Can't Stop Won't Stop (29 page)

But Robinson and Bootee recorded the track anyway, peeling off Furious Five rapper Melle Mel to add his last verse from a forgotten version of “Superappin'.” Robinson decided “The Message” had to be released as a single. Flash saw where this was going, and he pushed the rest of the Five into the studio to try to rap Bootee's lines. It didn't work. Instead, Bootee and Robinson added them at the end of the record, in streetside arrest skit recalling Stevie Wonder's interlude in “Living for the City.” But Pandora's Box had been opened. The ensuing tug-of-wars between the group and the label and between Mel and Flash resulted in Flash leaving Sugar Hill the following year. The video appeared, with Flash and the crew lip-synching along to a rap only Mel had helped compose.

Sugar Hill's second most important rap record had been as A&R–driven and market-driven as its first, and the consequences for hip-hop music were also far-reaching. Not only was “The Message” another boost for the rapper over the DJ, the crew itself became a dramatic casualty of rap's realignment towards copyrights, trademarks, executives, agents, lawyers and worldwide audiences. By the end of 1983, there were two groups called the Furious Five, competing
in civil court for the rights to the name, and dousing their creative fires under thousands of dollars of cocaine. From this point, questions of ownership and authorship would become hip-hop generation obsessions.

But Robinson's instincts had been exactly right: the record became the fifth rap single to reach gold-selling status. The single certainly did not represent the first time post-'60s rappers had chosen to touch on themes of social dislocation and institutional racism—Kurtis Blow's “The Breaks,” “Hard Times” and “Tough,” Brother D and the Collective Effort's “How We Gonna Make the Black Nation Rise,” and Tanya “Sweet Tee” Winley's “Vicious Rap” were just some of the recorded examples. But because it was set to a beat too slow to rock a crowd, “The Message” focused the listener on Bootee and Mel's vivid lyrics and their delivery—neither frenetic nor flamboyant, but instead, by turns, resigned and enraged. Flash's instincts had been correct, too: it was the grimmest, most down-beat rap ever heard.

And that vibe matched a rising disgust with Reaganomics, the culmination of fifteen years of benign neglect, and a sense of hopelessness that only seemed to be deepening. Liberal music critics who had been sitting on the fence about rap jumped off with both feet. “[I]t's been awfully easy to criticize mainstream, street-level rap for talking loud and saying nothing. No more,” wrote Vince Aletti in
The Village Voice
, praising the song's chorus as “a slow chant seething with desperation and fury,” and the track's “exhilarating, cinematic sprawl.”
⁹

It's among hip-hop history's greatest ironies that “The Message,” so artificial and marginal by the standards of the culture then, would prove at once to be a song so truthful about the generation's present and, in its righteous retail math, so influential to that generation's future culture.

The visions of “Planet Rock”—universal communion and transcendence—and “The Message”—ghetto strife and specificity—could only be brought together on the dance floor. But in the graffiti movement, both a bellwether and a vanguard, the contradictions were intensifying. Mike “IZ THE WIZ” Martin, a king from Queens, says, “1982, in my opinion, was the beginning of the end for graffiti. That's why I did as many pieces as I could during that time period. I knew it was the last hurrah.”

Dondi White, for instance, had made his legend during the blackout of 1977. When the next summer morning came, the sixteen-year old's name had been emblazoned over a staggering number of cars and he had begun his journey toward becoming the Stylemaster General.
¹⁰
Five years later, he was leaving the subway underworld for the light of the galleries—a carnival of openings, meetings, contracts, exhibitions. On Valentine's Day in 1982, he opened his first solo show at the dizzying, packed Fun Gallery.

The public face of the Fun Gallery was its magnetic co-director, Patti Astor, a ‘68er, sometime Warhol associate, and a former underground movie star, who had just finished a role in
Wild Style
playing a journalist who brings the hip-hop scene downtown. Her tiny storefront in the East Village became a more traditional gallery counterpart to the Bronx's freewheeling Fashion Moda. It was a downtown lodestar from which a shortlist of writers could catapult themselves into the art scene.

When it opened in August of 1981, it was a temporary space with no name. The artists would give it one when they showed there. “Kenny Scharf came up with ‘Fun Gallery,' FAB FIVE FREDDY was next. He wanted to call it ‘The Serious Gallery,' ” Astor said. “We stayed with ‘Fun.' ”
¹¹
FAB's show vaulted the gallery into the international spotlight. The East Village, once needle-stick somnambulant, was suddenly fun. At its peak, it featured over seventy galleries.
¹²

There was a growing duality in the movement. Some writers called the galleries their new yard. But they would never master the art-world the way they had their world of yards and transit cops, toys and enemies. Years later, Elizabeth Hess would ask the question that was never answered at the time, “Was it their work or their class and racial exoticism that inspired patrons to support them and dealers to legitimize their unorthodox talents?”
¹³

“Between ‘82 and ‘85 I created enough work to supply ten dealers in five galleries,” Dondi told ZEPHYR. “The thing is, I felt if I wasn't painting then people would think I wasn't a real artist to begin with.”
¹⁴
Collectors dabbling in graffiti as radical chic wrapped the artists in an unfamiliar, uncomfortable strait-jacket of preconceptions and expectations.

It was becoming clear to the artists that while the biggest galleries were eager to make stars of Haring and Basquiat and Scharf, they saw the artists
from the subways as a bunch of primitives. ZEPHYR says, “One thing that always comes back in my mind is that CRASH, FUTURA—totally different artists, completely different aesthetics visually—all were struggling with the fact that the people who were presenting this work were often unwilling or unable to present those artists as individuals with a very distinct vision. Every artist had their own thing visually. But it didn't come out because very few of the dealer/owners, with a few exceptions, had the willingness to avoid group shows.”

In 1981, the group shows had been a way for the smaller galleries to make their name and for marginal artists to join together to administer the shock of the new. By 1983, group shows were another form of marginalization. And even as the slightly tipsy art-world toasted itself in opening itself to ghetto youths, the subway and street graf scene was undergoing an explosion of violence it had never seen before.

Mayor Ed Koch and the MTA's Richard Ravitch militarized the yards with $20 million worth of razor-wire fences and guard dogs. The cars were whitewashed, turned into “The Great White Fleet,” and the MTA shifted its strategy towards defending the clean cars. Suddenly the amount of painting space dropped.

This problem was exacerbated by all of the media attention. At the same time, Chalfant's and Cooper's photos, the anti-graffiti campaigns, the TV shows, the magazine articles and the gallery buzz swirled into a mega-TAKI effect. In the past when a young toy was seen in the yard, he would be carrying the paint-bag of a master. Now IZ was finding himself face to face in the yards with packs of thirty and forty little kids, descending in clouds of noise, hitting him up to tag their piece books, leaving empty cans all over the place, always setting off cop raids.

With the buff and the toy flood, a new breed of bombers took over. IZ says, “One of the cardinal rules of graffiti was you didn't go over somebody. And if you did, you made sure it was very clear it wasn't a dis. Like if somebody had a throw-up, you did a whole car and naturally you buried it, so it wasn't disrespectful.” Now, as Chalfant and Silver would document in their brilliant documentary
Style Wars
, bombers like CAP ONE could overturn that rule. When the masterpieces were erased, the definition of fame changed,
the underlying structure of respect collapsed and graffiti's code of conduct unraveled.

To CAP, the distinction between his throw-up and your piece was meaningless. If you went over him, he was going to go over you—
everywhere
, he emphasized. He began attacking on multiple fronts. These cross-outs weren't, like Basquiat's, for play, they were for blood.

There had always been beatdowns, but now crews mobilized to defend themselves and their spaces, and more consciously and viciously policed their layups and yards. The beefs sometimes spilled into block parties and neighborhood jams. There was, SPAR ONE says, “a whole war mentality. That's when I remember things started getting really violent.”

At the High School of Art and Design, PINK curated a graffiti-art exhibit with twenty of the school's best writers. She recalls, “We had a wonderful exhibit with canvases and big eight-foot panels, free standing, and illustrations and black books and the works. We had everything in glass cases, hung up. All in all, it was a successful opening and I went home at three that afternoon, I was all exhausted. And I catch my exhibit on the six o'clock news.

“Apparently CAP and PJAY showed up, pulled out a .45 and shot my school full of holes. Shot one kid in the back. That was it. They closed the show the next day and the principal requested I just leave their school. I never graduated from the High School of Art and Design and the faculty really cracked down on graffiti writers after that.”

Graffiti was caught between acceptance and rebellion, aspiration and motivation. IZ says, “It was getting to a point where beef was getting settled at gallery shows, because you couldn't find them anywhere else.”

At the same time, the four elements were being packaged to tour for the first time outside of New York. As a measure of how big hip-hop was dreaming, the tour would bypass America and head straight for the Old World. In November, Kool Lady Blue sent the stars of the Roxy to tour England and France.

Organized by French journalist and indie record label owner Bernard Zekri, the bill was headlined by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, and included the Rock Steady Crew, the World Champion Fantastic Four Double Dutch
girls, FUTURA, DONDI, Grandmixer D.ST. and the Infinity Rappers, RAMMELLZEE and FAB 5 FREDDY.

FAB recalls, “Heads were like, ‘Yo, what's our show gon' be, what we gon' do?' I thought about it, I said, ‘Let me just tell you. Look, being that I got an art background I done seen some weird shit on the performance art tip. So no matter what we do onstage, we gon' always look cool. Just keep it real natural. Like if you just want to walk out onstage and give your man a pound or whatever, that's cool, that's how we gon' do it!' ”

David Hershkovits hopped on the bus to cover the tour for the New York
Daily News
. They planned to play seven dates in France and England on the two-week tour. “They had this whole show,” he remembers, “It wasn't just a band, it was the graffiti and the breakdancers and the DJs and the whole experience.”

After long bus trips broken up only by full-scale tagging and pilfering attacks at the gas stops, the twenty-five-member entourage would head onstage to try to replicate the organic feel of the Roxy for the crowds. DST spun, and his rappers rapped. Bambaataa got up and played and the b-boys would get up and dance as the spirit moved them. The Double Dutch girls headed up for a few routines. FAB and RAMMELLZEE took turns on the mike, while FUTURA and DONDI painted live pieces.

Hershkovits recalls, “Not too many people showed up to these shows. Especially some of these little towns where they didn't have a critical mass audience anyway. They're not the hippest people out there. We'd play in some school gymnasium in some town, maybe fifty kids would show up. And the French are not demonstrative, even in Paris where there was a decent turnout. I remember looking at the people and they would just sort of be looking at each other trying to figure out if they should like it or not. They didn't know quite how to react. It was so new.”

Legs laughs, “Typical European audiences, man. But that's just the way it is. We were asked like really stupid questions like, ‘Yo, are there trees in the Bronx?' ”

In Strasbourg, France, they got a taste of that old Bronx River unpredictability. Crazy Legs recalls, “We did a show and there was these drunk people, and the Double Dutch girls were onstage doing their thing. They threw bottles at
them.” The music stopped. D.ST armed himself with a broken bottle, PHASE 2 picked up a chair. “Next thing you know, people were backstage talking about, ‘We gon' get them!' DONDI led the people out there. DONDI had his belt with his name buckle on and the dudes caught a beatdown. After they got beat down, everybody stepped back onstage, and then the people in the audience started clapping! It went from a show to a brawl to getting applause.” Bambaataa went back to playing his records, and their legend was sealed. By the time they reached Paris, the media came out to meet them like they were the real thing.

When the hip-hop heroes returned to the Roxy, the innocence seemed to be fading. ZEPHYR says, “Everyone was trying to hustle something. Someone had an angle, someone was like, ‘Can I take your picture?' ‘Can I make a movie about you?' ‘Can I do a series of shows at The Kitchen with you?' ‘Can I write an article in
The Village Voice
?' ”

Rolling Stone, People
and
Life
came down with photographers and journalists. Fashion designers prepared their next year's lines by taking notes and trading numbers with the graffiti writers. Post-disco indie-label owners like Tom Silverman, Corey Robbins and Steve Plotnicki of Profile Records, Aaron Fuchs of Tuff City Records or Will Socolov of Sleeping Bag Records might be buying artists drinks at the bar. Soon these white-owned indies would eclipse the Black-owned ones; even the mighty Sugar Hill never recovered from the acrimonious collapse of its biggest act, Flash and the Five. Harry Belafonte had begun to soak up ideas for a multimillion dollar Hollywood movie that would be called
Beat Street
. A year later, the Roxy's owner ousted Kool Lady Blue. The dispute, she says, was over money.