayor Lindsay announced his own antigraffiti program in late June. The mayor’s proposal called for the fining and jailing of anyone caught with an open spray can in any municipal building or facility. Lindsay was highly agitated at the time of the announcement, and Robert Laird, his assistant press secretary, admitted to a Times reporter that “the unsightly appearance of the subways and other public places created by the so-called graffiti artists has disturbed the Mayor greatly.”5

Lindsay again addressed the graffiti problem in extemporaneous comments before a large crowd at the rededication ceremonies for Brooklyn’s Prospect Park boathouse in late August. Standing before the white ceramic exterior of the newly renovated structure, Lindsay noted that he had asked for tighter legislation against graffiti vandalism but said that police action alone would not cure the problem. Pleading for greater public interest in the problem, the mayor exclaimed, “For heaven’s sake. New Yorkers, come to the aid of your great city—defend it, support it and protect it!”6

Lindsay’s graffiti legislation had been referred to the city council’s General Welfare Committee in early August, but the members had shown little inclination to deal with it at that time. (The council meets only twice during the summer months, and committee activity is virtually suspended from July to September.) Impatient with the committee’s foot dragging, Lindsay insisted that they hold a special meeting on graffiti on August 31. The mayor asked a number of top administration officials, including the deputy mayor, the parks commissioner, and the MTA chief administrator, to testify in favor of the legislation. But only four members of the fifteen-member committee were present at the session, and no action was immediately forthcoming.7

Meanwhile MTA chairman Ronan publicly gave his support to Mayor Lindsay’s graffiti campaign. On October 28 he told reporters that he had instructed the transit police to charge “such miscreants with ‘malicious mischief,’ ” and he urged the mayor to stress the seriousness of “this blighting epidemic” to the courts.8 Later that same day Mayor Lindsay held a cere- mony in his office at which he officially commended one of Dr. Ronan’s transit policemen, patrolman Steven Schwartz, for his “personal crusade” against graffiti. Schwartz alone had apprehended thirteen writers in the previous six months, a record for graffiti arrests unmatched in the department. The mayor followed up the ceremony with a statement that it was the “Lindsay theory” that graffiti writing “is related to mental health problems.” He described the writers as “insecure cowards” seeking recognition.9

The General Welfare Committee submitted a graffiti bill to the city council in mid- September stating that the use of markers and spray paint to write graffiti has “reached proportions requiring serious punishment for the perpetrators” and that such defacement and the use of “foul language” in many of the writings is “harmful to the general public and violative of the good and welfare of the people of the city of New York.”10 The bill proposed to eliminate graffiti by making it illegal to carry an aerosol can of paint into a public facility

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“unless it is completely enclosed in a sealed container.” It specified that “no person shall write, paint or draw any inscription, figure or mark of any type” on any public property. Judges were given wide latitude in dealing with such offenses, but the law stated that it was the council’s intent that any person guilty of writing graffiti “should be punished so that the punishment shall fit the crime.” In this spirit the bill recommended that judges sentence writers “to remove graffiti under the supervision of an employee of the public works office, New York City transit authority or other officer or employee designated by the court.”11 The bill also recommended that merchants selling spray paint or markers be required to register with the Police Depart- ment and to keep a record of the names and addresses of all persons who purchase such merchandise.12

The day after the General Welfare Committee approved the bill, the Times published an editorial stating that graffiti “are day-glo bright and multicolored, sometimes obscene, always offensive.” The editorial praised the committee for getting tough with “youthful vandals” and announced that “graffiti are no longer amusing; they have become a public menace.”13

Perhaps intending to spur the full council on to faster action on the graffiti law, Mayor Lindsay on October 5 announced the formation of a graffiti task force under the direction of his chief of staff, Steven Isenberg. The task force, which included among its members the heads of a number of city agencies, was designed to coordinate “tough new programs” for the enforcement of the expected graffiti legislation.14 The mayor further stated that

the ugliness of graffiti and the ugly message—often obscene or racist—has generated widespread support for the City’s campaign to end this epidemic of thoughtless behavior. Even those who once possessed mild amusement about graffiti are becoming increasingly indignant at the damage being done. . . . I know the problem is complex, but we have to roll up our sleeves and solve it. The assault on our senses and on our pocketbooks as we pay the clean-up costs must be stopped.15

The graffiti bill was approved unanimously by the full city council on October 11, minus the section on control of the sale of spray paint, which had aroused opposition from merchants and was considered by the council to be “too controversial.”16 Mayor Lindsay, who signed it into law on October 27, was pleased with the bill but warned merchants to “self-regulate” their sales or he would impose further legislation that would make it illegal to sell spray paint to anyone under eighteen years of age.17

There was also antigraffiti action on other fronts. Science came to the aid of graffiti fighters with the invention, by E. Dragza of the Samson Chemical Corporation, of an “artproof acrylic polymer hydron” which he named Dirty Word Remover (DWR).18 On July 31 Mayor Lindsay announced that Dragza’s formula, renamed Hydron 300, was to be sprayed on a library in Queens, another in Brooklyn, and a firehouse in the Bronx, to facilitate the removal of graf- fiti from their walls. The mayor expressed hopes that use of the “Teflon-like coating” would help to make graffiti removal “easier and less costly.” The cost of the experiment was set at $5,000.19 Results of the test were never made public.

Inspired by the growing campaign against graffiti, private citizens also got involved in the “graffiti war” of 1972. In November the Kings County Council of Jewish War Veterans invited “citizens of good will” to join their bucket brigade to clean graffiti off the monument to Pres- ident John F. Kennedy in Brooklyn’s Grand Army Plaza.20 The Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts staged their own graffiti cleanup day when more than 400 scouts spent a day partially cleaning six IND trains. Each participating scout received a citizenship medallion in honor of his or her achievement from the Avon Products Corporation.21

Other New Yorkers devised ingenious solutions to the problem. E.A. Sachs, for example, in a letter to the New York Times suggested that the MTA paint subway vehicles with a “multi-

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colored spray” that would “camouflage any attempts at graffiting.”22 M.W. Covington, also in a letter, made the more drastic suggestion that a “massive police assault” be launched against graffitists who deface Central Park monuments.23 R.H. Robinson of Brooklyn showed great ingenuity in his suggestion that large fines levied on convicted graffitists be divided between the city and persons turning in the graffitists. He noted that he had already assem- bled a lengthy list of offenders in his own neighborhood.24 Of more than a dozen letters concerning graffiti that appeared in the Times that winter, only one was sympathetic to the writers. The letter writer, P.R. Patterson, hailed youths who paint graffiti for “cheering up the depressing environment in the poorer areas of the city” and accused most people of being “guilty of subduing the desire to mark up subways as a protest against the indignities of the city bureaucracy.”25

Early in 1973 Steven Isenberg announced that over the year the police had arrested 1,562 youths for defacing subways and other public places with graffiti. Of those arrested, 426 eventually went to court and were sentenced to spend a day in the train yards scrubbing graffiti.26

Two weeks after Isenberg’s announcement Frank Berry, the executive officer of the transit authority, announced that conventional “quick treatment” graffiti writing had reached the “saturation level” and was being supplanted by “large . . . multi-colored inscriptions that may cover one-half or more of a subway car’s outer surface.” The alarming proliferation of such “grand design” graffiti constituted, according to Berry, distinct danger to riders because “they can block the vision of riders preparing to enter or leave through the door.” In light of these new developments Berry called for an increase in the number of graffiti arrests to eliminate the possibility of a “grand design” epidemic.27

On February 26 the New York City Bureau of the Budget completed a detailed work plan for Mayor Lindsay’s graffiti task force. The report began by stating that antigraffiti efforts in 1972 had cost the city $10 million, yet they had not been sufficient to reduce “the city-wide level of graffiti defacement” below “fifty percent surface coverage,” a level that it declared “unac- ceptable.”28 It thus proposed that the city engage in a graffiti prevention project that would seek to reduce the level of defacement to an acceptable 10 to 20 percent. The cost of such a project was estimated to be $24 million.29

Under the control of a project management staff team appointed by the mayor, the proposed project would coordinate efforts by various city agencies and private corporations toward four major project elements:

• Technological improvements: Testing and implementing the use of high-performance paints, coatings, and solvents for graffiti-defaced surfaces.

• Security measures: Testing and implementing increased security measures in those areas of the city where security may deter graffiti vandalism.

• Motivation of graffiti vandals: Testing and implementing psychological measures aimed at either inhibiting vandalism or diverting vandals elsewhere.

• Control of graffiti instruments: Testing and implementing the feasibility of manufacturer and retailer restrictions on packaging and display of graffiti instruments.30

Under these categories the report listed nearly one hundred specific tasks, the completion of which would lead to the achievement of the overall objectives. The tasks included “imple- menting and monitoring psychological field-testing for graffiti vandalism prevention and developing procedures for monitoring of procedures involved in implementation of restric- tions.” Mayor Lindsay devoted a month to study of the report before releasing it or commenting on it publicly.

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Meanwhile on March 26 New York Magazine published a long article by Richard Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand.” His reference was not to the growing graf- fiti fad but to the city’s fight against it. Goldstein, giving the pro-graffiti forces their first published support, stated that “it just may be that the kids who write graffiti are the health- iest and most assertive people in their neighborhoods.” He further declared graffiti to be “the first genuine teenage street culture since the fifties. In that sense, it’s a lot like rock ’n’ roll.”31

In the same issue the New York Magazine management presented a “Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade” in which it gave “Taki awards” to a number of graffitists in categories labeled “Grand Design” and “Station Saturation.” Award-winning works were reproduced in full color in the maga- zine. They declared the emergence of grand design pieces a “grand graffiti conquest of the subways” and ridiculed chairman Ronan, Mayor Lindsay, and the Times for their attitude toward the new art form. The Taki Awards article also contained a statement in praise of graf- fiti from pop artist Claes Oldenberg that was reprinted in the catalog for two subsequent UGA exhibitions and was quoted in a number of magazine and newspaper articles about graffiti, as well as Norman Mailer’s book, The Faith of Graffiti. Said Oldenberg:

I’ve always wanted to put a steel band with dancing girls in the subways and send it all over the city. It would slide into a station without your expecting it. It’s almost like that now. You’re standing there in the station, everything is gray and gloomy and all of a sudden one of those graffiti trains slides in and brightens the place like a big bouquet from Latin America. At first it seems anarchical—makes you wonder if the subways are working properly. Then you get used to it. The city is like a newspaper anyway, so it’s natural to see writing all over the place.32

The day after the New York articles appeared, Mayor Lindsay called a press conference at which he discussed the findings and proposals contained in the graffiti prevention project report. He stated that copies of the work plan would be sent to the heads of the MTA, the Environmental Protection Agency, the board of education, and all other agencies and author- ities concerned with graffiti prevention. He ridiculed “those who call graffiti vandalism ‘art’ ” and asked the citizens of New York to join him in denouncing the graffiti vandals. “It’s a dirty shame,” said the mayor, “that we must spend money for this purpose in a time of austerity. The cost of cleaning up graffiti, even to a partial extent, is sad testimony to the impact of the thoughtless behavior which lies behind . . . the demoralizing visual impact of graffiti.”33

As graffiti continued to appear on subways and other city property, Mayor Lindsay became increasingly angry, not only at supporters of graffiti and the writers themselves but at his own staff for their inability to control the problem. In an interview with a Sunday News reporter, Steven Isenberg “smiled when he recalled two times when Mayor Lindsay burst into his office and—with four-letter fervor—ordered him to ‘clean up the mess.’ One time the Mayor had snipped a ceremonial ribbon at the opening of a Brooklyn swimming pool that was already covered with graffiti and the other time he had spotted a graffiti-laden bus in midtown. ‘I certainly got reamed out,’ Isenberg recalled.”34

The mayor’s anger over the continued appearance of graffiti on the subways exploded publicly on June 30, 1973. Steven Isenberg explained, “When the Mayor went to mid-town to publicize the parking ticket step-up, he took the subway back to City Hall and what he saw made him madder than hell.”35 Immediately upon his return to his office the mayor called a hurried press conference at which he snapped, “I just came back from 42nd Street in one of [MTA chairman] Dr. Ronan’s graffiti-scarred subway cars, one of the worst I’ve seen yet.”36 The mayor stated that the extent of name marking in the trains and stations was “shocking” and pointed out that the antigraffiti force he had organized the year before had come up with a plan

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to prevent the writing through increased police surveillance of lay-ups, train yards, and stations. “Since the time the plan was sent to the MTA I haven’t heard a word,” he said. “I don’t think they even bothered to look at it. They don’t give a damn and couldn’t care less about being responsive to elected officials.”37

A few months later in an interview with Norman Mailer, Lindsay explained that his aggra- vation with graffiti was due to the fact that it tended to nullify many of his efforts to provide the city’s subway passengers with “a cleaner and more pleasant environment” in which to travel. At that time the mayor was also attempting to justify the city’s massive expenditures for new subway cars, which, once covered with graffiti, “did not seem much more pleasant” than the old cars.38

The graffiti policies that were established during the Lindsay administration are still being pursued. The MTA continues to scrub trains only to find them immediately redecorated. The police continue to apprehend writers only to see them released, unpunished, by the courts. It would seem that the failure of the city’s expensive antigraffiti policies should be a matter of great concern to the press and elected officials; however, the management, expense, and overall wisdom of New York City’s antigraffiti policies have not been criticized publicly by either politicians or the press and thus continue unchanged.

Norman Mailer attributed Lindsay’s attitude toward graffiti to the fact that the mayor had earlier sought the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972 and that graffiti had been

an upset to his fortunes, . . . a vermin of catastrophe that these writings had sprouted like weeds over the misery of Fun City, a new monkey of unmanageables to sit on Lindsay’s overloaded political back. He must have sensed the Presidency draining away from him as the months went by, the graffiti grew, and the millions of tourists who passed through the city brought the word out to the rest of the nation: “Filth is sprouting on the walls.”39

It is doubtful that graffiti played as important a role in Lindsay’s declining political fortunes as Mailer speculates. Evidently, however, Lindsay believed that graffiti was a problem signifi- cant enough to rate a substantial amount of his attention, and thus it became a political issue during his administration.

The fact that there has been very little reduction in the amount of graffiti that has covered the city’s subways since 1971 can be seen as proof that the city’s antigraffiti policies have failed. John deRoos, former senior executive director of the MTA, has placed the burden of blame for this failure on the city’s judicial system: “Almost all graffiti can be traced to people who have been arrested at least once. But the courts let them off. Six, seven, eight, or nine times.”40 In an interview former transit police chief Sanford Garelik also laid the blame for the failure of the MTA’s graffiti arrest policies on the courts: “The transit police are doing their job but what’s the use of making arrests if the courts refuse to prosecute? Graffiti is a form of behavior that leads to other forms of criminality. The courts have to realize this . . . anything else is an injustice to the public.”

Chief Judge Reginald Matthews of the Bronx Family Court has replied to such criticism of the courts’ handling of graffiti: “Graffiti is an expression of social maladjustment, but the courts cannot cure all of society’s ills. We have neither the time nor the facilities to handle graffiti cases; in fact, we cannot always give adequate treatment to far more serious crimes. Graffiti simply cannot be treated by the juvenile justice system as a serious thing, not in New York.”

Not everyone in the MTA and the transit police blames the courts. Reginal Lewis, a car maintenance foreman at the MTA, puts the blame on the transit police for “not keeping the kids out of the (train) yards.” Detective sergeant Morris Bitchachi, commander of the MTA’s

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ten-member graffiti squad, blamed the city’s Department of Social Services for not providing special rehabilitation programs for “known graffiti offenders.”

City University professor George Jochnowitz had another idea: “The New York Times is . . . responsible for the prevalence of graffiti. On July 21, 1971, an interview with Taki 183, a previ- ously unknown graffiti dauber, appeared. . . . The glorification of this vandal by the nation’s most prestigious newspaper was not without effect. Within months a minor problem became a major one.”41

After 1975 there was little press coverage of graffiti, a reflection of the city government’s reluctance to publicize the city’s continuing failure to control the graffiti phenomenon. This, combined with the seeming unwillingness of the press to bring criticism upon itself through the publication of other Taki-style reports, led to a near press blackout on the subject of graffiti.

In 1980 the blackout ended when the New York Times Magazine published a long article about three graffiti writers: NE, T-Kid, and Seen. Other newspapers followed suit, featuring articles on other writers and on the current state of the graffiti phenomenon.

In September 1981 the mayor’s office broke its silence when Mayor Koch declared that “New Yorkers are fed up with graffiti,” and announced a 1.5 million dollar program to provide fences and German Shepherd watchdogs for the Corona trainyard. MTA chairman Richard Ravitch had at first rejected the idea, stating that, “fences are not going to work. It is likely that they would be cut and the dogs would get out and perhaps injure someone in the neigh- boring community.”42 Ravitch quickly gave in to pressure from the mayor, however, and a double set of razor wire-topped fences were quickly installed, between which six dogs patrolled the perimeter of the yard. Mayor Koch and the press were present on the day the dogs were released and the mayor declared, “We call them dogs, but they are really wolves. Our hope is that the vandals will ultimately get the message.”43

To test the effectiveness of the fences and dogs, all of the trains stored at the yard were painted white and the mayor asked the MTA to inform him immediately if any graffiti was painted on them. For the following three months the trains were watched closely and no graffiti appeared on the outsides of the trains. Declaring the Corona experiment a success, the mayor announced on December 14 that the city would increase its contribution to the MTA by $22.4 million to fund the installation of similar fences at the other eighteen train yards operated by the authority. The mayor stated that the new security installations would not feature attack dogs because, at $3,000 per year apiece, their maintenance had proved too expensive. Instead, coils of razor wire would be placed between the fences. Said Koch, “I prefer to think of these as steel dogs with razor teeth. And you don’t have to feed steel dogs.”44 Ravitch said that he was pleased by the mayor’s decision to increase transit financing and that the MTA would attempt to complete construction of the new fences within six months.

Privately, MTA officials expressed doubts that the fences would, ultimately, be effective. Graffiti writers did so as well. Said Ali, “We haven’t gone over the fences at Corona because it’s on a lousy subway line. If they fence a popular yard like Pelham or Coney Island, the writers won’t be stopped by razor wire, dogs, or laser towers. We’ll get past the fences. Wait and see.” Daze said, “All the fences will do is keep most of us out of the yards. We’ll still be able to hit the trains in the lay-ups, and we’ll bomb the insides and the outsides of in-service trains with tags—big spray-paint tags like nobody’s ever seen. The MTA can’t stop us from doing that unless they put a cop on every car.” Bloodtea continued, “All they’re doing is moving graffiti from the outsides of the trains to the insides. It’s the inside graf- fiti—the tags—that the public hates. All the mayor is doing is getting rid of the outside pieces that the public likes, the big colorful pieces.”

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According to mayoral aide Jack Lusk, the yard-fencing program is the first step in a long- range antigraffiti program. Said Lusk;

“The public hates graffiti and it’s up to us to do something about it. Fencing the yards will take care of some of it. Beyond that we’re planning a series of antigraffiti television, radio, and print advertisements featuring the slogan. ‘Make your mark in society, not on it.’ We’re also considering sponsoring antigraffiti citizens’ groups; legislation banning the sale of spray paint and markers to minors; and possibly the establishment of a special transit court that will handle crimes like graffiti and other forms of vandalism. Even though the mayor does not have direct authority over the MTA, the public holds him responsible for the state of the subways. The public is frightened and disgusted by graffiti and they want us to do something about it. We’re going to do whatever is necessary to wipe it out.”

Notes

1. “‘Taki 183’ Spawns Pen Pals,” New York Times, July 21, 1971, p. 37. 2. Ibid. 3. “Garelik Calls for War on Graffiti,” New York Times, May 21, 1972, p. 66. 4. “Nuisance in Technicolor,” New York Times, May 26, 1972, p. 34. 5. “Fines and Jail for Graffiti Will Be Asked by Lindsay,” New York Times, June 26, 1972, p. 66. 6. “Lindsay Assails Graffiti Vandals,” New York Times, August 25, 1972, p. 30. 7. Edward Ranzal, “Officials Testify in Favor of Mayor’s Graffiti Bill,” New York Times, September 1, 1972, p.

25. 8. Edward Ranzal, “Ronan Backs Lindsay Antigraffiti Plan,” New York Times, August 29, 1972, p. 66. 9. Ibid.

10. “Stiff Antigraffiti Measure Passes Council Committee,” New York Times, September 15, 1972, p. 41. 11. New York Administrative Code, Section 435–13.2 (1972). 12. “Stiff Administrative Measure Passes Council Committee,” New York Times, September 15, 1972, p. 41. 13. “Scratch the Graffiti,” New York Times, September 16, 1972, p. 28. 14. “Lindsay Forms ‘Graffiti Task Force,’ ” New York Times, October 5, 1972, p. 51. 15. Office of Mayor John V. Lindsay, press release, October 4, 1972. 16. “Antigraffiti Bill One of Four Gaining Council Approval,” New York Times, October 11, 1972, p. 47. 17. “Lindsay Signs Graffiti Bill,” New York Times, October 28, 1972, p. 15. 18. “New Chemical May Curb Graffiti,” New York Times, April 22, 1972, p. 35. 19. Office of Mayor John V. Lindsay, press release, July 31, 1972. 20. “Antigraffiti ‘Bucket Brigade’ Planned,” New York Times, November 13, 1972, p. 41. 21. “Boy Scouts Scrub Graffiti Off Walls of Subway Cars,” New York Times, February 25, 1973, p. 35. 22. E. H. Sachs, Jr., letter, New York Times, December 24, 1972, Sec. 8, p. 2. 23. M. W. Covington, letter, New York Times, December 26, 1972, p. 32. 24. R. H. Robinson, letter, New York Times, June 5, 1972, p. 32. 25. P. R. Patterson, letter, New York Times, December 14, 1972, p. 46. 26. New York Times, January 14, 1973, p. 14. 27. “Fight against Subway Graffiti Progresses from Frying Pan to Fire,” New York Times, January 26, 1973, p.

39. 28. Bureau of the Budget of the City of New York, Work Plan—Graffiti Prevention Project (February 26, 1973),

p. 2. 29. Ibid., p. 3. 30. Ibid., p. 2. 31. Richard Goldstein, “This Thing Has Gotten Completely Out of Hand,” New York Magazine, March 26,

1973, pp. 35–39. 32. “The Graffiti ‘Hit’ Parade,” New York Magazine, March 26, 1973, pp. 40–43. 33. Murray Schumach,“At $10 Million, City Calls It a Losing Graffiti Fight,” New York Times, March 28, 1973,

p. 46. 34. James Ryan, “The Great Graffiti Plague,” New York Daily News Sunday Magazine, May 6, 1973, p. 33. 35. James Ryan, “The Mayor Charges MTA Is Soft on Graffiti,” New York Daily News, July 1, 1973, p. 2.

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36. Alfred E. Clark, “Persistent Graffiti Anger Lindsay on Subway Tour,” New York Times, July 1, 1979, p. 47. 37. Ibid. 38. Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti (New York: Praeger/Alskog Publishers, 1974). 39. Ibid. 40. Owen Moritz, “The New Subway,” New York Daily News, December 5, 1978, p. 37. 41. George Jochnowitz, “Thousands of Child-hours Wasted on Ugly Daubings,” New York Post, October 20,

1978, p. 43. 42. Ari L. Goldman, “Dogs to Patrol Subway Yards,” New York Times, September 15, 1981, p. 1. 43. Ibid. 44. Ari L. Goldman, “City to Use Pits of Barbed Wire in Graffiti War,” New York Times, December 15, 1981,

p. B-1.

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Introduction

In the spring of 1975 the 77th Street fountain in New York City’s Central Park was the place to be. On weekends the hip kids from all the boroughs—Brooklyn, Bronx, Manhattan, Queens—came down to the fountain. With their radios, better known as ghetto blasters or boom boxes, they made the fountain a rocking inner city park scene.

The fountain is in a cobblestone area about half a mile square with a big Roman style foun- tain in the middle, cut out of the trees and grass of Central Park. It was like a hidden valley. Walking through the trees to reach it was like finding a hidden Mayan temple buried deep in a rain forest. Once you got to it, the square was an outside-in block party, rocking and shocking the midday. Most everyone there was Black or Spanish, with Italians, Irish, and some tourists, too. Radios blaring on the same station. Fellows throwing base at the girls. Girls in high heels dancing the Latin hustle on cobblestone. There were old men playing cards, domi- noes, grooving to Tito Puente, having a taste. Families were having picnics on the grass hills surrounding the square. Vendors selling ice cream, soda, hot dogs, loose joints and more. To a California kid the way people dressed was hip to the point of being bizarre. How could so many people in one place be so cool?

Platform shoes were history at that point. Only tourists and diehard hippies wore them. Instead it was shoes like marshmallows. Fat toed, colorful shoes with one- to two-inch soles made out of chalk-white rubber. Those hip kids wore jeans, or thirties peg pants, always pressed, with a single one-inch calvary stripe down the leg, with pajama top T-shirts and gang- ster appleboy hats or baseball hats.

The girls were wearing tight jeans or skirts, high heels or flats, and T-shirts. I can’t recall the names of all the stuff they wore or how they got it together, but I do remember that they looked awfully good.

And everywhere there was music and dancing. Some radios rocked James Brown or funk or disco. Tape machines blared Afro-Cuban while three or four live congo players made the sound a little more earthy. If the fellows weren’t rapping or dancing with the girls, they were dancing in large groups with each other. They danced in crazy fresh three-, four- or five-man routines. I remember seven or eight guys who had on the street look with marshmallows, striped peg pants and all. They were in a dance formation I recognized as the bus stop, also known as the L.A. hustle. The bus stop was a dance where three or more people joined in mili- tary like platoon formations (people in rows side by side). All of the people in the bus stop

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formation marched forward in unison three steps, then to the side three steps, then to the other side three steps, then stopped and clicked heels, stomped their feet, turned around in place, and started again. There were sometimes thirty or more people in the bus stop formation. Truth can be stranger than fiction.

The way these kids at the fountain were doing the bus stop was completely different from the L.A. hustle as I knew it. At the moment that the usual dancers would stomp their feet and click their heels (like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz), these New York kids dropped to the ground, spinning on the way, then did a little footwork freeze here, freeze there, then pop back up in time to pick up the rest of the routine. All of a sudden the radio cut to James Brown’s live version of Sex Machine and the homeboys got loose. They all dropped the L.A. hustle like a bad joke and started going off on the drop and footwork. At first I thought it was a variation on the L.A. hustle; I realized later that the L.A. hustle was just a little experiment, these drops and footwork were the real deal. Their drop move was crazy fresh! I’d never seen it before. First they hopped, then stepped, then abruptly dropped to a squat with backs straight, on the snare drum note and popped back up into standing leg steps on the bass beats. Each guy had unique leg steps in between the drops, like Ali shuffles, spins, hops with one leg up then drop- ping down in a squat and coming up fast, all on the beat and with serious finesse. Like this: base-snare-bass-bass-bass, spin-drop-popup-shuffle, shuffle-snare-bass-bass bounce-bounce, drop spinup-snare-bass-bass-snare, step-step drop. They looked like Russian kazotsky dancers with soul.

Their footwork on the ground was bugged out, too. It looked like gymnastic sweeps and other footwork mixed with leg stretch exercises, splits, drops and spins done while squatting low to the ground, using the hands to propel the body. Some of the moves were strange and complicated, at the same time beyond my understanding. But I knew it was something very hip, very special. I liked this dance. It was more than just hip, it looked like fun. What I had witnessed for the first time that fine spring day in Central Park was the beginnings of a dance style that would evolve and later become an international phenomenon called breaking.

Part I

It was the mid-seventies, New York (the disco decade) that gave birth to breakdance style, but its roots date back to ancient Africa, feudal China, and tribal Eurasia.

“Oh no!” you say. “Boring history junk!” Well hold up home boys and home girls, just chill for a few and bust it. To appreciate breaking to the max you’ve got to understand how it started, and where it came from. After all, the more you know about breaking, the better you will be at (1) doing it, (2) being able to see its influence in other dance and art forms, or (3) impressing strangers with all the stuff you know.

Like most American dances, breaking owes much to eighteenth century American slavery, when African and European dance styles began to mesh. In early America the European and British Americans introduced the minuet, the waltz and the quadrille (the dance you always see in Three Musketeers movies). The African-American slaves introduced a shuffle step dance called the joba that sort of looked like a prehistoric tap dance, the snake hips, and the fishtail.

The hip thing to do if you were a slave was to imitate the master’s dances in a mocking way just for fun while incorporating some of your own moves and rhythms. But unlike the highly civilized, properly timed European dances, African dance was about leaps, hops, skips, falls, drops and turns done to unrelenting tribal beats and rhythms. These moves done in combination with the European dance steps looked a little buggy. Like a proper eighteenth century gentleman trying to stay cool with a hot foot, I imagine it looked ridiculous at first, but then so did the L.A. hustle.

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From (out of) those new cross cultural dance experimentations and in some of the purely African dances there were styles that resembled and would later, through American dance history, evolve to become the ultimate dance form: breaking.

Similar in style, for example, was the juba, which was done by one or more dancers in a circle of male dancers, each one taking his turn to go off. The steps they used were more like shuffle steps and tap than breaking, but the circle formation deal with one-at-a-time action is close. Within the same period of time, dances that use drops like the bullfrog hop resembled Brooklyn rocking. These slave dance creations soon caught the attention and interest of the masters. They began to see and appreciate their level of difficulty and creativity that went into these dances.

Being the kind-hearted type of chaps they were, the slave masters often let the best of the dancers have it a little easier, and being sporting fellows, the masters would encourage competition. Battles. Here’s another important connection to breaking that has existed throughout American dance history. The competition. Every dance form done first by young Black men from the jiggy contest on the plantations of Texas in 1850 to tap dancing of the 20s to the jitterbug of the 30s and 40s to breaking today has always been about who was the best.

Even the electric boogie, which most people think could not have been created without European mime and Marcel Marceau, appeared to have its roots in early America. A dance called the Virginia Essence created by slaves, which combined British clog dancing and African shuffle steps, sounds a lot like the electric boogie. In 1872 ragtime composer Arthur Marshall was quoted as saying, “If a guy could really do it, he sometimes looked as if he was being towed around on ice skates. The performer moves forward without appearing to move his feet at all by manipulating his toes and heels rapidly.” If that’s not an early moon walk, then what is? Or how about this? A dance that appeared around the turn of the century in Black minstrel shows called Stepping on the Puppy’s Tail also had an amazing resemblance to the moon walk. Stepping on the Puppy’s Tail was described as moving each foot alternately backwards “like a horse pawing the ground.” It just goes to show there’s nothing new under the sun, or in this case under the moon.

There, that wasn’t so bad. We peeked a look at how colonial American and pre-Civil War American dance had a few ties with breaking.

1. Dancers standing in circles while somebody in the middle does his thing. 2. A little electric boogie action. 3. The beginning of competition in American subculture dance.

In the 1850s Irish citizens emigrated to America. Poor, fleeing from potato famines, many settled in New York City in lower Manhattan, the same neighborhoods as most of New York’s Blacks at the time. The Blacks were digging on their national dance called the Irish Jig. Unlike the British Jig (which is like what you see in pirate movies) the Irish Jig was controlled and required more skill. With the back straight and the arms firmly by the side, the legs and feet moved rapidly in complex time and rhythm and made clacking sounds on the floor.

The Blacks, who were doing the juba shuffle dance, combined it with the Irish Jig and devel- oped the tap dance.

What does that have to do with breaking, you ask? Well, since tap has been around so long, it has connections with all the other dances that eventually did evolve into breaking.

At the turn of the century when Black dancers were touring the states with circus and carni- vals as minstrels, things were beginning to get interesting. Since live acts in those days were about amazing some hick in the next town just to sell him medicine he didn’t need, stage dancing became more spectacular and inventive.

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For example, Jim Green, a dancer in a company called A.G. Allen’s Mighty Minstrels, was known for a move he did that stopped the show. He’d dance for a while, then fall on the floor and spin around on his butt in time with the music, and he called it the Black Bottom. Hold everything! The first ass spin!?! Word up.

In New York, 1915, during the vaudeville years, a Black tap dancer named Dewey Wein- glass, after seeing the Russian dancer Ivan Bankoff at a Broadway theater, started experi- menting with Russian steps. He borrowed moves like drops, squats, sweeps, splits, tumbles, and flips and added them to his dance routines. Early in 1911 petite Ida Forsyne, only five feet tall, another American Black vaudeville dancer, used Russian moves in her shows and became a European sensation. She could do what the Russian peasant dancers did since she was so light and tiny. Like Kazotsky (the squatting kick dance that goes with da-da-da-dadadadada- hey!) but even faster. She added her own variations that even the Russian dancers couldn’t do, all the way across the stage and return backwards. The first Black American collaborators with Russian dance had definite connections with top rocking, drops, footwork, and a lot of other gymnastic style moves in breaking!

I’d like to stop and make a prediction here. I predict that these Russian-influenced breaking moves will come full circle in the next couple of years as breaking breaks through the Iron Curtain. Russian gymnasts will completely dig it and pick it up as part of their gymnastic floor routines or as a separate gymnastic sport. But don’t worry, if there’s a battle. The Bronx will brush Moscow for years to come. Why the confidence, you ask? After all, the Eastern Euro- peans started a lot of this stuff and always do very well at the Olympics, thank you. But the reason they could never take us out is because breaking happens on funky beat of which Russians have no conception. This is also the major distinction between the original European dances and the copies by African-American slaves. The Blacks took stiff rhythms and made them rock. Therefore the Russkies would have to immigrate millions of Black Africans to Russia, and a few million Spanish, show nothing but Bruce Lee and Kung Fu films, wait a couple of hundred years and then battle us!

Flash dancing was a tap dance style that started in the 1920s and like the movie of the same name involved wild acrobatics. This was the time of crazy aerial acts like the Nicholas Brothers, the Four Step Brothers and the Berry Brothers. These dance crews were capable of forward flips with no hands, landing in splits, running up walls into flips (like the movie Flash- dance), sliding in the splits across 50-foot stages, all of this taking place in between tap dance routines. It’s no wonder that the 1983 film Flashdance would feature break-dancing, our gener- ation’s flash dancing. One dancer known as Pops Whitman was doing moves very similar to the drop moves of 70s New York and the perfected drops of the later 1980s. As described by a colleague, Baby Laurence Jackson, “I’m sure Pops Whitman invented a lot of flash steps. A front and back split that looked effortless but was almost impossible and a Russian twist that was indescribable. He started spinning like a top and went down into a squat and up over and over, each time he came up he was facing his audience with his ankles locked. In my book he was the greatest of all the acrobatic tap dancers.”

Sounds like Baby Jackson was talking about New York City Breakers Powerful Pexster! Nothing new under the sun, just rehearsed a few times, that’s all. Here’s another story from the flash dance days that’s pretty cool.

The Nicholas Brothers and the Berry Brothers, considered the top crews in flash dancing, challenged each other to a battle. It happened at New York City’s downtown Cotton Club in 1938 while Cab Calloway’s orchestra was rocking the house (46 years before the New York City Breakers battled Rock Steady in the film, Beat Street.)

The Berry Brothers supposedly took out the Nicholas Brothers, with a fresh move described as unbelievable the two brothers did a flying leap from a platform high above the stage twelve feet into the air and over the heads of Cab Calloway’s orchestra. They landed twenty feet away

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downstage in a split right on the last note of the music. Some say the Nicholas Brothers were better all-around performers and acrobatic dancers, but not as accomplished in the flash acro- batics style for which the Berry Brothers had no rival. Flash acts were seen in more than just nightclubs. In the 30s and 40s hundreds of films were made featuring flash dancing. These films served to “turn on” millions of people in a short period of time to these unique dance styles. Out of those millions, thousands tried the dancing, hundreds perfecting and improving on the styles (which added to dance evolution). The films and television shows that breakers are now appearing in work in very much the same way. In the 50s couples were still doing the swing and jitterbug dances to rock and roll music while rock and roll performers started devel- oping a new style of performance dancing that borrowed from the spectacular dance moves of generations before. Elvis Presley, for example, did something with his legs that dates back to early minstrel dancing called legomania or rubber legs. Jackie Wilson was the rock and roll rhythm and blues star who was famous for splits, spins and other moves from flash dancing of the 20s and 30s.

The dawn of the revolutionary sixties partner dancing gave way to a get it together and let it all hang out freestyle. Sixties youth challenged all established popular dance forms with new steps and moves focusing on expression. While revolting against both orchestrated lifestyles and sounds of the past and the new high technology of the present, Americans got hip to a funky music called rhythm and blues. Safely held in Black American culture for years, rhythm and blues, with its emphasis on tight beats and repetitive rhythm sections, finally had its day of mass popularity. American popular dance became more informal and expressive. In other words, America got loose. Soul and rhythm and blues labels like Decca, Motown, and Philly Sound hit an all-time high in popularity as they supplied America and the world with music tailor-made for the monkey, the jerk, and the mashed potatoes. Just when America was getting used to rhythm and blues, James Brown crashed on the set sing-screaming like a fiend, doing unbelievable sliding and spinning moves into splits, while his band played the funkiest bass rhythms and blues beats anyone had ever heard. He was it. The undisputed king of soul. James Brown combined old minstrel dances like the camel walk and the one-foot slide with 30s flash dances like spins and splits all on the funky rhythm and blues beats of his Fabulous Flames and created a new level of performance dance. Through his music he also created a new wave of popular dance styles.

James Brown created the ultimate dance music because it had unrelenting repetitive beats and rhythms that could make you dance forever. The James Brown sound doesn’t speak to your head, it speaks to your body, to your arms and legs, your hips and your rear end, directing, supporting, moving you like a river current. James Brown brought a quality to American Black music which had been missing since tribal Africa. Low down funk. By the late 60s and into the early 70s, at the height of funk influence, popular dance also changed. Dances that imitated characters or animals like the monkey, or the Philly dog gave way to simple dance steps that were more about movement and body control. As music became more structural and steady in rhythm due to the emergence of funk, popular dancing evolved into an even greater form of freestyle. New York, with its history of Black dance and its street-wise culture, was first to develop and perfect freestyle street dancing. A freestyle dancer had confidence in the beat always being there at the same time and place. He could go off into steps, changes, drops, off-beat splits and moves, spins, and then at the last moment fall back to the original steps and on the beat.

Also made popular by James Brown were the bridges or breaks (in tempo and rhythm) in songs. He changed the rhythm and the tempo of the main part of the song to a new high intensity pace for about 15 to 20 seconds, then dropped back to the original beat without losing any timing or rhythm. The breaks lasted such a short time because they were too intense to fill the whole song and were a nice change of pace which made the song more interesting

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to listen to. For the freestyle dancers in the early 70s who used the more intense breaks to really go off and do the hottest moves, the breaks in the songs weren’t long enough. D.J.s like Cool Herc in the Bronx recognized the frustrations of these freestyle dancers and would elon- gate the breaks in the record by using two of the same records on two turntables and a mixer. He mixed back and forth from record to record, never leaving the break. Now the freestyle dancers had their cake and could eat it too. With more break time, freestyle dancers devel- oped new moves and styles to match the length and intensity of the special mixed breaks. As steps by freestyle dancers became more spectacular and unique, competition to see who was best became more intense. In order to outdo each other, freestyle dancers began dropping to the ground using Russian-style footwork and gymnastics moves like sweeps and splits. Comedy and pantomime in moves or routines helped to zap a judging crowd in freestyle dance battles which usually took place at the first hip-hop jams where break mixing D.J.s supplied the sounds. These freestylists of the early and mid-70s who danced in the breaks of funk and disco records were called B-boys or Break boys, and are the fathers of modern breakdancing. How breaking evolved to become what it is now is in the story ahead. Read on.

PART 2

The first real breakers were the gang members of Black gangs in the Bronx in the late 60s, early 70s. These guys did a dance called the Good Foot, from James Brown’s record of the same name. The Good Foot was the first freestyle dance that incorporated moves involving drops and spins and resembled the beginnings of breaking. The best way to describe the Good Foot is to imagine a majorette marching in a parade taking steps raised high at the knee but keeping the leg raised at the knee in the air for a beat before dropping it down and simultaneously raising the other leg, like a stop action drum majorette on beat.

When the gangs disappeared and only party crews remained these Good Foot freestyle dancers hung out with the party crews, and as the party crew D.J.s started developing their techniques the freestyle dancers began to develop their own moves.

As the D.J.s invented new ways to elongate the break beats in the records, dancers had more time to invent and experiment. Soon moves like dropping down to the ground and popping up again on beat became standard and gave these first breakers the nickname of “boie-oie- oings.”

Footwork came in when the boie-oie-oings started using their arms and hands to support their bodies in order to free the feet and legs to do gymnastic steps, shuffles and sweeps. In Brooklyn a new step inspired by these drops was being developed called the Brooklyn Rock. Once the first early break moves had been established (drops footwork, sweeps, etc.), a defi- nite style began to develop. The first and longest lasting style was comedy.

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