CHAPTER 2 Hardcore LA
. “Please!” On August 17, 1986, Whodini’s frontman Jalil Hutchins stood on the Long Beach Arena stage, urging concertgoers to settle down. The thousands of music fans in front of him were gathered for a sold-out hip-hop showcase, waiting to see the act at the top of the bill, Run-DMC. As the reigning kings of rap made their way to the venue, and as the revelry devolved into commotion, Whodini strained to finish its set. Throughout the group’s performance, arena security guards worked to contain scattered fistfights and shoving matches, but when one of these spilled onto the stage, the show stopped. Stagehands switched on the bright house lights and Whodini’s DJ, Grandmaster Dee, quieted the music, stalling the show to let Hutchins make his appeal: “This is a place to party. This is a place to hear music.”1
The abrupt break from the thunderous bass thumps of Whodini’s “I’m a Ho” only focused more of the crowd’s attention on the violence erupting around them. Extra light worsened things, emboldening some to rush their targets while others scrambled toward the exits.2 Outside, as security worked to clear the hall, the pandemonium spilled into the parking lot. Long Beach police squad cars swarmed in, an LAPD helicopter hovered above with its searchlight trained on the action, and officers in tactical gear made arrests. Billboard Magazine later reported that “an estimated 300–500 gang members” had shown up for the “Long Beach fracas” that left dozens arrested and forty-two people injured (three critically). It brought the concert, one of the last on Run-DMC’s Raising Hell tour, to an abrupt end before the trio even had the chance to take the stage.3
All efforts to prevent the melee from unfolding that night had failed. Arena officials, anticipating at least some gang presence, had hired dozens of extra staff, including off-duty Long Beach police, who led ticketholders through metal detectors and performed pat-downs, confiscating an assortment of guns, blades, and pipes—an arsenal which, in the possession of arena security, might have briefly reassured concert organizers but ultimately portended trouble. Once the throng outside had been efficiently funneled through entryways and checkpoints, guards and ushers left their posts in the lobby and moved inside to chaperone the sellout crowd. In the seating areas, the signs of mayhem came early.4
Rumors that hundreds of Los Angeles gang members were on site began swirling before the music started. As retired detectives working security spread word that some in the crowd had “disguised their ‘colors’ under jogging suits,” crewmembers backstage placed calls to the Long Beach police requesting extra protection for the talent. But, by then, fights were already breaking out among concertgoers, some dressed in red and others in blue, and spilling over to bystanders and uniformed security guards.5 In spite of the venue’s security procedures at the ticket gates, some had managed to smuggle guns and knives to their seats. Others broke bottles, smashed metal folding chairs, or stripped fire extinguishers from walls to wield as weapons. The show began, but the scattered brawls made for a frustrating entertainment experience that became increasingly hazardous as the night progressed. Young rap fan Chris Baker said the scene made him “scared for my life.”6 By 10 PM, warm-up band Timex Social Club had finished its set, and Whodini was trying to get through its own songs. Police had already gathered outside, outfitted in riot gear.7
Chino, an LA Blood who recognized rival bangers in the crowd immediately upon arrival, later told a reporter, “I knew there was going to be trouble, there had to be.” A teenager calling himself Mafia Dick explained that any concert that attracted youths from all over LA’s ganglands was bound to be a tinderbox: “We don’t get along outside, so we’re not going to get along inside, and when you put all these groups together, you’re lookin’ for trouble.” One detective who was present that night told Rolling Stone the violence was inevitable: “There are long-held grudges between these gangs, and when they converge in one place, the paybacks will come.”8
In a word, it was “crazy,” according to Run-DMC’s Jason “DJ Jam Master Jay” Mizell. As he and his fellow band members arrived at the venue, they witnessed what was happening inside, then watched from backstage as event organizers and security proved wholly incapable of preventing a mass exodus. “It was like a stampede,” Run-DMC front man Joseph “Reverend Run” Simmons recalled, “chairs coming up in the air, panicked kids in the crowd.” He, like other witnesses that night, blamed gangs. “They just took over,” he said, citing hundreds of predatory kids roving through the building “beating and robbing.” Describing what sounds like a scene from the apocalyptic 1979 thriller The Warriors, Jam Master Jay described a hoard of people “dressed the same, with bandannas on their heads” who roamed the floor “walking as one, chanting, screaming the names of their gangs.” As events unfolded outside, Run-DMC huddled backstage in a dressing room, joined by a few VIPs and stagehands. There, the young men broke apart a clothing rack to use the pieces as weapons while a staff member’s walkie-talkie broadcast ominous updates from somewhere out on the arena floor: “We’re losing it! We’re losing it!”9
Sponsored by an AM radio station in LA, KDAY, and promoted by the county’s most prominent mobile DJ crews, the Long Beach Arena concert in August 1986 promised to be two things. First, it was touted as Run-DMC’s climactic show on the West Coast leg of Raising Hell, the group’s first big tour. The sixty-four-date, multicity tour represented a milestone for the trio from Hollis, Queens, and the group’s final sellout show on the other coast, in Southern California, was to help certify its move from local success to national fame.
Second, the Long Beach event had the potential to be a game-changer for hip-hop. Through the mid-1980s, rap music was synonymous with New York artists, New York fans, and New York venues. The East had incubated hip-hop for nearly a decade and guarded its creation closely. Bill Adler, publicist for Russell Simmons’s label, Def Jam, later recalled the era: “Not only did New York dominate rap, but there was almost nobody else involved.” Bronx rapper Chris “Kid” Reid put it even more strongly: “Any other place didn’t even exist.”10 But music industry insiders predicted that the regional insularity of early New York hip-hop would spell its early demise. Run-DMC defied that expectation. The Raising Hell tour included a string of California gigs, culminating with the Long Beach showcase; if it succeeded, that would do a lot to prove hip-hop’s appeal to a broad consumer market. A sold-out Long Beach Arena rap concert would constitute an answer to the critics trying to dismiss this music movement as ephemeral, and pave the way to its future.11 Run-DMC took their act to California hoping on some level to usher in a new era of hip-hop, break the music free from its East Coast shell, and let it evolve as both an art form and a pop phenomenon. The 1986 Long Beach Arena concert helped all of that happen, but not in the way anyone anticipated.
The Los Angeles Times called it the “rap riot,” showing a headline writer’s preference for short words, but also coining a label that neatly yoked hip-hop culture to unrest. Both Southern California and Run-DMC were immediately pulled into ongoing national debates about the connections between youth music and social disorder. The lurid news of a rap riot played into an established narrative about riotous behavior being set off by rock concerts. The early 1980s had seen plenty of reporting by entertainment trade publications, popular music magazines, and newspaper “lifestyle” sections about “hardcore” music subcultures and the antisocial behavior they encouraged—just as rhythm and blues music in the 1950s and rock ‘n’ roll in the 1960s had caused their own cultural panics. In that context, the Run-DMC concert looked to some like more evidence of the causal links between music and society’s ills. Music journalist Frank Owen later called it “perhaps the worst rock ‘n’ roll riot in history,” but at the time it also looked like part of a pattern.12
Southern California—particularly LA County and Orange County—was, in fact, the epicenter for the worst of the eighties “rock riots.”13 Early in the decade, violence had become the hallmark of punk rock performances throughout the region, not only in Long Beach but also in Newport Beach, Costa Mesa, Santa Ana, Huntington Beach, Fullerton, and Los Angeles. Police officials and city leaders railed against events featuring punk music because it was a youth trend that, as the Santa Ana police chief argued, was “conducive to violence.” News of bloody clashes, drug use, and other “hardcore punk” behavior inside rock music clubs and concert halls fueled the public’s fears. In 1983, Billboard quipped, “Just when you thought it was safe to go to a punk rock show in Los Angeles … along comes another ‘punk riot’ to fan the flames of controversy.” The Los Angeles Times reported that “a recent concert featuring skin-slashing, furniture-smashing and window-breaking was not unusual for punk rock.”14
No wonder punk rock shows in Los Angeles, featuring provocatively named groups such as Suicidal Tendencies, the Vandals, Social Distortion, Lost Cause, Verbal Abuse, Black Flag, and Agression, invited police attention (Fig. 2.1). City leaders, including those in Long Beach, worked closely with law enforcement to put punk-friendly venues “on notice,” using existing fire safety codes, occupancy limits, and rules about loitering to tamp down the thriving scene. The tactics tended to work primarily by spooking insurance companies, which frequently denied punk venues and event promoters access to liability insurance—a critical buffer against the financial losses resulting from property damage or personal injury lawsuits. Rather than pass legislation barring punk rock concerts altogether, a move likely to be found unconstitutional, city leaders worked with existing laws in an attempt to, as one councilmember put it, “accomplish what we want.”15
Public campaigns to police radical youth music scenes in the 1980s were not exclusive to Southern California, and nor was punk music the sole target. In fact, by the middle of the decade, heavy metal had become the bigger bogeyman for the anti-obscenity activists across the country reigniting the culture wars of decades past. On the national stage, in 1985, then-Senator Al Gore’s wife, Tipper Gore, cofounded the Parents Music Resource Center with three other DC-based women. The group sought commitments from US record companies to place warning labels on albums with violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise morally abhorrent content. This and other forms of pressure in what has been called a time of “Satanic panic” were mainly targeted at heavy metal artists, including Judas Priest and Black Sabbath’s former front man Ozzy Osbourne. But in Southern California, where punk bands flourished, moral crusaders targeted metal and punk with equal fervor. City leaders, local parent groups, school administrators, police, and youth counselors deemed heavy metal and punk rock to be essentially the same, despite the musical and philosophical differences their fans saw in them. In the eyes of concerned citizens, both punk and metal artists modeled dangerous and addictive behavior for their young, middle-class, white fans. Kids in the suburbs of LA and Orange Counties abused drugs and alcohol, disrespected authority, and engaged in violent, self-destructive acts, and musicians were to blame. At “Spikes and Studs,” a one-day conference held at an Anaheim hotel in February of 1985, 130 people gathered to learn about “heavy metal and punk and their influence on children.” Family counselors from the Back in Control Training Center warned about the associations between this “extreme” music and high levels of anger, violence, satanism, and “damage to both property and animals.”16
Fig 2.1 A group of LAPD officers in riot helmets patrol outside the Palladium in Hollywood, the site of a punk rock showcase featuring Southern California’s own Black Flag, November 1986. Photograph by Gary Leonard, Los Angeles Photographers Collection / Los Angeles Public Library.
Long before the rap riot in Long Beach, “punkers and metalers” were those most associated with event violence in the region, so much so that Southern California venue managers, promoters, police, and performers braced for it. In June of 1986, just two months prior to the Run-DMC show, police had responded to another flood of emergency calls about a sold-out event at the Long Beach Arena—this time, a heavy-metal concert featuring Ozzy Osbourne and Metallica. There, the Long Beach police made dozens of arrests, mostly for drug possession and assault, after four concertgoers jumped or fell from a balcony into the crowd below, one of them to his death. In an interview following the incident, the convention center’s general manager said it was “not unusual” for an arena event of such size to devolve into chaos.17
Organizers of Run-DMC’s Raising Hell tour may have been too nonchalant about problems at shows prior to the one in Long Beach, along with the police in various locales who monitored the summer’s events. In Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Detroit, and Atlanta, law enforcement agencies reported no more than “some bizarre conduct” following Run-DMC’s appearances. In New York, police did make two dozen arrests outside Madison Square Garden. But the group’s tour promoter, Jeff Sharp, explained the trouble as inconsequential: “When you have a sold-out show at Madison Square Garden and only 24 arrests, that’s not a problem. That’s reality.” NYPD officials agreed, noting that at such events police always “anticipated” a little misbehavior.18 In Atlanta, a gunman fired into the crowd during a July show at the Omni Coliseum, wounding an eighteen-year-old fan. But Atlanta police downplayed the shooting as a fluke, underscoring that no one had been seriously injured and that the lone suspect had been charged.19 Violence in the streets of Pittsburgh after the Civic Arena show prompted the city’s public safety director to issue, by then, a familiar warning about “provocative and pornographic” songs poisoning the culture. In spite of the occasional trouble inside and outside its concerts, Run-DMC’s sixty-four-date tour rumbled along, with the group and its handlers largely unperturbed. “Of course, the tour had been prepared for some trouble,” as Def Jam publicist Bill Adler would later recall. “Most of rap music’s millions of fans are teenagers, and there’s always the possibility of unruliness when thousands of teenagers get together.” Russell Simmons, the group’s manager, summed up the occasional “unruliness” this way: “It was no problem.”20
The Run-DMC show in Long Beach in the summer of 1986 reminded city officials and anti-obscenity crusaders that popular culture could push bad people to do bad things. Reacting to the concert violence in Long Beach, Tipper Gore chalked it up to “angry, disillusioned, unloved kids united behind heavy-metal or rap music, and the music says it’s OK to beat people up.”21 Or, as observers on the other side of the debate noted, concert violence in 1986, predictably, drummed up hysteria around the arts, which served to distract the public from other pressing social and economic crises. According to Melody Maker, 1986 marked “the year that Run-DMC joined AIDS, crack, and Colonel Gaddafi as yet another media-generated threat, a bogus disturbance designed to outrage all right-minded people and enhance the legitimacy and cohesion of a rapidly crumbling social structure.”22
Still, rap music by 1986 had become far more than simply a proxy for other, whiter youth cultures that provoked public anxiety and spurred cultural conservatives to take action. In the aftermath of the “Long Beach melee,” as Billboard called it, debates about youth music trends began to center on the topic of race. As the story of the disastrous Run-DMC concert riveted the popular press and intersected with news of LA’s ungovernable juvenile gang problem, the narrative shifted from tabloid-style commentary about the “bizarre conduct” of “headbangers” and “knuckleheads” and, instead, turned to breathless reporting on LA’s “ghetto toughs.” In the music press, in particular, the consensus was that the 1986 Long Beach show exemplified the “rap violence” that appeared to be a product of hip-hop’s “gang war,” and, in this context, it was fair to cast LA’s rap fans as “gangsters.” Dog-whistle terms like these reframed what was, for the 1980s, otherwise run-of-the-mill concert violence that struck indiscriminately in terms of genre and race. And they suggested that the Long Beach “rap riot” would have more ominous implications for hip-hop, for Run-DMC, and for Los Angeles.23
In 1983, three years before the Long Beach Arena rap riot drew attention to “rap violence” in the Golden State, African-American filmmaker Topper Carew went west to find out whether hip-hop culture had gained much traction in Los Angeles, the entertainment capital of the world. The young, Washington, DC-based auteur understood the insularity of New York hip-hop, which was still in its infancy, and was thus curious when he heard rumors that the music had taken root in California. Los Angeles offered Carew the opportunity to test his theory that hip-hop was a more impactful cultural force than music critics in the early 1980s were willing to concede.
The product of Carew’s research was a documentary film entitled Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin’ (a reference to breakdancing, the dance style most commonly associated with hip-hop at the time). From the opening scenes, which included images of cars slogging along ribbons of freeway, palm trees towering above manicured lawns, and the weightlifters and roller-skaters of Venice Beach, the film marked LA—and its youth culture—as wholly distinct from New York. It helped that Carew recruited local hip-hop artist Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow to guide his cameras around town. Ice-T, a regular performer at a colorful downtown hip-hop nightclub called The Radio, gave the filmmaker intimate access to what the rapper described, in rhyme, as a singular regional “movement” marked by “graffiti turning ghettos into art” and “kids who dance on the street and in the park.”24
Carew’s effort to showcase a distinctive rap culture in Hollywoodland nevertheless revealed a youth music scene subject to East Coast influences. From the multiracial breakdance crews to the colorful graffiti murals decorating the nightspots Topper Carew chose as backdrops, Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin’ presented New York hip-hop trends grafted onto Southern California landscapes. California came through, sometimes to the point of cliché. For instance, LA rappers and dancers honed their skills not on concrete basketball courts or in schoolyards but instead inside palatial ballet studios. In front of ranch-style houses, on long driveways and freshly cut lawns, kids exhibited “top-rocks,” “freezes,” and other dance moves learned, notably, from young Bronx migrants. As New York-based performer Suga Pop explained in the film, he and other breakdancers came to LA in the early 1980s for work opportunities, which, it turned out, included offering step-by-step dance tutorials to locals. Even Carew’s well-connected local tour guide had East Coast roots; Ice-T had been born and raised in New Jersey, and his creative sidekick Charles “Afrika Islam” Glenn was a recent Bronx transplant.25
The Radio, the downtown nightclub featured in the film, was itself a kind of New York import. A French immigrant named Alex Jordanov ran the place, filling the venue’s event calendar by tapping his Manhattan connections. Jordanov turned The Radio into one of the few after-hours establishments in Los Angeles, adopting a dusk-to-dawn schedule reminiscent of New York City nightlife norms. It was also one of the first LA dance clubs to provide New York’s newest recording artists with West Coast gigs. Plus, Jordanov commissioned colorful faux graffiti murals for the stage. In a city in which street graffiti was mostly single-line, monochrome “tags” and Old English lettering written to designate gang territory, The Radio’s vibrant, bubble-letter backdrops were an unusual sight, calling to mind MTA subway cars rather than the LA River’s concrete tunnels.26 Chris “The Glove” Taylor, a local DJ who sometimes performed at The Radio, recalled the scene as “a piece of the East Coast hip-hop scene right in the middle of LA,” with its “spray-can art,” “dance battles,” and guest hip-hop performers from New York, including DJ Derek “Grandmixer D.ST” Showard, and the Queens trio Run-DMC.27
Other local entrepreneurs tacked in the same direction Jordanov did. In Hollywood, for instance, New Yorker Matt Robinson booked parties at the Rhythm Lounge, emulating the hip-hop showcases he had frequented at the Roxy in Manhattan.28 At Club Lingerie, another popular Hollywood nightspot, punk rock devotee Brendan Mullen scouted bands and hip-hop talent for his line-ups, seeking to do for LA’s music culture what new-wave princess Blondie, Brooklyn artist Fred “Fab 5 Freddy” Brathwaite, and hip-hop trailblazer Afrika Bambaataa had done for New York’s Midtown. One of Mullen’s most ambitious projects was a 1983 show at Club Lingerie billed as the “South Bronx Rap Party,” starring Bambaataa and the Rock Steady Crew, and featuring local punk band Black Flag and the Red Hot Chili Peppers, a little-known group at the time.29
Through the mid-1980s, few paid much attention to Los Angeles rap. This was in part because reductive interpretations like Carew’s documentary portrayed LA’s post-disco youth music culture, at best, as tribute to New York City’s hip-hop arts scene, and at worst, as an absurd imitation of that scene. As Los Angeles Times music journalist Al Martinez put it colorfully at the time, New York hip-hop “spread to LA and was eventually adopted by apple-cheeked Beverly Hills teens who rapped in the air-conditioned comfort of their Porsche Targas.”30 Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin’ offered evidence that Southern California diluted hip-hop, turning a street-based urban music style created by poor black and brown kids into something palatable for a whiter, more privileged, California crowd. In the film’s concluding scenes, Carew’s cameras captured a pair of platinum blonds in pastel party dresses who appeared at ease surrounded by graffiti murals and minorities. “It’s fun to try out new clubs and stuff,” they beamed. Two other white teenagers from the well-to-do suburbs of Pasadena and Arcadia said they took frequent trips to The Radio “because we like the music here,” and “it’s a different crowd,” sounding quite like the white, thrill-seeking flappers who traversed through black Harlem in the 1920s.31
Topper Carew’s earnest attempt to capture the essence of early 1980s Los Angeles hip-hop cast doubt on the notion that Southern California youth were architects of their own culture. For all of its focus on local color and its engagement with West Coast dancers and partygoers, the film ultimately suggested that all the artists and fans were mere disciples of the New York scene. The film, one of the first to document hip-hop culture, neglected important regional idiosyncrasies and offered only a rough sketch of music-making within the scene. As Ice-T later said of his own starring role, “I was the only rapper that they could find.”32
Plus, by adhering to the utopian characterization of hip-hop culture promoted by the genre’s forefather, Afrika Bambaataa—that the culture was a vehicle for racial harmony, to “grab that black and white audience and bridge the gap”—Carew fixated on multicultural crews and white, wide-eyed clubgoers, somehow missing that there were predominantly black networks of locals, far removed from the Hollywood scene, building, financing, and consuming LA rap in its infancy.33 But his characterization stuck; the film’s portrait of multicultural bliss in LA’s street dance scene inspired TriStar Pictures in Culver City to market a pair of B movies, romantic dramas entitled Breakin’ and Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, centering on a friendship between a white ballet dancer and two pop-lockers from the ’hood.34
Casual observers were, like director Topper Carew, transfixed by evident parallels between the hip-hop avant-garde in New York and LA’s “trendy crowds,” between the Roxy and The Radio, and between the two coasts’ industry insiders and entrepreneurs promoting a multiracial, “four elements” arts movement tied to the aesthetics of punk. Mesmerized by the East Coast cultures that buzzed in Los Angeles’s Downtown and Westside, many overlooked the lively youth dance scenes that thrived outside those orbits. In the predominantly African-American communities of South Los Angeles, including Compton and Long Beach, black youths were shaping a musical landscape of their own, often by casting aside the New York mold.35 In the heart of LA’s ganglands, far removed from “aerosol can” murals and white “art school crowds,” creative innovation flew under the radar as young people focused on building a regional dance-music scene they could claim as their own.36
Through the early 1980s, the growth of hip-hop depended upon a handful of independent labels based in New York, including Sugar Hill and Profile Records. These enterprises discovered talent and showcased their signed artists inside a thriving, industry-driven New York nightclub circuit. Here, DJs played supporting roles, spinning records to serve the needs of labels and the acts they represented. Most early New York DJs, including DJ-cum-rapper Bambaataa, were supporting actors for talent scouts, the true stars of the city’s nightclub circuit.
In Los Angeles, the scene operated quite differently. With the exception of hot spots like The Radio and Club Lingerie, which tended to function as West Coast appendages of the Manhattan scene, Los Angeles nightclubs in the early 1980s were a virtual wasteland for contemporary urban music and for the record companies seeking to expose crowds to it. In 1983, Steve Buckley, a promoter for Capitol Records’ black music division, noted a dearth of venues for funk, electro, and rap, which struck him as counterintuitive considering LA’s size and population density. “A much more active club scene in this community,” Buckley told the Los Angeles Times, “would be important.” African-American musician and Los Angeles native Leon Chancler said that, for black music, LA offered barely any of the kinds of live entertainment venues set up for discovering talent. While industry-intertwined music events were integral to New York’s nightlife, Chancler lamented, “It’s not part of the black culture here.”37
Without the kinds of high-profile nightclub gigs and exposure opportunities afforded to their New York counterparts, Los Angeles DJs crafted their own scene, a do-it-yourself alternative to industry gigs. Rather than rely on the patronage of record labels or booking agents at venues, artists and entrepreneurs rented their own spaces, including garages, school gyms, hotel ballrooms, and conference centers, for “mobile” dance parties all over Los Angeles County. Black Angeleno youths with business savvy and carefully curated vinyl record collections organized themselves into “mobile DJ” crews and “mobile sound systems.” Crews pooled their resources to book event spaces, hire security, recruit talent, purchase new records, and promote dances. Mobile DJs served as hosts and performed as top-billed acts with the kind of name recognition that could draw thousands of cover-paying partygoers. Developing their keen insight into the discriminating tastes of their LA peers, mobile DJs earned loyal fans. Indeed, they became some of the most influential tastemakers in Southern California, and captains of a predominantly black-run, grassroots entertainment industry. These were thriving, vertically integrated businesses created by young African-American virtuosos who dominated the dance party circuit in Los Angeles County through the early 1980s.38
Fig 2.2 A 1982 promotional photo for Uncle Jamm’s Army mobile DJ sound system shows the group’s original members. Standing, left to right: Razor Sharp, UJA founder Rodger “Mr. Prinze” Clayton, Lester Malone, Troy, Muffla, Mr. No Good, and Egyptian Lover. Seated in front: Tomcat, Gid Martin, and Bobcat. Photograph courtesy of Egyptian Lover.
Chief among these Los Angeles institutions was Uncle Jamm’s Army (UJA), the preeminent mobile DJ sound system of the era.39 Rodger Clayton, UJA’s founder, cut his teeth in the mid-1970s, spinning records for parties in his father’s garage and collecting fifty cents from each guest, an early business venture that netted the teenager “good-ass lunch money.” The neighborhood performances eventually earned Clayton better paying gigs in Compton, Crenshaw, and Torrance, including a coveted booking with LSD, a local party promoting group that managed to draw thousands of teens to many of its events. When LSD refused to pay him for his work, however, Clayton assembled his own full-service entertainment crew of DJs, dancers, security guards, and able-bodied helpers (Fig. 2.2). Clayton also deployed friends and fans as street promoters, who roamed the southern half of LA County plastering posters and distributing fliers in their own neighborhood haunts. With this network, plus a dozen hulking Cerwin Vega speakers, twelve power amplifiers, four turntables, fog machines, and professional lighting, Clayton not only aimed to compete with LSD but hoped to reign supreme.40
By 1982, Uncle Jamm’s Army was unrivaled. Clayton’s events, regularly filled to capacity, graduated from house parties in Compton and Torrance to large rented spaces throughout the county, including the Biltmore Hotel in downtown Los Angeles, the Veteran’s Auditorium in Culver City, and a popular Mid-City skating rink called World on Wheels. At much larger venues, like the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum and the Long Beach Convention Center, UJA’s elaborate shows drew thousands. Sometimes Clayton invited funk and R&B heavy-hitters like Cameo, Cheryl Lynn, Lakeside, and Midnight Star to take the stage, but usually it was only UJA’s elite DJs who filled the bill.41 These upside-down event rosters, which featured major label artists as openers and local DJs as headliners, caught the attention of Greg Mack, the newly hired music programmer at KDAY. He later recalled being stunned by how Clayton’s crew “could fill the LA Sports Arena with 8,000 people for a ‘dance’.… just DJs.”42 It was evidence of a kind of DJ empire that Mack had never before seen. As DJ Lester Malone boasted, “We had the whole market. There was nobody in LA but us.”43
That did not remain true for long. Just as Clayton had built his enterprise in response to LSD, the Army’s remarkable success galvanized other aspiring DJs and promoters, including original UJA members, to develop their own mobile sound systems. As Clayton demonstrated, mobile parties generated local fame, respect among peers, and a steady income for their organizers and talents. These were especially valuable for young black men contending with declining employment opportunities and the fast-growing influence of street gangs, fueled by cocaine trafficking in the region. UJA’s achievements were notable in the context of the early Reagan Era—when, as Long Beach native Calvin “Snoop Dogg” Broadus remembered, “things started changing in the ‘hood’ and none of us could exactly put our finger on the why and what-for of it all.”44 Clayton resisted the allure of the illicit, and with Uncle Jamm’s Army he provided a blueprint for a legitimate—and lucrative—trade. He showed peers how to make ends meet by building a sound system, assembling talent, designing promotional materials, and stuffing milk crates with the funk and electro records local kids loved, by bands like Funkadelic, One Way, Morris Day and the Time, Prince, Zapp, Maze, Art of Noise, Kraftwerk, and others.
After UJA opened up the Los Angeles dance culture, other intrepid youths sought to make their marks on the scene. Greg “G-Bone” Everett, for instance, founded the Music Masters, a small mobile crew that aimed to provide the UJA experience but at a lower ticket price. To cover steep overhead costs, Everett teamed up with another group of DJs, Knights of the Turntables, to form Ultrawave Productions. They were unable to wrest control of LA’s black teen market away from UJA, but they did manage to earn accolades for community service. Thousands of partygoers attended Ultrawave dances at the Veterans Auditorium, where Everett’s team collected canned goods to be distributed to South Los Angeles residents in need. “We were being like the Black Panthers,” Everett said.45
In Compton, Frank “Mixmaster Spade” Williams and “Toddy Tee” Howard partnered to corner the house party market, promoting their services by distributing street tapes with a sampling of the blended song mixes they played for backyard barbecues and garage gatherings. The dubbed cassettes, which ultimately netted them more cash than did their modest mobile events, helped the two earn the local stardom they sought. Most significantly, the mixes gave Toddy Tee a foundation for promoting his “Batterram” tape in the summer of 1985, with its raps about rock cocaine, loose women, dope hustlers, and the Los Angeles police. These homemade tracks became the most requested songs at the kinds of dance parties he and Spade once worked to promote.46
Several other DJs emerged from the “teen scene” that Uncle Jamm’s Army monopolized through the early 1980s. Among these was Alonzo “Grand Master Lonzo” Williams, one of UJA’s first DJs, who split from Rodger Clayton in 1983. Lonzo made his move at the height of the mobile party craze, when most black youths shunned private discos and nightclubs. As Williams told the Los Angeles Times, “There were no clubs in the city that provided entertainment that catered to them.”47 Even The Radio, Alex Jordanov’s all-ages spot depicted in Breakin’ ’n’ Enterin,’ focused on the who’s who of the New York-based music industry. DJ Afrika Islam described the typical crowd he saw at The Radio as “99 percent white and international,” mostly affluent and “trendy” out-of-towners like Jordanov himself. The few black youths spotted at the club were performers, he noted. The Radio was not, in other words, a venue custom-made for LA’s African-American youth.48
Lonzo, a staple of the local party circuit, understood how removed “hip” clubs like The Radio were from the flourishing South Los Angeles mobile dances. While Jordanov honored the Roxy model, Lonzo seized the opportunity to give mobile dance party patrons a more permanent home, and one located not on the periphery of South LA but deep within. Lonzo ran Eve After Dark, a small nightclub for sixteen- to twenty-one-year-olds on South Avalon Boulevard in Compton. There, he showcased his own DJ supergroup, the World Class Wreckin Cru, featuring Lonzo himself and three others handpicked from his Compton neighborhood: Marquette “Cli-N-Tel” Hawkins, Antoine “DJ Yella” Carraby, and Andre “Dr. Dre” Young. With Lonzo’s clout among the UJA faithful, and thanks to the Wreckin Cru’s dynamic shows, Eve After Dark often drew full-capacity crowds.49
Texas native Greg Mack might not have had the insider’s perspective on the local mobile scene that Lonzo enjoyed, but he learned to respect, and later replicate, Clayton’s business. In early 1983, when Mack began his stint as a music programmer for KDAY, the low-frequency radio station that served much of South Central Los Angeles, he recognized that his listeners were the very same local kids who filled the Uncle Jamm’s Army mobile events. It was clear to Mack that Clayton’s command over LA County’s black teen party scene was a product of careful attention to the eclectic and ever-changing tastes of his crowds. As an LA Weekly piece would later put it, when Clayton was at the turntable, “the ‘strength of street knowledge’ was in the building.”50
Mack’s early career in Texas radio and limited experience as a party DJ predisposed him to recognize the powerful influence of South LA’s DJ teams. He quickly realized that he would make better progress in his own mission to revitalize KDAY by understanding what was happening at the mobile dances around town.51 Mack was impressed enough with Clayton’s program that he sought to join forces with him. It was a relationship that Mack, who also made many advertising choices at KDAY, proposed as mutually beneficial. But the UJA founder ultimately rejected his offer of partnership. Mack remembers Clayton claiming, “We don’t need radio,” perhaps emboldened by the fact that hip-hop music label representatives, including executives at New York’s Profile, Sugar Hill Records, and Def Jam Recordings, made a habit of rushing promotional copies of new records directly to him before reaching out to local radio disc jockeys like Mack.52
Rebuffed, Mack approached two other DJs his scouting had identified as the most promising in the county—namely, DJ Yella and Dr. Dre, the top-billed talents at Lonzo’s Eve After Dark. In his role at KDAY, Mack could give Yella and Dre on-air spots to showcase their mixes and promote the nightclub’s events. He also invited the two Compton DJs to moonlight as members of his own mobile sound system, the Mixmasters—the only DJ crew at the time harnessing the power of live radio. By 1984, over KDAY’s airwaves, the Mixmasters broadcast some of the region’s most popular dances, including those at LA’s two largest skating rinks, World on Wheels and Skateland USA.53
The young Eric Wright was a frequent patron of Eve After Dark, and it gave him the idea to form his own mobile dance business. Later he would take the name “Eazy-E” and refashion himself as a hardcore rapper, but Wright’s early foray into lawful, sustainable work was with his own mobile DJ dance business. Under the moniker High Powered Productions, he scouted backyards and garages around Compton and hired his friend Dr. Dre to DJ. Wright ultimately decided his financial future should not depend on promoting barbecues and house parties, but the experience gave the young businessman useful insights into black youth music culture in South LA and the trends that propelled it.54
Rodger Clayton, his collaborators, and his many competitors tailored their mobile DJ party businesses for their Los Angeles peers, and they did so with two significant and related results. First, events thrown by the “high priests” of the mobile scene drew together the party faithful from LA’s most marginal communities. The Los Angeles Times, in a 1983 profile of Clayton and the UJA, noted that for local black teens “these rented-hall dances are the only game in town.” Clayton’s sister Adrienne recently recalled one UJA fan’s devotion. “I met a gentleman a few years ago … he said, ‘Yeah, you know, I didn’t eat lunch all week so that I could save my $5 for the dance on Friday.’ I said ‘Really?’ He said, ‘You don’t understand, you had to be there on Friday night or you were nobody, because everybody was at school talking about it on Monday.’”55 Second, the leaders of LA’s mobile DJ dance scene created the scaffolding for an alternative community-based economy. By the early 1980s, when the drug trade offered the promise of fast money even to those with other employment options, rented-venue dances created work opportunities that were both meaningful and legal.
One characteristic of the early Los Angeles hip-hop scene that did make it a New York analog was its birth in hardship. In the 1970s and early 1980s, recession and government reforms disproportionately disadvantaged blue-collar urban communities, particularly African Americans and immigrants in inner city neighborhoods where stable, salaried jobs were limited and municipal public services were as vital as they were scarce. Wage gains failed to keep up with rising inflation in the cost of living, and unemployment soared; according to the US Labor Department, some 11.5 million Americans lost jobs due to plant closings, abolitions of positions or shifts, or slack work between 1979 and 1984. These economic conditions, combined with cuts to some publicly funded social programs aimed at youth recreation and work training, took their toll on working-class black neighborhoods in Los Angeles just as they did in the predominantly African-American, Afro-Caribbean, and Latino regions of New York that had first spawned hip-hop culture.56 The era also brought a greater and growing divide among African Americans, between upper and lower classes. The civil rights wins of prior decades had created more potential for African Americans to make significant economic, social, and political gains, and with greater access to higher education and growing demand for black talent in the professional fields, the proportion of black households earning middle- and upper-class incomes was expanding. Work by lawyers and activists to tear down racial barriers in housing meant that, by the 1970s, more upwardly-mobile black families in the decaying inner city had options to relocate to newer, safer, more affluent neighborhoods. As many did, those for whom the economic changes of the era were most burdensome were left behind.57
By the early 1980s, the concerted efforts of national leaders to stimulate the economy by slashing taxes for businesses and top-earners, cutting welfare spending, and shrinking federal regulations on banking (which paved the way for predatory lending), had come at a high cost to low-income communities. These policies were particularly devastating to the families of the inner city—in places like the Bronx, Brooklyn, South Central Los Angeles, Compton, and East Long Beach—who already bore the brunt of wage disparity and urban flight. On both coasts, youths contending with revenue-deprived schools, scant recreational options, and challenging job markets used the resources they had to build and then capitalize on new music trends.
In Southern California, the plight of those living in low-income inner-city neighborhoods became especially acute in the early 1980s, when Proposition 13, an initiative passed in 1978 that placed a strict two-percent limit on annual property tax increases, caused state and local governments to slash spending on roads, parks, schools, libraries, and fire, paramedic, and police departments. In the wake of the tax revolt, Los Angeles County leaders put forth proposals for levying new local taxes to protect and expand public services, but those efforts mostly failed. This meant that those families already confined to the poorest neighborhoods by low wages and limited employment opportunities saw public schools deteriorate further and municipal services like public transportation become increasingly unreliable. The shifts coincided with, and resulted in, the further expansion of local street gangs, the rise in violent crime, and the spread of illicit industries, including guns and narcotics trafficking. These were devastating changes that gave the county’s police agencies leverage to demand a larger proportion of public funds for crime control at a time when city budgets were in the red. By the early 1980s, residents in the most economically vulnerable regions of South Los Angeles County were struggling to adapt to deteriorating public services and worse job options—and also an increased police presence marked by “gang sweeps,” rampant racial profiling, and a level of militarization extending to the infamous “batterram.”
The most popular mobile dances of the first half of the 1980s worked precisely because, in this context, they delivered the entertainment that kids from places like South Central, Compton, Carson, Torrance, and Long Beach sorely needed. “We’re giving them somewhere to go,” Clayton explained of his parties, “where they can forget they don’t have a job or that their parents aren’t working.”58 One regular on the scene, Mark Luv, later reflected that he and his friends were saddled with the day-to-day challenges to “survive the Reagan era” while also enduring the dangers that pervaded the neighborhood. “People got jumped on the bus over shoelaces and jewelry or the wrong color Kangol,” Luv said, crediting Uncle Jamm’s Army events for offering everyone in South LA “a break in their lives.”59
According to UJA’s Egyptian Lover, the pleasures of mobile DJ dances—the music, the opportunity to meet someone new, and the chance to escape burdens on the outside—tended to draw as many gangbangers, pimps, and drug dealers as young people who considered themselves “law-abiding” and who were only peripherally associated with street gangs. Mark Luv insisted that all kids, no matter “their dirt,” needed a social outlet. That was especially true, he thought, for the ones who were “selling, banging, seeing their homies get killed.”60 Plus, as one member of South Central’s Pueblo Bishop Bloods explained, any black youth from a poor district of South Los Angeles could be considered a gang “associate” simply because, based on his address and school, he was tied geographically and socially to at least one neighborhood street clique.61 Dividing active “gangbangers” from “associates” and “affiliates” was difficult, if not impossible. And for Clayton, any attempt to exclude the former would mean cleaving the social connections people had outside the dance, which he wanted to replicate inside. His curation of all-inclusive community dances was driven by the unique population he served even as it performed “a great service keeping a lot of people off the street” and out of trouble.62
By contrast, trendy nightclubs on the Westside and in Downtown LA, including Alex Jordanov’s The Radio, enforced strict rules for entry that were intended to deter suspected gang members and others deemed dangerous. The dress and conduct codes inevitably affected black youths broadly. Citing security concerns, nightspots like The Radio, Club Lingerie, and the Palace granted entry only to those in “designer” fashions while regularly turning away kids in Levis, khakis, and T-shirts.
Whatever their ambitions for keeping young people off the street, the architects of the mobile dances came to depend upon gang members and drug runners as drivers of the scene. As loyal participants (partygoers, dancers, DJs, and rappers) and as party planners and staff (security guards, street promoters, and even financial backers) these “troublemakers” proved key to the success of mobile dances and the livelihood of their organizers. The Glove, who also DJ’d for Uncle Jamm’s Army, recalled “more gangstas” than any other sort of partygoer on the dance floor.63 Clayton’s former partner Lonzo Williams acknowledged that “some of Uncle Jamm’s Army’s biggest clientele were Crips,” particularly members from one of the gang’s largest sets, the Rollin 60s. New York DJ Henry “Hen Gee” Garcia was so struck by the differences between the Los Angeles mobile scene and East Coast hip-hop culture that he took to referring to the electro and funk music blasting out of the speakers at Compton dances as “gangbanging music.”64
By 1984 and 1985, LA’s most popular skating rinks became known as the stomping grounds for the county’s two most notorious black street gangs, thanks to their patronage of mobile DJ sound systems. The Crips claimed Mid-City’s World on Wheels and the Bloods chose Compton’s Skateland USA. When Craig Schweisinger opened Skateland in 1984, Compton police warned him that his business would attract gang youth. The rink, after all, stood in the cradle of LA’s Blood territory, two blocks from West Piru Street, birthplace of the Piru Bloods. Schweisinger was unmoved, determined to provide all of Compton’s black teenagers with a neighborhood alternative to Mid-City’s World on Wheels. But the rink owner was also wary of riling police officials, so he paid to install a metal detector at the entrance and hung a placard outside that warned “NO CAPS—NO COLORS.” Schweisinger dutifully hired venue security, as well—yet, to the utter horror of Compton police, he gave those jobs to known gang “affiliates” from the neighborhood who rarely enforced the dress code and allowed “a sea of red” inside the spot.65 As Los Angeles rapper Michael “Microphone Mike” Troy (who later became “Myka 9”) recalled, on any given night in the mid-1980s, the rinks were filled with gang members simply hanging out, “skating and playing video games.”66
There were, of course, risks to such a communion. In a dance scene bound to warring street gangs, violence was a constant threat. Even the hint of trouble created significant practical challenges for event planners, performers, and partygoers. This was particularly true for the dance circuit’s most popular crew, Uncle Jamm’s Army, whose showcases became as notable, by 1984, for “gangbangers going crazy” as for “fresh” music. In spite of the confidence Clayton expressed that partygoers, no matter their hustle, would check all drama at the door, many from specific gang sets brought hostilities in from the outside and postured on the dance floor. To manage the unpredictable, Clayton spent extravagantly on “high-visibility” security patrols, and many of his hires, like those at Schweisinger’s Compton roller rink, were tough kids from South LA’s ganglands.67 He also warned his DJs not to abruptly stop the music if they saw a fight, because it only drew more attention to the commotion and exacerbated the anxiety in the room. Instead, he instructed DJs to play Parliament’s “Flash Light,” a track with an uncanny ability to calm conflict and reenergize the dance. Most venues employed similar strategies, with varying levels of success. From 1984 to 1988, Schweisinger’s Skateland reported two shooting episodes, and violence at World on Wheels, Skateland’s Mid-City competitor, was even more common.68 Clayton’s UJA events, in spite of his best efforts “to stay on top of it,” became popularly associated with gunshots and fleeing crowds. By the mid-1980s, audiences had grown used to bracing for danger.69
Still, participants in the DJ dance scene tolerated the uncertainties and resisted barring anyone from the scene, including those active in LA’s most violent street gangs. In fact, some saw the benefits of folding these groups in. DJ Egyptian Lover, who parlayed his UJA gig into a career as a recording artist and label owner, later acknowledged that the gang economy had facilitated his success: “Drug dealers sell drugs, buy cars with big speakers, and then buy my records.”70 Mixmaster Spade told a story about hawking homemade tapes on the streets of Compton, and having a drug dealer approach him: “Man, dude, I been looking for you, man. How many you got?” When Spade showed him about thirty, “he said, ‘Man give me all of them,’ and pulled out a big wad like this. He said, ‘Now make me some more,’ and gave me a deposit.” When enthusiastic customers like this played music in their opulent cars’ powerful audio systems, they also became effective advertisers. For better or for worse, these were exalted, deep-pocketed, and culturally influential young men. To shun their support would be to reject a vital source of income and exposure.71
The fact is that gun-toting gangbangers, and the thousands of young people who were peripherally affiliated with them, were integral to the core mobile dance demographic that so many young strivers depended on to succeed in Los Angeles County in the 1980s. O’Shea “Ice Cube” Jackson, who grew up just west of South Central, remembered that he, like most of his peers, managed generally to abide by the law. But they accepted gang members in their communities as if they were the troublesome relatives in an extended family.72 Tracy “Ice-T” Marrow, the breakout star of Topper Carew’s documentary, offered an explanation: since virtually all of South Central operated “under the jurisdiction of the gangs,” young men like him had to cultivate bonds with those who wielded the most power in “the Avenues.” He was never a “frontline soldier,” but in high school, Ice-T socialized with the Crips in his neighborhood. “I was more what I considered a ‘gang affiliate.’ I wore my colors,” he recalled, rather than take the risk of being “a one-man team coming into school, with no backup.”73
Gangs were a social reality woven into the Los Angeles mobile DJ dance scene in the early 1980s. Indeed, gang members and those who affiliated themselves with gangs gave the scene much of its shape. Any effort to exclude this part of the youth culture in South Los Angeles County might unravel the whole fabric. The mobile DJ sound systems that governed LA’s post-disco, black teen music movement knew better.
This was the hidden Los Angeles dance scene that Run-DMC managed to captivate. By the mid-1980s, the three teens from the suburbs of Queens were beloved in Los Angeles as “heroes of the street.”74 Run-DMC’s manager, Russell Simmons, knew it was significant to get this kind of validation from so ripe a market on the West Coast. As a young New York party promoter, he had rejected the early Manhattan hip-hop club scene and its reverence for “industry insiders” and bohemian white kids. Simmons looked to LA, instead, with its mobile party giants like Uncle Jamm’s Army and Greg Mack’s Mixmasters. He was particularly interested in the fact that, in Los Angeles, the dance scene’s gatekeepers were black DJs and street promoters from the ’hood rather than white nightclub managers and record-label executives from the hills.
The distinction was crucial for Simmons, who believed Run-DMC’s brand of hip-hop would thrive in the Los Angeles market. The group’s embrace by black partygoers in LA, however, was not immediate, in part because mobile party kings like Clayton and KDAY’s chief tastemaker, Mack, had few incentives to give the group exposure. An LA fan following remained an elusive prize in 1983, even as Run-DMC’s single “It’s Like That / Sucker M.C.’s” climbed the Billboard R&B charts. “We were so on our own stuff,” dance regular Mark Luv remembered, “we didn’t give it up for them.”75 Clayton offered a simple explanation for his initial resistance to book the New Yorkers for his events: “We did not need them.” Eventually, however, Simmons’s persistence paid off and Clayton capitulated, allowing Run-DMC to play an Uncle Jamm’s Army show at the Los Angeles Memorial Sports Arena in late 1983. The three young, green performers were stunned by the size of the UJA audience. “They had never seen so many people,” Clayton remembered. “They were scared.”76 Although their hosts were skeptical of them, and although they earned a measly sum for their appearance, the show was a promotional win for Run-DMC. Radio hosts at KDAY began fielding requests for the group’s music, and regional sales of “It’s Like That / Sucker M.C.’s” took off. Soon, Run-DMC was in a position to successfully lobby KDAY’s Mack for more spins in exchange for recording promotional spots for the station. Mack’s own DJs, the “Mack Attack Mixmasters,” added tracks from the group’s debut album Run-DMC into their on-air and party set rotations.77 With the aid of the city’s original hip-hop pioneers, Run-DMC earned the adoration of a new generation of Los Angeles rap fans who, by 1985, were beginning to favor hard-edged, narrative-driven rap over the lyrically sparse freestyle and electro-rap dance productions popular just a few years earlier. The devotion in LA that summer to Toddy Tee’s “Batterram” mix tape—the homemade rap recording reacting to, among other things, the new military-surplus vehicle the LAPD was deploying in its war on drugs—reflected the shifting preference in LA toward street tales backed by bass booms and claps.78 And as regional mobile, radio, and nightclub DJs responded to evolving local tastes, they laid the groundwork for the “pure and uncut” music of Run-DMC, leaders of the new hip-hop vanguard.79
Joseph “Reverend Run” Simmons, Darryl “DMC” McDaniels, and Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell made precisely the sort of artistic choices that manager Russell Simmons believed necessary for making waves in “the streets.” Guided since the group’s inception in 1982 by Russell’s vision, each rapper fashioned himself as “the common b-boy.” (Breakdancers had come to be known as b-boys and b-girls.) These were streetwise kids who weren’t ashamed of their gritty, urban upbringings but instead, in style and substance, embodied that environment.80
To this end, Run-DMC embraced the basics of b-boy street wear, the understated styles worn not only by breakdancers but also by DJs, MCs, and legions of poor and working-class Bronx kids who reveled in the impromptu neighborhood parties of the mid-1970s. By the 1980s, b-boy fashions had fallen out of favor with hip-hop’s earliest, most promising performers, who were now winning high-profile bookings in New York’s downtown nightclubs and recording contracts with Sugar Hill Records, the hip-hop focused label founded by disco star Sylvia Robinson and her husband.81 Groups like Sequence, Funky 4 + 1 More, Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, the Treacherous Three, and the Cold Crush Brothers found themselves setting trends for an as-yet undefined music culture. In this role, most of these artists took on the flamboyant trappings of disco, electro, and even doo-wop; their wardrobes overflowed with capes, headdresses, fringe, gold lamé, brightly colored suits, and head-to-toe matching leather outfits embellished with fur.82 With Simmons’s urging, Run-DMC rejected the splash and the theater, and instead dressed in the uniform of the inner city. By opting for sneakers, jeans, T-shirts, bomber jackets, and black hats, they implicitly honored hip-hop’s b-boy origins and resisted what hip-hop was becoming as it moved from the block and into tony nightclubs and recording studios. Recognizing what was artistically radical about that move in the early 1980s, when the glitz worked, John Leland at the Village Voice explained, “Run-DMC force you to confront them as people, not as fantasies” (Fig. 2.3).83
Fig 2.3 At a 1984 performance in Long Beach, Run-DMC members Joseph “Reverend Run” Simmons and Darryl “DMC” McDaniels wear the leather jackets and black fedoras that became the group’s signature “street” style. Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives, Library Special Collections, UCLA Library.
Run-DMC’s music was similarly defiant. The trio managed to upend most early hip-hop conventions in their production choices, lyrical themes, and performance techniques. While their fashion choices harked back to b-boy days, their musical production moved radically away from the orchestral, sample-heavy, electronic sounds so popular in early hip-hop. African-American session musician and producer Larry Smith (and, later, punk artist Rick Rubin) provided Run-DMC with a stripped-down, drum-forward sound that captivated a younger generation of hip-hop fans. Their rap music was altogether new, divorced more thoroughly than ever before from hip-hop’s disco roots. At the same time, Run-DMC brought the music back to the streets. As Leland wrote in the Village Voice, “With just beats and rhymes, they brought rap closer to its original state before the producers took it out of the reach of ordinary schmucks.”84
Run-DMC’s approach reinforced its “homeboy credentials” and set them completely apart from older hip-hop acts.85 Brooklyn rap artist Shawn “Jay-Z” Carter remembered, “From the first listen, Run-DMC felt harder than the Sugarhill Gang or even Kool Moe Dee and other serious battle rappers of the time.” In sum, he said, “Their voices were big, like their beats.” As a kid growing up in a Brooklyn housing project in the 1970s, Jay-Z had been mostly ambivalent about early Bronx-based hip-hop trends. But with their macho swagger and vivid tales of the hustler’s struggles and successes, Run-DMC reinvigorated hip-hop for him, giving him faith that rap music could “be real” and perhaps even have a “point of view” in line with his own. MCs Run and DMC sounded to him like rebels, and with a “raw and aggressive” flow these young black men were on wax archiving lived experiences that sounded like his. It was a revelation, he remembered, for his circle of friends to hear in Run-DMC’s raps echoes of everything from “our aspirations and our crumb-snatching struggles, our specific, small realities (chicken and collard greens) and our living-color dreamscapes (big long Caddy).”86
Outside New York, too, Run-DMC attracted a younger generation of music fans. Dallas native and Los Angeles rapper Tracy “The D.O.C.” Curry could recall first hearing Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight,” hip-hop’s first hit single and one of the first hip-hop songs to reach audiences beyond the five boroughs. The track was The D.O.C.’s initial exposure to “rapping” just as it was for most young people across the country. But he was not impressed until several years later when he first heard Run-DMC, and more specifically, the electrifying cadence of Reverend Run’s raps. Run was young, black, and brash, just like him and, thus, helped him recognize how he, a street rapper from Texas, might fit within hip-hop. “Run had everything I had,” The D.O.C. remembered. “He had the same vocal styling, the same command in his voice.” The fact that Run was also unashamed—“Whatever the fuck he was saying, he meant that shit”—allowed him to command attention the way The D.O.C. believed rappers should.87
Instead of “message raps” that told moral tales, Run-DMC offered snapshots of personal hard times (“Bills rise higher every day / We receive much lower pay”), temptations (“They offer coke—and lots of dope—but we just leave it alone”), and race pride (“I’ll attack this matter in my own way / Man, I ain’t no slave, I ain’t bailin’ no hay”).88 Biographical sketches of hardened b-boys were rich with allusions to material wealth, sexual conquest, and lyrical supremacy. (“We slay all suckers who perpetrate / And lay down laws from state to state” was one line, well chosen to appear on Raising Hell tour merchandise.)89 While their bravado thrilled new fans like Jay-Z and The D.O.C., some branded Run-DMC’s music as too “harsh” and “political,” with its trappings of black militancy. For instance, in 1984, writers for the television sitcom The Jeffersons crafted an episode in which a gospel quartet performed a rendition of Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That” at an all-white honky-tonk, finishing their performance with fists raised in Black Power salute.90 Even Run-DMC’s own label mate Kurtis Blow found the trio’s frequent use of the colloquial term illin’ too radical. “Those lyrics are bad,” Blow told Newsday. “What Run-DMC is doing is perpetrating, acting like they’re tough gangster kids.” Amid the critiques, Run-DMC gained renown as genre innovators for unapologetically abandoning the early hip-hop canon. Years later, rap patriarch Curtis “Grandmaster Caz” Fisher identified Run-DMC’s rise as “the end of our era.”91
Russell Simmons wanted the group he was managing to shatter conventions. He put his trust in the popular appeal of urban authenticity and encouraged his artists to be “true to themselves.” Most importantly, Simmons aimed for Run-DMC to be two things that the music industry had assumed were incompatible; his group would be both “street” and “pop.”92 Although he sought exposure for Run-DMC on the downtown New York club circuit, he refused to pin the trio’s success to places like the Roxy, which seemed to take black music and “whiten it up” and “water it down” for a broader audience.93 Plus, as a Queens-based promoter of a Bronx-born experiment that had become a Manhattan phenomenon, Simmons recognized the potential for hip-hop to earn audiences throughout New York City and, eventually, outside its boroughs. Like many rap music cynics, Simmons believed that the fledgling genre—mostly sequestered in the Northeast and stymied by the Sugar Hill Records monopoly—was at a crossroads in the early 1980s. Music writers might have expected hip-hop to fade into obscurity, just like disco, but Simmons envisioned the flowering of the genre. With careful cultivation, he imagined it maturing, earning new audiences from around the country, topping the music charts, breaking sales records, and ultimately finding a permanent place within the recording industry. As Reverend Run later reflected, Run-DMC wanted to ensure that hip-hop could no longer be “dismissed as a fad.” He and his band, under his brother’s management, intended to change the game altogether, “not by softening up but by being tougher than leather.”94
Within a year of its first single release, Run-DMC was the only chart-topping, commercially successful hip-hop act in the world. This unrivaled position was the result of the trio’s unique street appeal and Russell Simmons’s hunger for broad market appeal—but there was also another factor. Cable television’s newest phenomenon was music video programming, and while MTV’s video jockeys spurned early rap pioneers—including Grandmaster Flash and Sugarhill Gang—because their videos “didn’t look very good,” they welcomed Run-DMC.95 With the support of Simmons’s label Def Jam, the trio managed to produce slick video shorts that fit the channel’s edgy style, even earning a place on the mantel of MTV celebrity. In 1985, at MTV’s second annual Video Music Awards, host Eddie Murphy introduced Run-DMC as the three Queens kids who saved hip-hop. Once the butt of music industry jokes, rap was now “going strong,” Murphy declared, thanks to “the baddest brothers in rap.”96 Within a year, Melody Maker was echoing this assessment, stressing rap’s pop potential, a notion once considered absurd. It praised Run-DMC as “the first rap group to be truly significant, the first rap group to speak in a major language … the first rap act to be successfully marketed as a pop group so that they now rub shoulders with Madonna, Bruce Springsteen and Michael Jackson.”97
In addition to its MTV ascendency, Run-DMC shattered market expectations by becoming the first rap act to sell enough music to justify a multicity, multivenue concert tour. Even hip-hop’s earliest and most lionized star, Afrika Bambaataa, failed to register on American music charts until 1985, the year he appeared on a compilation album that also featured Run-DMC.98 While Bambaataa and his group, Soul Sonic Force, boasted an international fan base through the 1980s, their shows in the United States, even at peak career, were sometimes described as lackluster showcases that drew small crowds made up of “trendies” and “older, white rock critics.”99 By contrast, Run-DMC filled to capacity sprawling concert venues throughout the country, beginning in 1984, the year its debut album, Run-DMC, was released. The group’s tours included many of the nation’s major cities, premier nightclubs including the Front Row Theater outside Cleveland, Ohio, the Inferno in Buffalo, New York, the Channel in Boston, and the Stardust Ballroom (also known as the Mix Club) in Hollywood. In their first two years on the road, Run-DMC also played major performance spaces like the Warfield Theater in San Francisco, the Hollywood Palladium in Los Angeles, and the fifteen-thousand-seat Madison Square Garden arena in the trio’s hometown.100
By the summer of 1986, Run-DMC understood they were unrivaled. They were certified hit makers, stars of MTV, and veterans of the national arena circuit. But Run-DMC’s Raising Hell tour, to promote its third studio album, promised to amplify the group’s relevance within hip-hop. That year, the group’s label, Profile, financed more concert dates, including bookings inside arenas and sports centers in the South and across the West. Run-DMC’s most ambitious promotional tour was planned as a sixty-four-date jaunt that featured dates in New York City, St. Louis, Dallas, Atlanta, New Orleans, Oakland, and Los Angeles.101
When Run-DMC kicked off its Raising Hell tour in 1986, the trio from Queens stood as hip-hop’s only platinum-selling artists and the genre’s standard bearers. The “baddest brothers in rap” also had an image problem, and they knew it. After a flurry of crimes following performances in June and July, which included robberies at Madison Square Garden and a shooting near an exit at Atlanta’s Omni Arena, some media outlets concluded that Run-DMC’s brand of rap was to blame for the lawlessness. The narrative dovetailed with existing concerns about violence plaguing heavy metal and punk rock shows, a moral furor that culminated in 1985 with the widely publicized US Senate Hearing on the dangers of “outrageous recordings.”102 In a cultural environment fraught with renewed anxieties around youth music trends and social disorder, Run-DMC and other rappers found themselves under pressure to defend their genre. Reverend Run blamed bigots who didn’t understand the music: “just because it’s black people, they think we ain’t got nothing to do except bust somebody’s head open.” He was not the only one, he noted, being demonized on local television, in the pages of popular magazines and national newspapers, and in political debates: “All of us rappers get a raw deal.” He wished the critics would “chill out and stop hassling us.”103 Convincing the public that rap was not derelict music became increasingly difficult with every new report of concert violence, and it was a particularly awkward mission for a group promoting such a provocatively titled album. As Billboard observed, the Raising Hell tour was living up to its name.104
The “rap riot” that erupted inside the Long Beach Arena that August made the difficult task of scrubbing hip-hop’s reputation virtually impossible. Raising Hell tour promoter Jeff Sharp saw the Long Beach Arena fiasco as a terrible watershed. “I’ve been in this business eleven years,” Sharp explained, “and I’ve never seen anything like it.”105 Critics were quick to note that the violence in Long Beach could not be shrugged off by the rap showcase producers because, unlike earlier vandalism, theft, and bloodshed on the tour, it all took place inside the concert venue. Before Long Beach, those intent on citing Run-DMC’s music as the catalyst for crime had to rely on arguments that the group could be blamed for arrests made near a rap venue or in the hours following a performance. In its reporting on the Long Beach violence, Melody Maker noted that media outlets “didn’t need to inflate and exaggerate the violence … it was there waiting for them, preened for the cameras and very real.”106
In the wake of the Long Beach Arena disaster, Run-DMC pivoted in its campaign to defend hip-hop from moral crusaders. Rather than continue to buck those critics sounding the alarm about troublesome youths, Run-DMC now joined the chorus. The trio, their manager Russell Simmons, and members of the Profile Records staff ran a public relations campaign aimed at exoneration, fearing that the group’s brand had been irreparably damaged by the violence in Long Beach. Run-DMC’s publicists carefully promoted the final leg of the concert tour, promising it would engage good kids in a “safe activity” rather than delinquents “raising hell.” And the trio gave interviews with many of the very same mainstream media outlets they had once disdained. The message, simply, was that it had been gangbangers, not rap fans, doing the fighting; they had “sabotaged” the Long Beach show.107 Jam Master Jay railed against those who had prevented his fans from enjoying the music, blasting all the Crips and Bloods who needed to “get their life together and grow up.”108 Reverend Run insisted “These weren’t our fans” and called the brawlers “scumbags and roaches.” Talking to a Los Angeles Times reporter, he blamed LA for letting things get to the point where “gangs are running your town.” The group had played other tough towns, he pointed out, but in places like Detroit gangs respected that, inside the show, they were on Run-DMC’s “turf.” Seizing the high ground, he blamed lax security in LA for letting the “gremlins” through the door and complained that now, “our fans are probably so scared to see us, that they won’t come near our show. And I can’t live with that.”109
LA’s own Rodger Clayton, who had promoted the Long Beach Arena show in partnership with Mack at KDAY, also spoke to the Los Angeles Times. Clayton conceded that rap is “street music” that “appeal[s] to the masses.” Among those fans, he said, “you’re always going to have a few fools,” but “that doesn’t make the music bad.” The press was wrong, the mobile party titan said (just as Run-DMC once had), to demonize hip-hop and the predominantly black kids who consumed it. Determined to shield itself and the hip-hop movement from blame, Run-DMC issued a statement saying it would “refuse to play Los Angeles until police and the authorities take sterner measures to protect Run-DMC fans from local gangs. The gangs stand for everything that rap is against.” With that last phrase, they disavowed any connection to a key sect of the local hip-hop scene and, by extension, its “associates” and friends. Having worked for years to gain acceptance on the West Coast, the New Yorkers now positioned themselves against a major contingent of its Los Angeles market.110
Unwilling to be put on the defensive, officials at the Long Beach Arena in effect punished the Queens artists, refusing to book them for future events. Venues elsewhere, including in New York City and Atlanta, did not cancel future shows on the tour, although law enforcement in many cities expressed urgent security concerns having seen what had happened in Long Beach.111 That was not the case for the rest of the California leg of the tour. Immediately, officials at the Hollywood Palladium canceled the next night’s sold-out concert featuring Run-DMC and the Beastie Boys, a white rap trio from Brooklyn.112 A spokesperson for Long Beach Arena management announced in the same week that the venue would institute a “prohibitive booking policy,” which would bar other hip-hop acts from performing on its premises. Arena officials stated in no uncertain terms that fans of rap music exhibited “a propensity to create situations likely to cause injury to other patrons.”113 Michael McSweeny, marketing director for Long Beach city facilities, issued a similar statement about criteria for future concert bookings. As he explained, “A band’s track record,” and whether “it looks like there’s been a bad show,” would guide entertainment decisions henceforth.114 In September, event organizers for the annual city-sponsored Los Angeles Street Scene scrambled to make an announcement regarding Run-DMC, who had been booked months earlier as one of the festival’s headliners. The Festival Committee, in conjunction with the Los Angeles Office of Public Safety, first proposed new conditions requiring that the group “ bring along a couple of well-known ‘mainstream’ artists to stage a special performance condemning gang warfare and the drug ‘crack,’” which Run-DMC accepted. Ultimately, however, the committee removed Run-DMC from the event program, citing “controversy.”115
The coordinated drive to mend the Run-DMC brand and safeguard the group’s revenues out west soon delivered the trio back to Los Angeles, a place the rappers had only recently fled and publicly criticized. There, they inserted themselves into a community-driven anti-gang movement spurred by a recent spate of drive-by shootings. New data revealed that gangs continued to proliferate in the Los Angeles region, with law enforcement estimating nearly fifty thousand members in the county divided into more than four hundred cliques. Violent crimes had jumped significantly since the prior year, breaking municipal and county records. South Los Angeles community leaders, including former gang members, responded by expanding outreach programs and seeking more creative strategies for reducing the bloodshed.116
In September of 1986, LA’s anti-gang nonprofit Community Youth Gang Services Project (formed in 1981), in partnership with KDAY, seized on the national publicity following the Long Beach Arena “rap riot” to call for a “Day of Peace” among LA gangs. Hopes were high that with KDAY’s ability to reach a young and loyal audience, the day “could lead to a season of peace in November and December.”117 Program Director Jack Patterson later reflected on why the station got involved: “The anti-gang thing really came from having people say that only gang members listened to us because we played all this gang music. We felt we had to put forth the truth about how bad gangs were.”118
KDAY invited Run-DMC to participate, an obvious choice in the immediate aftermath of the August Long Beach incident, and also given the group’s ability to influence young people. Run-DMC agreed to participate, viewing the invitation as an opportunity to reset. After Long Beach, the young stars were suffering the fallout from what one journalist would later call their “catchy, vaguely gangster-like image,” and it was very unclear whether they would recover.119 A prominent role in an anti-gang radio broadcast on South LA’s most beloved rap station, hosted by revered DJ Mack, offered a potential lifeline: it could cast Run-DMC as anti-gang advocates while underscoring the street authority they believed they had. “The hardcore crowd is the Run-DMC crowd,” Jam Master Jay noted, so who was more suited to perform these good works for that crowd than they were? “Kids listen to us before they listen to their parents or teachers,” Reverend Run boasted during a news conference promoting the outreach broadcast. “Maybe we can help young people who are thinking of joining gangs, using or dealing drugs … to think of some alternatives.”120
On October 9, all three members of Run-DMC joined KDAY’s two-hour “Day of Peace” radio program alongside the gang project’s leaders, Olympic boxing gold medalist and East LA native Paul Gonzalez, and singer Barry White—himself a former member of South Central’s Slausons gang. With the panel at the ready, KDAY opened its phone lines and each of them started fielding calls from members of local gangland communities. Live on air, they responded to “frustration, fear, anger, helplessness,” the Los Angeles Times reported, and beheld the “grim portrait of Los Angeles-area neighborhoods gripped by gang violence, drug sales, staggering youth-unemployment and disintegrating families.” There were harrowing stories of relatives and friends shot dead, children caught up in the drug-running game, and prison sentences. Other music and sports celebrities called in to offer their own condolences, prayers, and advice for coping with a crisis they mostly witnessed from afar. Pop mogul Quincy Jones, best known at the time for his work with Michael Jackson and producing the platinum-selling humanitarian anthem “We Are the World,” urged LA youths to “respect yourself.”121
During the “Day of Peace” broadcast, the gang project nonprofit fielded hundreds of calls over its hot lines, including a few from young bangers who cited KDAY’s show as the impetus for their pleas for help. They desperately wanted “to know how to get out” of the gang life, one counselor reported. Project Regional Director and South Central activist Leon Watkins was encouraged. It was “naïve” to believe that one broadcast could stop the violence, he cautioned, but “some will listen. There has to be a starting point.” Run-DMC was more confident that their on-air public service mattered. “I feel good if I know I’ve helped some kids,” Reverend Run said. “I think I helped a lot today because kids love us that much.”122 Indeed, dozens of local gangs announced a few weeks later that they would work toward a ceasefire. According to the Los Angeles Times, between eighty and one hundred gangs promised to hammer out the terms of a truce, and authors of the proposed “Our Peace Treaty” credited Run-DMC and the KDAY “Day of Peace” broadcast for inspiring the diplomacy.123
At the end of 1986, Run-DMC proudly accepted praise for its community service efforts in Los Angeles, a turnabout for a group of easterners that had so recently berated the “scumbags” out west. Although the trio had used their New York City roots to remind the press that they were alien to the crisis in Los Angeles and “don’t have anything to do with what’s going on out there,” they also claimed their working-class Queens upbringing gave them rare insight into such inner-city struggles.124 In doing so, they tapped into the notion of urban authenticity, a trait that was prized in the world of hip-hop and, as Run-DMC discovered, increasingly vital to commercial success. Ignoring all the contradictions in their many public comments about Los Angeles and its gangs, and relying heavily on their own “street” credentials, the band believed they had emerged from a devastating public relations disaster as honored heroes in Los Angeles’s war on gangs.
Despite efforts to bury the past, however, the August 1986 violence continued to haunt Run-DMC through 1987, forcing the trio again and again to deny the extent to which their music and their concerts promoted violence and, worse, glorified the gangster image. Still barred from LA’s major performance venues and dogged by questions about the Long Beach show, the group refocused on its Together Forever tour.125 With a $600,000 security budget, the international concert tour featuring the Beastie Boys promised to “restore rap’s image as a safe activity.”126 The black rap trio and the white rap trio both touted Together Forever as a cutting-edge, racially integrated line-up designed to draw diverse and civil crowds. As Newsweek’s Bill Barol wrote, the highlight of this tour was “out in the audience [where] black kids and white kids stood together, rapped along, waved their hands in the air, had a great time.” The promise of Together Forever was that its success would eclipse the “hysteria” around the Long Beach disaster. As Beastie Boys rapper MCA emphasized, Together Forever would help fans forget the “one isolated event” that represented nothing more than “a problem in LA.”127 To their perpetual frustration, reporters in cities across America and even in Europe refused to let up, interrogating all the rappers about gang-related violence. “We’re not these psychopaths that they talk about,” Beastie Boys member Ad Rock proclaimed on CBS News Nightwatch, visibly frustrated. “We’re good kids.”128
In Los Angeles, the gang truce that Run-DMC purportedly inspired failed to materialize. The South Los Angeles gangland wars, in fact, expanded and intensified that winter, with some cliques harnessing the media attention generated by the fallout from the Long Beach Arena show to attract new recruits. Even those groups tasked with drafting the treaty ultimately fell back into conflict. A police sergeant for Inglewood’s homicide division reported “a tremendous increase in violent gang assaults” in the months following the celebrated “Day of Peace” broadcast. Moreover, by 1987, LA’s black press began reporting on the “drive-by wars,” a terrifying surge in targeted shootings from moving cars—a crisis blamed, again, on rock cocaine and escalating gang rivalries.129
The year ended with yet another widely reported “rap riot,” this time at a UTFO concert, the first hip-hop show held in the city since the 1986 Long Beach Arena event. (UTFO, a New York-based group, was popular in Los Angeles largely because Compton rapper Toddy Tee repurposed its most popular singles “Roxanne, Roxanne” and “Bite It” for his street stories, “Rockman, Rockman” and “L.A. Is a Jungle.”) Despite ample security at the Hollywood Palladium, including airport metal detectors, extra staff posted around the venue’s perimeter, and screening for gang colors at the ticket gates, representatives from at least eight Los Angeles gang sets made it inside with weapons. Fights raged and shots were fired. In the aftermath, the local press reported on LA’s “mood of paranoia” about “heavily armed” black youths who “spray bullets at anyone and everyone,” and posed a question that had tormented Run-DMC and divided its fans for nearly a year: “Can rap music—with its aggressive, jackhammer rhythms and often hard-edged street imagery—be performed safely in Los Angeles?”130
That music critics and the entertainment press kept a spotlight fixed on Los Angeles and its “crisis” vexed Run-DMC because it threatened to undermine the group’s success. This spotlight, however, worked in favor of the region’s fledgling rap artists. Prior to August of 1986, hip-hop music was represented as an exclusively East Coast phenomenon with New York roots and New York sensibilities. Run-DMC’s sudden and extraordinary commercial success in the mid-1980s seemed only to reinforce the axiom that hip-hop was an artistic phenomenon inextricably tied to the boroughs of the Big Apple. But the Long Beach stop on Run-DMC’s 1986 Raising Hell tour hinted at a sea change coming.
A small cadre of Los Angeles rappers and DJs, most of whom had risen to fame within the Southland’s mobile dance scene of the early 1980s, absorbed the music made out East, yet remained fiercely loyal to art created within their own environs. Often with little more than crude recording systems, local patronage, and the support of the low-wattage KDAY radio station, South Los Angeles talents like Mixmaster Spade, Toddy Tee, Rodney O, Joe Cooley, DJ Pooh, King Tee, The Compton Posse, Ice-T, Cli-N-Tel, Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, and Ice Cube dedicated themselves, in lyrical content and in musical production, to engaging with the urban landscapes and cultures around them. These artists recorded and performed music that reflected upon and, in some cases, romanticized LA’s street cultures, including life experienced in proximity to gangs, the allure of easy money, the pervasiveness of violence, and daily encounters with the police.
Many young purveyors of this distinctly regional sound—eventually referred to as “gangsta rap”—emerged, not coincidentally, in the wake of the 1986 Long Beach Arena Run-DMC concert, the event that KDAY’s Mack would describe as “the straw that broke the camel’s back.”131 The violent rap show shook the music industry and threatened to ruin the careers of Reverend Run, Jam Master Jay, and DMC. For some, the “rap riot” threatened to be the death knell not only for the Queens sensation but for the whole genre of hip-hop. With its dominion jeopardized, Run-DMC dealt with the media by snubbing Los Angeles area rap fans and by ridiculing gang-related groups who were, like it or not, part of the fabric of LA’s regional hip-hop scene.132
The Long Beach show proved a critical juncture, but not exactly in the way New York’s kings of rap feared. The more Run-DMC and its handlers took pains to disassociate themselves from Los Angeles, the greater the public’s fascination with those “problems” out west and the power of rap to provoke them. This presented a window of opportunity for LA’s own rap hopefuls, who recognized the value of the limelight, even when the light was harsh. They understood how to harness the negative attention to promote themselves as artists and, crucially, to draw attention to the Los Angeles they knew—a place that the eighteen-year-old aspiring rapper Ice Cube described in rhyme as “Hardcore, LA not like the past.”133