Wild Style Reinvents the Urban Musical
Wild Style managed to suggestively evoke aspects of hip hop culture through the negotiation of “real” urban spaces while, at the same time, largely conforming to the structure of the classical Hollywood musical. This is true of several other hip hop musicals, but it is the film’s unique tension between documentary aspects and the musical genre that imparts it with an urgency and complexity worthy of a sustained discussion. Some critics have noted that hip hop musicals referred to the Hollywood musical genre through allusions to particular films and syntactic elements. In the case of Wild Style, more often than not writers have been oblivious to these generic characteristics. In his New York Times review of the film, Vincent Canby seems so befuddled by the ways in which the theme of city space takes center stage that he cannot discern the movie’s show musical structure. He writes that Wild Style “is a series of random encounters of graffiti artists, rappers, and breakers, leading up to a giant rap-break concert in a Lower East Side band shell.”1 As I will show, Canby’s “random encounters” actually consist of a romantic plot interspersed with a number of communal performances. All of these features tie Wild Style emphatically to the generic conventions of the musical film. The final stage performance, what Canby calls the “giant rap-break concert,” is in fact the element of the film that satisfies a number of established film musical conventions through its incorporation of both a romantic union and a successful musical performance.
This chapter therefore has three broad aims. In the first instance, it looks at how Wild Style intervened in contemporary discourse about graffiti through the depiction of Raymond (Zoro). His journey follows the arc of traditional Hollywood “music men” and ultimately reveals him to be a thoughtful and complex artist whose creative growth has antecedents in other narratives of the visual arts, particularly the history of Abstract Expressionism. The chapter’s second objective is to look closely at folk musical conventions operating in Wild Style as a means to deploy a radical and politically engaged cinema that reformed contemporary media visions of the South Bronx as a social problem riddled with crime and drug abuse. In doing this I open up a discussion of the notion of home in a wider context: its historical devaluation in urban communities of color, its significance to folk musical traditions, and its material condition in contemporary inner city life. Lastly, I turn to a discussion of Wild Style’s formal properties and narrative strategies. Here I address the film’s reflexive tendencies in relation to the broader history of musical film and hip hop artistic practice, and the ways in which it dynamically harnessed the tension between two traditionally adverse modes of filmmaking, the documentary and the musical.
Although I am arguing that Wild Style is a musical, the two main characters are not musicians or dancers but graffiti artists. Nonetheless, Wild Style’s Raymond is a conventional “music man” in the sense that creativity is restored as a positive and utopian communal vision at the end of the film through the assistance of his artistic intervention, even though his main talent is neither singing nor dancing. The film worked to transform the stereotype of the graffiti writer from a destructive teenaged “hood” to a sensitive young artist intensely concerned with the integrity of his work, a process that was contemporaneously underway in black newspapers.
An article from the Afro-American referred to graffiti as a disease in 1972, while the Chicago Defender, another widely circulated black newspaper, decried the presence of graffiti in a series of articles from February of the next year, with such titles as “Let’s Stop Killing Our Communities” and “Vandalism: Who are the Victims?”2 The latter opens with a quote from an angry fifteen-year-old writer who states, “I hate the man’s world … we gotta let him know it wherever we are.”3 In response, journalist Carolyn Fortier asks whether or not “he really hears(s) you when you write on walls and destroy the community where YOU-not-HE-have to live?”4 The article examines graffiti as part of a larger vandalism explosion in black Chicago communities allegedly stemming from young people’s apparent lack of respect for public and private property, a problem that the piece ultimately attributes to parental failure and neglect. Accompanying the text is a photograph of a Woodlawn apartment façade in which words such as “Mighty Falcons” and “Sundown” are scrawled across an entrance-way flanked by Corinthian Columns. Classical art is under attack since “intricately designed pillars hold up the dying claim to beauty” and “the rampant abuse by vandals has scarred a magnificent structure.”5
A little over a decade later, things were entirely different. The editors of the Afro-American chose to print a picture of graffiti writer Dominique Philbert (Ero) with the caption, “From Subway to Fame,” as they noted his rise to international renown in the art world. Philbert appears in the photograph with one of his graffiti-on-canvas works at New York’s Fun Gallery. Later that year, the newspaper printed a “Hip Hop Glossary” and defined the “Graffiti Writer” as “an artist who works in the spray can paint medium, creating works of art on public surfaces, such as walls and subway cars (and sometimes canvas).”6 In just ten years, a directionless angry youth looking to spurn “the man” was transformed into an intelligent painter who selects the medium of spray paint to articulate his artistic intervention.
The initial hostility of the black press (and, in particular, the Afro-American) to graffiti is understandable given that the nation’s oldest environmental campaign, The Clean Block Program, was initiated in 1935 by Francis L. Murphy, daughter of the newspaper’s founder. Murphy’s program was resoundingly successful, and in 1939 the Afro-American boasted that it registered over 8,000 entrants and 500 city blocks in an annual contest.7 As the publication remarked on the specific transformations that had taken place during the campaign it noted that “whole rows of houses were painted by landlords. Hundreds of yards and back alleys were cleaned, back fences white-washed or painted, yards beautified and fronts literaly [sic] made to look like flower gardens or little parks.”8 Later, this environmental program would also align itself with national concerns. The 1941 campaign, for instance, emphasized hygiene and cleanliness in line with wartime initiatives to keep disease at bay as America prepared for battle. A tag line from an article about the contest in May of that year forgoes any mention of flower gardens and freshly painted fences but includes the subheadings “Clean Blocks First Line of Home Defense” and “Disease and Dirt Must Go.”9 The program grew in prestige and financial sponsorship as it consistently emphasized cleanliness, urban gardening practices, and civic duty. It reached out to the community through luncheons and workshops and rewarded hard-working residents with block parties, tickets to sporting events, and movies.10 Even though the program’s initiatives often dovetailed with more radical grassroots campaigns to improve life for inner-city neighborhoods, it is easy to see how the presence of graffiti seemed to disrupt the decades-long mission of the Clean Block campaign—a tidy, well ordered urban vista free of garbage, dirt, and peeling paint. Without a doubt, the impulsive scrawls found in and around public spaces in Chicago and New York in the early 1970s, such as those pictured in Fortier’s article, were very different from the intricate and premediated large-scale works that began to dominate the urban landscape a decade later. Wild Style gave narrative form to a detectable change in attitude in some black publications, one that positioned graffiti practitioners as artists who could be identified by their particular medium, and had the potential to exhibit on the international art circuit. If the Woodlawn apartments’ façade struggles to bear the weight of a hideous disfigurement, the paint bombs thrown in Wild Style are intended to invigorate the architectural squalor and bring new life to its moribund surfaces.
Fig. 2.1. Classical architecture under threat from the “Graffiti Disease,” Feb. 24, 1973. Courtesy of the Chicago Defender.
Fig. 2.2. Graffiti as Communal Revitalization: Production still from Wild Style (1983) featuring a graffiti mural on Connie’s Superette. Photographer: Cathy Campbell; courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.
Ahearn’s film actually opens with an image of the word “graffiti” executed in the new “wild style” of urban script that supplanted the somewhat softer and more readable bubble style letters of the late 1970s. We then see a rope thrown down an outdoor wall with the figure of Raymond (Lee Quinones) scurrying down. The camera cuts to a close-up of the face of this young artist as we hear a subway train screaming by, and the soundtrack breaks into a chunky hip hop beat. These shots evoke the clandestine and dangerous nature of graffiti writing, or “bombing,” at night in the city. Subway noise permeates this scene (and the entire film), attesting to the omnipresence of trains in the South Bronx. Most of the illegal graffiti writing in the film also takes place in train yards at night, echoing these first few scenes.
In Wild Style’s prologue (these images precede the credits) Raymond’s art making is clearly defined as an outsider practice. He must paint covertly at night, and the film underscores the romantic aspect of Raymond’s work and persona somewhat forcefully as an opening shot frames his face in the darkness behind the grid-work of a chain-link fence. The shadows play on his face and the connection between urban spaces and his identity are not only revealed in his bodily performance, but are literally inscribed on his face by the chain enclosure of the train yard.
This sequence also introduces us to the film’s romance plot as we witness Rose (Sandra Fabara) writing her name on a wall beside Raymond’s graffiti signature. Like Quinones, Fabara plays a character based on her own experiences as a young graffiti artist. Documentary aspects of this film, while largely related to emergent hip hop culture, also chronicle the actual relationship between the two lead actors in the film. The couple appears together in this initial sequence, yet once we are inside the narrative space of the film we learn that they have recently split. As such, the initial shots in Wild Style function as a thematic introductory episode that is somewhat narratively disconnected from the film. It tells the viewer what the film will be about rather than locating any specific diegetic incident.
The ensuing credits are part of an animated sequence including both colorful words and images pulsating to a hip hop beat. This credit sequence, which will be discussed in detail later in the chapter, announces the tone of the film as somewhat playful. It also locates the urban as a space of performance, one which will be reimagined many times as the film constantly reconfigures the environs of the city through various modes of creative representation.
After the credits, we are made aware of Raymond’s graffiti nom de plume, Zoro, since he paints an enormous image of the famed masked marauder on a subway car and we also see several Zoro images and tags around the city.11 The signifier of his secret artistic presence encapsulates many representational strategies—from an animated, purely pictorial graphic image of the character Zoro to multiple forms of the written word, which display varying levels of intricacy and decipherability. His confidant and would-be promoter/manager, Phade, played by recording and graffiti artist Fab Five Freddy, knows the real identity of Zoro because he used to paint with him; a large part of the narrative involves a plan to unmask Raymond as Zoro by both Phade and a reporter (played by Patti Astor). This happens in various ways, including the introduction of a white, predominantly female, and somewhat predatory New York art world. Raymond’s secret identity will come to play a major part in the narrative of the film, attaching itself to conventions of the Hollywood musical. For instance, his veiled identity is linked to both communal and romantic dissonance, a common threat to stability in the narrative of the classical musical. Raymond’s unmasking will be followed by his incorporation into the larger community, a plot turn symbolized by his “appearance” within the final stage number of the film.
Although I have analyzed this portion of the film in relation to the commodity status of the final number in classical musicals in the previous chapter, it deserves further examination here with respect to art historical precedents. In this final number of Wild Style, Raymond performs as a gestural artist in painting the stage backdrop for the film’s concluding rap concert. Raymond uses his whole body to paint, and this performance follows in the tradition of American mid-century Abstract Expressionists who were often referred to as action painters or gestural artists.12 These earlier painters, such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning, and Franz Kline, often used expansive broad strokes to cover their large canvases, which served as reminders of the bodily movement required to create such bold and assertive works. Both graffiti writing and Abstract Expressionism require a constant and dynamic physical effort on the part of the artist that is not common in other painting traditions. Ahearn himself understood graffiti writers to be the natural inheritors of modern art practice and he has suggested that there is a direct line from Fauvism and Abstract Expressionism to graffiti:
(I)f you do something that’s aesthetic—graffiti is entirely—it’s like Vlaminck and the Fauves. Vlaminck used to say, “They throw bombs, I paint pictures.” In other words, the whole idea of the modern artist as a rebel, someone making some kind of social statement coming out of himself rather than a committee, and the idea of the modern artist as an outlaw—all these things have twisted around Pollack, [sic] and in a way have come out in the most natural form in this whole graffiti movement.13
Interestingly, Ahearn here emphasizes the “outsider” nature of avant-garde artistic progression in the twentieth century even though his film also works to incorporate the outlaw artist within the collective. The enormous images of painterly play in the amphitheater undertaken by Raymond are followed by the final rap concert. During this show Raymond perches atop the amphitheater while the entire community participates as performer and audience at the same time. This act of social cohesion represented through performance also coincides with Raymond’s eventual romantic reunification with Rose. Thus, the process of unmasking or redirecting a concealed, false, or troubling identity found in such classical-era musicals as Love Me Tonight and Top Hat is employed in Wild Style, like its antecedents, to satisfy the genre’s expectations for successful romantic pairing and integration of the couple within the social body.
As in most backstage musicals, a winning show is equated with romantic partnership and the amorous couple almost always appears together on stage by the end of the film in at least one production number.14 Wild Style reworks this ending, although Raymond’s involvement in the show entails painting the “set” of the disused amphitheater rather than singing and dancing. Raymond’s painting of the stage is captured by Ahearn as a performance, a solo act in the space that will become the final hip hop show of the film. Initially, Raymond is unhappy with his creation, a composition that evokes themes of artistic alienation. Rose and Raymond come together to discuss the direction of this present work, and she convinces him that “it’s not about you, it’s about the performers.” With this in mind, Raymond repaints the space with a design anchored by a large emblematic star in the center of the stage in order to represent the future stars of the show. He shifts the focus to the community, rather than expressing his own personal frustrations as an artist. The concluding show with his new backdrop is a raging success, and when perched on top of the amphitheater during the concert, Raymond is cleverly integrated into the spectacle of performance without literally being on stage.
As noted in the previous chapter, Altman has argued that the musical film genre works to hide all of the labor necessary to produce the final show (i.e., set construction, lighting design, etc.), yet Wild Style significantly inverts this dynamic. In fact, the camera lingers on not one but two different attempts to paint the abandoned amphitheater (the “set” of the show) in preparation for the final rap concert. Additionally, it is the actual “star” graffiti artist of the film, Zoro, not a crew of unnamed and unseen workers who performs this task. There is a deliberate sense of leveling here between various echelons of performance. Set painting, which is typically associated with manual labor, or at best craft production (part of the labor of musical production referred to by Altman), is equated with art, authorship, and the “star” of the film, and it is the vigorous bodily actions of Raymond that most forcefully signify the artist at work.
Raymond has been transformed into his alter ego Zoro through multiple and sustained acts of tagging and repeating this name and image throughout the urban environment. The rope thrown over the wall in the opening shots signifies the breaking into and getting out of a prohibited space. This action defines the artistic practice of graffiti, perhaps even more so, than the writer’s finished work and Wild Style makes it clear that performing is inscribing oneself into social space. The contemporaneous documentary film Style Wars (1982), directed by Tony Silver, also provides ample evidence to support this statement. Style Wars features young men—Ahearn’s defiant modern artists—scurrying down to the shadowy depths of the ancient subway tunnels to perform their work, “bombing” New York City trains before they rush towards throngs of anxious passengers. It also visualizes the efforts of the city—chemical washes and ineffectual anti-graffiti advertising campaigns—to stop this cycle of creation and destruction. Intercut between these scenes of perpetual urban “play,” Style Wars allows the writers to have a voice. For example, a young graffiti artist named Skeme is interviewed in his apartment with his disapproving mother at his side. Skeme notes that he participates in the subculture because he wants other writers to know his name. Another goal for this young artist is to go “all city”—which refers to having his tag, “throw up,” or larger piece on every line in the subway system. Other writers in Style Wars discuss the alluring smell of resting trains in the yard and the pleasure of navigating unfamiliar subway tunnels at night. Like the earlier generation of Abstract Expressionists, practitioners of hip hop culture in Style Wars and Wild Style value the act of artistic creation as much as the resulting product of that endeavor. And, for this emerging generation of artists, it is the repetition and proliferation of the name that is a sign of the performance and act of creation—it is evidence of the body at work.
Herbert Kohl and James Hinton have argued that the ability to rename the self, facilitated by the practice of graffiti, takes on an urgent political dimension for urban youth. In graffiti culture, refusal of the given or family name, and the adoption of a self chosen name, or one selected by peers, insists upon a radical repudiation of the authority of the parent generation. More specifically, according to the authors, it is also a negation of the oppressive social and political conditions historically offered to black Americans in the U.S., since most African American names bear traces of the slavery system and attest to the naming of slaves by white masters.15
Many graffiti names also specifically challenged the constraints of contemporary urban life. For instance, an early acknowledgment of graffiti as something other than vandalism by a mainstream media source was a New York Times article entitled “Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals,” which included an interview with the infamous writer.16 His moniker, the writer explains, is a combination of a diminutive of his given name, Demetrius, and his street number.17 The name asserts his ethnicity, but also proclaims his urban affiliation with 183rd Street. An appendix from Norman Mailer’s The Faith of Graffiti shows that the use of numbers in one’s graffiti name to denote an urban location or street number was common practice in the early 1970s. The list provides an extended catalog of graffiti names inscribed in and around New York City, several of which are followed by a number. (A small sampling of this list includes Rafi 179, Dynamite 161, King Super Kool 223, 113 Hellcats, B. J. of 118 St and Keep it cool 153.) This form of “naming” is no less a politicized act than Kohl and Hinton’s example. Because adopting a graffiti identity often entailed the appropriation of one’s street address—a signifier of the immobile place—while unfixing it and literally spreading it all over the city, the act of graffiti itself can be read as a reaction against the constraints of the urban environment and its arbitrary systems of division and order.18 For Taki 183 and a host of others using a similar graffiti identity, it seems that the urgency and political aspect of “bombing” the city with a moniker that bears one’s own city address lay in the desire to initiate an interpenetration of spaces, communities, and people that was unavailable in the current urban milieu. The subway cars moved names and identities throughout the topography of New York, modifying the traditional boundaries of the municipality, and transforming its threshold spaces.
Although the ethnic, social, and financial stratification of the city was deeply disturbed by outlaw graffiti culture, some institutions that were eager to co-opt this new urban script welcomed the art form. In Wild Style, the potential transformation of hip hop culture into a commodity form is largely dealt with through an exploration of the relationship between street graffiti and the lure of the New York gallery. Young street artists, short on cash and tired of having their words and images covered in a matter of days, did, in fact, accept commissions to make graffiti artwork on canvas (as we see Raymond do), thereby diminishing many communal or performative aspects of the piece.19 This tense relationship between gallery work and the street artist takes up one of the most important themes of very early backstage musicals—success in the popular arts at the cost of personal, familial, or communal loss. I would suggest that Wild Style, Beat Street, and Rappin’ capture the very problem of the founding text of the backstage musical, The Jazz Singer. Like Raymond, Jakie Rabinowitz (Al Jolson), star of The Jazz Singer, is torn between being successful outside of his community and remaining true to an “authentic” cultural role as a performer bound to a geographically located space of practice. For Jakie, the pull of communal obligations is strongly connected to his family and also the Jewish religion. His family, especially Jakie’s father, anticipates that the talented youth will use his abilities to honor the Jewish faith by performing traditional melodic chants such as the Kol Nidre. But Jakie (who changes his name to Jake) has other plans. He leaves Manhattan’s Lower East Side and its devout Jewish community in order to follow the path of stardom into the world of vaudeville theater and nightclub shows where he performs as a “jazz singer.” These two spaces of culture—the urban Jewish community and the musical theater circuit—seem irreconcilable, but through performance their differences are in fact magically erased in the final live concert scene. For Jakie, the appearance of his mother in the audience of his successful “jazz” act attests to the potential integration of “authentic” regional performance and popular culture, while the final “rap convention” of Wild Style, involving the South Bronx neighborhood putting on a show in a downtown space, brings the regional together unproblematically with the potential for integration into popular entertainment in an explosive outdoor party. At the end of Ahearn’s film, we are unsure whether or not Raymond will continue to paint in the street or be lured by the glamour and monetary promise of the gallery, but the final scene, by involving the local collective and a prospective way of “being heard” and “getting seen,” seems to suggest that you don’t need to choose between success and the community: you can have it all. A reviewer for Artforum International in 1984 noted that
like the classical Hollywood musical, Wild Style is about everyone’s desire to be a star, which, as is ironically acknowledged, is impossible to realize without validation and promotion by the mainstream culture, and consequently, exposure to the risk of exploitation; so far rap and break dancing have not been incorporated into white style to the extent of graffiti art.20
While folklorist Sharon Sherman remarked that “the graffiti artists and breakdancers … in all of these films … find their way into the heartland of America, selling McDonald’s hamburgers and Pepsi-Cola, and turning glorified music videos into box office hits,” the hip hop musical often works towards achieving a complex balance between maintaining “authenticity” and “getting paid” for members of the performing community—a process that is unquestionably linked to urgent political and social issues.21
Raymond is a Latino youth but his dilemma encapsulates the tensions between individualism and the community in ethnically and racially distinct populations of the United States more generally under the twin pressures of capitalism and assimilation. Jakie Rabinowitz struggled to “sing jazz” without alienating his traditional Jewish roots, and this same tension has permeated films about contemporary communities of color. In an excellent analysis of recent African American cinema dealing with college life, Lesley Speed suggests that films like House Party (1990), House Party 2 (1991), and Higher Learning (1995) explore how the desire for personal advancement can be effectively balanced with a responsibility towards the larger black community. She notes that the House Party films, in particular, use popular musical forms and entertainment to engage a youth audience as they explore social and political issues relevant to African Americans.22 In a similar way, Wild Style contributed to an ongoing discussion in American culture regarding how an individual might participate in the pleasures offered by assimilation into the larger social order without abdicating their personal responsibility to a minority community.
Wild Style’s crews or teenaged gangs traverse the city like the train cars decorated with their graffiti art, and they compete with each other through breakdancing, rapping, and athletics. These competitions happen in many different city spaces: the club, the street, the basketball courts, as well as the train yard. This theme of competition and performance structures nearly every aspect of the film, and it is negotiated through the conventional aspects of both folk and show musicals.
Altman writes that the folk musical is characterized by its emphasis on “family groupings and the home.”23 He also goes on to argue that “in many cases the action of the film is entirely limited to the type of town where everyone is a neighbor, where each season’s rituals bring the entire population together.”24 Community or family audiences within the diegesis are central to the structure of the folk musical because they provide a model for spontaneous performance. The entire neighborhood assembles to hear Judy Garland sing in her own living room during the party scene in Meet Me in St. Louis (1944) while several members of the rural community in Cabin in the Sky surround Ethel Waters as her character, Petunia, delivers the title track of the film in a forest setting. In this film, too, a delivery man joins Waters and her husband, Joe (Eddie “Rochester” Anderson), for the impromptu song and dance number “Taking a Chance on Love” in the couple’s home.
According to both Feuer and Altman, the folk musical values the quality of the amateur over the professional and imbues everyone in the community with the ability to perform.25 Being a spectator in the folk musical is a participatory practice that erases the boundary between artist and audience. The essence of the folk musical seeks to tap into the desire that everyone can be a performer. Thus, the constant permeation of performance space by the diegetic audience attests to the fact that the barrier to professional theatrical talent is in fact irrelevant. Feuer makes this argument about nearly all classical-era musicals and suggests that the porous border between audience and entertainer in these films addressed the tension between the loss of live performance in theater and the “dead” celluloid space of film. According to Feuer, “The Hollywood musical as a genre perceives the gap between producer and consumer, the breakdown of community designated by the very distinction between performer and audience, as a form of cinematic original sin.”26 She goes on to argue that “the musical seeks to bridge the gap by putting up ‘community’ as an ideal concept.”27 In the case of Wild Style, however, communal presentations of music and dance are not idealized as a way to compensate for the absence of live performance in the movie theater. Rather, these events are complex strategies of collective empowerment that function either literally or symbolically to safeguard against the contemporary social conditions that undermined the familial and communal structures of inner city neighborhoods. As I note in the previous chapter, the South Bronx was a site of unprecedented contemporary urban squalor. The communities in this region had been victimized by increasing crime, unemployment, poverty, inadequate housing, and a spate of devastating arson-related fires. Under such obviously detrimental material conditions, the concept of community resides in the possibility for random productive encounters with one’s neighbors when no designated neighborhood centers or spaces exist, and the amateur performer has the potential to facilitate a strikingly politicized role in creating and nurturing communal bonds.
For example, Ahearn stages an integrated musical number on the front stoop of a home that clearly derives from a casual street encounter. We see the spontaneous song of the golden-era folk musical transformed into a rap performed by members of Double Trouble. Rather than the traditional nuclear family grouping found in the folk musical, the number includes two adolescents and a young boy whose familial and filial connections are unclear except for the fact that they are all part of the same South Bronx neighborhood. In this scene, the boy is casually walking in the street and then stops to listen to Double Trouble’s rap. The number begins with a very tight close-up shot of the two rappers. In the following medium shot, our performers appear to be perched on a front stoop with metal banisters framing their lanky teen bodies, which are casually arranged on a set of concrete stairs. A young boy walks into the left side of the frame, snapping his fingers. He is shot from behind and his figure is present throughout the entire rap, providing the audience for their doorstep performance. The camera focuses closely on the faces of the rappers for most of the scene, but also cuts to the child, our audience, dancing while continuing to contribute to the number by snapping his fingers, keeping the beat. This young boy functions as a surrogate audience member for the film spectator. His presence provides a point of entry into the scene that is similar to the standard filming techniques employed in classical Hollywood backstage musicals during the depiction of musical numbers that take place in an actual theater. This type of shot sequence utilizes a camera position that approximates the actual distance and lateral positioning of an ideal spectatorial position—an imaginary third-row center seat. The shot pattern often gives the film spectator the impression of being part of the diegetic theater audience shown on screen by panning back from the stage floor, and gradually revealing increasingly more space of the theater, and with it the rows of audience members seen from the backs of their chairs.28 In Ahearn’s film, the boy is filmed from the back as stated, alluding to this previous tradition and suggesting that the viewer may casually step into the boy’s audience position after he leaves the scene to become a member of the street audience. The point, however, is not to recoup the loss of live entertainment endemic to every musical film, but rather to suggest that this new kind of encounter between performer and audience is random, quotidian, and an important element of communal bonding and expression within the community depicted on screen.
Fig 2.3. Rap duo Double Trouble in Wild Style (1983). Courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.
During Double Trouble’s rap we hear the musical percussion of the young boy in addition to the sounds of the city. Not only does the diegetic audience literally become a performer, but the city also participates in the number since its sounds—a barking dog and the groaning of the subway—permeate the scene, underscoring the fusion of documentary and musical elements in the film. This number presents a reconstruction and reworking of the folk audience and the traditional locus of the folk performance—the home. Instead of the private and semi-private spaces of small-town middle America (such as the local fair or living room parlor) or the expanse of black rural Southern neighborhoods where American film folk musical numbers have traditionally been staged, the locus of communal performance is drastically reconfigured to reflect vastly different forms of collective bonding rituals found in inner city neighborhood of the 1980s.
Double Trouble’s number shares, but also highlights, the folk musical’s characteristic emphasis on generational relations and the passing down of traditions to young people.29 Rap, and hip hop culture more generally, was a new mode of performance but one that initially included a positive emphasis on children and the community. Rapping is closely related to older forms of African American rhyming games such as “the dozens,” and the Jamaican born tradition of toasting. Even though rap may be understood as a manifestation of traditional African American and West Indian customs, hip hop culture is also youth culture, and is, in a sense, far enough removed from previously established forms of African American and Jamaican oral play to be considered new. Thus, rap is a Janus-faced practice, one that simultaneously looks back to established performance traditions, such as toasting, and forward to new representational forms, such as commercial hip hop music. Furthermore, scholars such as Andy Bennett have suggested that hip hop culture has its roots in the eighteenth and nineteenth century slave trade since it works to unify the African diaspora uprooted from their traditional homelands. Thus, hip hop links West Indians in England with the concerns of black Americans in the United States through the notion of a pan-African identity.30 This may be true for some groups. However, when American rap music in the early 1980s raised social and political issues, they were usually related to national if not local concerns. Astute contemporary observers like music critic Robert Palmer also argued that that the emergence of rap music reflected a wider interest in talking (rather than singing) for the music industry evidenced by the 1978 recording of Linton Kwesi Johnson’s poetry read against a background of improvised music, the success of Laurie Anderson’s 1982 album Big Science, which featured talking rather than singing, New York City performance artist Julia Heyward’s experiments with talking and chanting in her shows, and Jamaican toaster Yellowman’s record deal with Columbia.31
In the scene from Wild Style discussed above, both the rappers and their audience are drawn from the street. Nearly all the neighborhood members are shown to be talented at some aspect of performance in the film, and in the same way all residents of the community provide an audience for collective performance, from nighttime graffiti writing to rapping and breakdancing. The communal audience appears in most of the performance-oriented scenes in the film, including two extended club sequences featuring breakdancing, two integrated musical rap numbers (the scene including Double Trouble described above and the “Basketball number,” which will be addressed later in this chapter), numerous graffiti writing exploits, and the final stage show. Ahearn continually shows us that, as one breakdancer or artist steps out of the limelight, he or she immediately becomes a member of the audience. Indeed, this permeable border is in fact integral to Wild Style’s depiction of the breakdancing circle filmed in the Roxy nightclub. As one member leaves the circle, another one enters, creating a continuous flow between performer and audience.32 We even see Raymond and Rose, the “stars” of the film, as just two of the numerous clapping and cheering spectators in this scene. Performance in Wild Style, both in the club and on the street, is made possible through a continual regeneration and replacement of the community-based audience.33 Likewise, Beat Street, Breakin’ 2, Krush Groove, and Rappin’ all feature some depiction of the participatory communal audience as they significantly transform and politicize the relationship between performer and spectator within the folk musical. Let us recall, for instance, the final sequence of Rappin’ in which Rappinhood walks through the streets rapping with his crew while neighborhood grocers, moms, street vendors, and even prostitutes contribute to the number with their own rhymes.
As noted earlier, numerous scholars have either directly or indirectly noted that the structure of the folk musical has habitually been used to romanticize or neutralize the history of racial struggle in the United States. It depicts happy and apolitical African American sharecroppers, slaves, or the general rural poor whose joy comes from their love of nature and fervent religious beliefs.34 Alternately, the folk musical can also evoke an all-white culturally homogenous utopian space of familial and communal harmony. The hip hop musical, by contrast, is a jarring intervention in this history. In the true hip hop musical, folk culture is actually used in a critical and political manner. There is also no point of absorption and re-presentation of Americana in the hip hop musical—no reworking of American historical mythology. These films present black and Latino culture in its contemporary context without the patina of historical romanticism. Importantly, rituals of performance refuse to simply speak about “timeless” and benign aspects of communities of color. Every integrated musical number in Wild Style includes a young man boasting his name and abilities, and this turn facilitates both the recognition of individual talent as well as a representation of communal identity through music and dance.35 In fact, as early as 1980 emerging recording star Kurtis Blow expressed the importance of rapping to the poverty stricken inner-city community. He noted that “rapping is a way of life to lower income people. … In Harlem each square block has its own rapper DJ who does battle with the other rappers.”36 Blow suggests that rapping in urban communities of color is historically and inextricably tied to collective representation and regional “dialogues” within the neighborhood.37 These regional dialogues coalesced into a broader discourse of communal solidarity and political leverage when the track “King Holiday” was produced in 1985 by Mercury/Polygram to honor the first observance of Martin Luther King Day.38 The song was a musical collaboration by rappers such as Run-D.M.C., Whodini, and the Fat Boys, as well as other performers like Kool and the Gang, Lisa Lisa, and Whitney Houston. King’s son, Dexter Scott King, who oversaw the project “specifically wanted to make a rap-based record because he wanted to reach the audience that has come of age since his father’s assassination.”39 In the 1980s, rapping was a form of collective representation that was able to deftly maneuver between the local inner-city block and the national political stage. Wild Style suggests as much a few years prior to the release of “King Holiday” by using hip hop performance strategies and the communal audience of the folk musical to engage with broader contemporary social issues.
Just as Ahearn reworks and redeploys the traditional folk audience of the musical, so too does the conventional setting of the home undergo a radical transformation in Wild Style. As we have seen, according to Altman the focus of performance in Hollywood folk musicals often takes place in a country setting or within the home. Altman argues that within these films
the family residence, whether farmhouse, mansion, or humble flat, thus takes on a symbolic value, for it serves not only as the stable and constant backdrop of the folk musical’s action, but also as a permanent reminder of the strength and stability of the American family and home.40
In Wild Style, however, it is the street and other public spaces of the South Bronx that function as “home,” the community’s central locus for communication, socialization, and performance. We rarely see the interior of any actual residence. The domestic has instead been replaced by the street and other urban locales—spaces that provide the backdrop for communal expression and bonding. Children play in the streets, people meet, converse, and perform on front stoops, groups convene to play ball on neighborhood courts, and an abandoned amphitheater is taken over by the community to be used as a performance space for amateurs.
In an early scene, after we first see Raymond painting his Zoro logo, the camera follows our graffiti hero walking at night and then tracks up slowly to reveal the shadowy façade of a brick tenement building. Raymond then climbs into his home through a window, and encounters his brother Hector (a military man) who greets him with a gun as he condemns the state of his graffiti covered room. Thus, even when we do glimpse the spare interior of Raymond’s apartment it, like the street and the trains, has been covered with graffiti. Hector refers to Raymond’s art brought indoors as “fucking garbage” and advises him to “stop fucking around and be a man.” Here we witness a conflict between two brothers, yet Hector clearly displays a paternalistic tone toward his younger sibling, disciplining Raymond in what appears to be a home without a father.
This sequence reinforces the theme of entering prohibited spaces by recalling the opening shots of the film in which Raymond breaks into a subway yard, transgressing spatial boundaries. As Raymond enters his bedroom like a cat burglar through the window frame, he is literally apprehended and admonished by his older brother in military garb. Even though Raymond is in fact entering his own residence, this domestic space promises none of the comforts of the family home found in the folk musical, and it is monitored by an authoritative figure who resists the socially progressive artistic interventions that graffiti has to offer.
The conflict between Hector and Raymond is staged as a “showdown” between a figure of parental authority and a teenager, referring to the stereotypical problem of teenagers and their perpetually untidy rooms. This scene uses a cliché found in many representations of parent/youth relations (in sitcoms, television ads, and countless teen films) in order to open up a radical and suggestive premise regarding the transformation of space through artistic intervention. The “garbage” to which Hector refers is of course a radical reworking of domestic space, an intervention that seeks to resist the conformity and limitations of inner-city tenement housing.
It is worth pointing out that the camera prevents us from seeing the entirety of Raymond’s cramped room. Ahearn only focuses on small sections of the space, dividing it up into artistically abstract components that isolate and emphasize the graffiti rather than the domestic function of the room. Susan Stewart has argued that
graffiti make claims upon materiality, refusing to accept the air as the only free or ambiguously defined space. The practice of graffiti emphasizes the free commercial quality of urban spaces in general, a quality in contrast to the actual paucity of available private space.41
Ahearn’s mise-en-scène underscores the unstable and permeable border between the inside and outside, between legal and illegal spaces, and, most dramatically, between the functions of “home” and street.
Other rap musicals of this era do not undertake such a drastic reconfiguration of “home” as a locus for communal interaction, but in most of these films it is still the street (rather than the domestic interior) that provides the focal point of communal gatherings and rituals. Interestingly, what cultural anthropologist Melvin Williams wrote of the impoverished African American Pittsburgh neighborhood Belmar is relevant here:
“Home” for the “genuine” Blacks in Belmar is “just a stopping-off place.” It is a “motel” where you sleep, eat, and “hide, if you have to.” But it is not one’s “hearth,” “castle,” or showplace for entertaining. The street corner, the tavern, the “speakeasy,” a favorite stoop, or the neighborhood “greasy spoon” are where people, especially men, “hang out.” This variation of location is referred to as “down the way,” “up the way,” “hit the street,” “over the way,” and the “avenue.” Most “genuine” Blacks have never had the consistent resources to furnish and maintain a home, so they spend most of their interactional time out of the house. Part of the mystique of out-of-home interaction is the potential for including large numbers of people. One of the techniques is loud communication. Thus, all within hearing distance are welcome to interact and respond to “what’s going on.”42
Wild Style showcases the domestic squalor and transformation of a Latino home in particular, but the observations made by Williams in the 1970s about a black community in Pittsburgh seem to ring true for the inhabitants of the South Bronx in Ahearn’s film as well, regardless of their race. Thus, the function of hip hop for communities of color is partly an extension of organizational structures that ensured the largest potential for public participation in political and social rituals. This model for collective communication and interaction described by Williams shows how multiple public spaces in less prosperous urban black communities replaced the importance and centrality of the family home found in the classical-era folk musical, and indeed the heart of white middle-class American mythology. As he notes, “home” (one’s actual domestic living quarters) functions more like a place where one fulfills necessary duties (like sleeping and eating) instead of providing a nurturing space of social interaction for the black residents of Belmar. Likewise, all of the important actions and rituals that bring people together in the hip hop musical occur outside of the symbolic confines of “home.” Williams’s observations are about a specific black community, yet they are important here because they illustrate the ways in which many facets of hip hop culture are in fact coping mechanisms for life in an impoverished inner-city region. Neighborhood spirit is not gauged by displays of domestic exterior extravagance, a common measure of communal pride in suburbia. Rather, exhibitions of individual creativity that are fleeting, ephemeral, and within public view, such as graffiti murals and impromptu dance numbers, displace the physical presentation of suburban neighborhood pride so neatly evoked by the imagery of the perfect white picket fence. Even through historically the Afro-American Clean Block Drive encouraged urban blacks to emulate postwar suburbia’s fascination with uniformity, orderliness, and superficial perfection in their communities, these goals, perhaps, seemed less important and less within reach given the rapid decline of inner-city housing and other infrastructures in the early 1980s.
It can be said that the representation of “home” in the hip hop musical is structured in two different but related manners. Firstly, the true hip hop musical reveals how the family residence is no longer a productive site for social bonding. For instance, Wild Style and Beat Street point to the failure of governmental bodies to maintain the infrastructure of inner-city communities by visually documenting the actual dilapidated housing of the South Bronx. When domestic spaces are revealed in Wild Style, they become sites of confrontation used to underscore the inadequacy of housing structures in disadvantaged urban neighborhoods. Rappin’ is largely about the need for better homes and domestic services in an impoverished urban locale, and Rappinhood, the “music man” of the film, becomes a community activist on his journey towards romantic success and stardom. In this film, the home is an actual menace to the health of poor citizens as the community nearly freezes to death waiting for heat that has been turned off by a greedy landlord. In Krush Groove, musical bonding rituals occur almost entirely in public spaces, while we see very few domestic interiors. In contrast, the classical-era folk musical usually featured one or more musical numbers within a domestic setting that brought the family and extended family of neighbors together within a neatly proscribed space of social ritual, representing a positive symbol of familial and communal spirit. The true hip hop musical inverts this spatial norm in order to reveal how the family home has in fact become non-nurturing, claustrophobic, and even life- threatening for certain populations.
Secondly, the representation of “home” is reduced or completely elided in some examples drawn from the surface hip hop musical. In Breakin’ Through and Delivery Boys, this omission can be explained by the fact that poverty and problematic living situations of inner-city neighborhoods are not important aspects of the films. In the case of Body Rock, as noted earlier, we do witness the impoverishment of the main character’s living quarters, yet there is no link between his indigence and the plight of the rest of his community. Delivery Boys and Breakin’ Through simply avoided any polemic or socially charged material, and the absence of a black or Latino inner-city household in a film supposedly about hip hop culture functions differently across the spectrum of early hip hop cinema.
The displacement or absence of the actual home in the surface hip hop musical, and the complete transformation of it in Wild Style, are radical reconfigurations of the conservative exchanges, values, and rituals that signified “home” in the classical folk musical. Contested notions of “home” invoked a volatile and troubled discourse for the nation in general at this time, and specifically for inner-city neighborhoods. I have discussed in the first chapter how the massive failure to provide adequate housing for many of the nation’s poorest urban communities had been exposed in national news media following President Carter’s widely publicized visit to the South Bronx in 1977. Just a few years later, President Reagan vowed to transform this devastated area through tax incentives and the involvement of private industry, but his policies achieved the opposite effect; the gap between the wealthiest and poorest citizens widened and the number of people living in poverty—particularly black and Hispanic children—increased.43 Granted, poverty rates had risen during Carter’s presidency, but social programs had been created or buttressed in the 1970s rather than reduced or eliminated. The Reagan administration, in contrast, endeavored to roll back spending or eliminate altogether a number of programs related to child abuse, neglect prevention, as well as juvenile delinquency.44 African American families became more vulnerable on several fronts when changes to governmental policy, which reduced or eliminated programs that had previously protected the rights of minorities, took effect during the early 1980s.45 Under Reagan, federal assistance programs across the board were dismantled or significantly reduced.46 This was particularly troublesome for black families because they (even those whose members were working) have statistically been more reliant on government assistance than nonminority families, and their income levels actually diminished in the first few years of the decade compared to other sectors of the population.47 Even when relatively sympathetic mainstream media attempted to assess the status of African American families in the mid-1980s, the results were less than admirable. “The Vanishing Family—Crisis in Black America,” a CBS report helmed by Bill Moyers, was met with vitriol by the black community because it appeared to repress the institutional roots of black poverty and the reality of diminishing access to public programs in favor of what historian Manning Marable decried as a “‘blame the victim’ thesis of black poverty.”48 In fact, the year that Wild Style was completed marked the highest poverty rate for black children in America since the U.S. Census Bureau began compiling and recording poverty statistics. While trying to find a neat and conclusive correlation between statistical data and cinematic production is certainly not the goal of this argument, it is significant that this film emerges at a time when children of color, their families, and the material infrastructure of urban communities were considerably destabilized, rendering the search for meaningful articulations of “home,” family, and community increasingly urgent.
According to Altman, the folk musical often called up a distant past in order to expurgate all of the unpleasant aspects of that earlier historical period. He notes that the classic Hollywood folk musical used various aspects of American regional popular culture, and that this “lens” of folk culture helped to romanticize and cast a mythic glow upon American history.49 Although earlier black-cast folk musicals such as Hearts in Dixie and Cabin in the Sky often reveal music and dance to be the most important cohesive activity undertaken by the rural black community, group performance frequently only laments personal failings. The threat to collective harmony comes from within the group rather than outside.50 One of the first all-black cast films by a major studio, Hallelujah! (1929), is exemplary here. In this film, the organization of labor that allowed for the systematic exploitation of black rural cotton pickers is not scrutinized as a problem for the community. Instead, the moral weakness of one man, Zeke, is responsible for all of the hardship and suffering. He loses six months wages earned by the entire family, refuses the affections of a morally respectable girl from his community, and causes the death of his brother. Thus, poverty, familial grief, and neighborhood tensions are attributed to the actions of the individual rather than the systemic racial exclusions and inequities of the hegemonic social order and economy.
In contrast, Wild Style documents urban poverty without romanticizing the living conditions of inner-city residents and it highlights communal solutions rather than focusing solely on personal weakness as a destructive force for the collective. As noted earlier, Beat Street even explores the plight of a family who is forced to squat in an abandoned building because there is no adequate affordable housing. While there are occasionally “bad” individuals in these films (such as the character Spit in Beat Street who covers other graffiti artist’s work), the use of folk musical devices in several hip hop musicals, such as an emphasis on the neighborhood as socially inclusive, and the demonstration of communal cohesion and values through amateur performance, facilitates creative and productive responses to oppressive material conditions rather than focusing on individual shortcomings.
Ahearn filmed one of the most successful sequences of Wild Style as a tribute to Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (1961).51 However, instead of presenting the problem of urban divisions as violent warfare between racial groups (represented by the white working-class Jets and the Puerto Rican Sharks in Wise and Robbins’s film), Ahearn constructs a city space of performance that frequently crosses racial divides. This cinematic tribute, shot in an inner-city basketball court, features rival crews Cold Crush and Fantastic Five engaging in a competitive rap session while performing a stylized dance inflected basketball game. The references to West Side Story’s opening shots of New York’s Spanish Harlem are very specific, from the use of urban basketball courts to the decisive snapping of fingers that anticipate the number. Furthermore, the inscription of gang territory is marked in the earlier film by graffiti as well. These two films, however, differ radically in their appraisal of the sublimation of violence into performance. In West Side Story the initial friction between the Sharks and the Jets is represented through dance but this rivalry later culminates in a violent, ultimately lethal rumble at the end of the film. Conversely, the competitive performance aspects of Wild Style suggest that the potential for youth gang conflict can be fully diffused through its redirection into creative forces.
A decade before Ahearn’s film was released, graffiti and gang culture in New York City sometimes shared a close relationship as rival gangs waged war on each other through violence as well as competitive tagging. Graffiti writers without gang affiliations were occasionally subject to harassment and beatings when they ventured into unfamiliar municipal regions.52 To secure their safety, a gang of Brooklyn-based graffiti writers, the Ex-Vandals (short for Experienced Vandals)—whose only purpose was writing—emerged in the early 1970s.53 A decade later, the desire to transform the brutality of youth gang interactions into non-violent and creative entities is largely how hip hop culture developed, according to most sources. Afrika Bambaataa and other former gang members created the Bronx-based Zulu Nation, “a loose organization dedicated to peace and survival,” and promoted performance and hip hop as creative ways to end strife between youth gangs in inner-city neighborhoods.54 David Toop writes that early venues for hip hop culture such as community dances “helped bring former rival gangs together. In the transition from outright war, the hierarchical gang structure mutated into comparatively peaceful groups, called crews.”55 Wild Style’s basketball rap is an example of this potentially radical diffusion of violence into competitive performance, uniquely situating this utopian aspect of inner-city youth culture within the generic boundaries of an integrated musical number.
There is little statistical data on gang violence in inner-city regions at this time, nor could one really attain accurate numbers relating to the escalation or lessening of these incidents. Sally Banes, in her review of the breakdance manual Breakdancing (1984), is skeptical of the arguments made on behalf of breaking as an alternative to gang violence. After an unfavorable evaluation of the manual, she tersely quips “And, the book claims that as a result of breaking, gang warfare has stopped in the Bronx (!).”56 On the other hand, in July of 1984 Newsweek reported that a Denver high school was embracing breakdance as a successful strategic alternative to gang violence:
At North High School in Denver, where fighting erupts regularly between rival gangs, kids have begun to break-dance in the hallways between classes. “It’s a way to be No. 1 without blowing somebody away,” says Pierre Jiminez, director of a Denver juvenile-delinquency program who pushed for a city-sponsored break-dance contest.57
Boston Globe reporter Ethan Bronner also noted that
on a recent Saturday afternoon at radio station WMBR in Cambridge, two black teen-agers with a long-standing rivalry nearly came to blows as they waited for disc jockey Magnus Johnstone to interview them. Seeing trouble through the glass of his studio, Johnstone intervened, asking “Do you want to battle with the beef or the word? If with the word, let’s do it on the air.” The two aspiring “rap” musicians accepted his offer. Using rap’s driving boastful idiom, they fought it out on the airwaves through a formalized singsong duel of rhymes each had written, mirroring similar “battles” held in parks and on street corners throughout Roxbury and other black sections of Greater Boston.58
Mandalit del Barco, writing in 1984, asserted that “by all accounts, break-dancing has become a substitute for violence.”59 She backs up this claim with the words of Lorenzo “Kuriaki” Soto, a member of Rock Steady Crew:
Instead of fighting, we break against each other. … If I was dancing and somebody were to say, “You’re whack, man. You don’t even got the good moves,” I’d tell him instead, “Well, I’ll battle you.” Right there, instead of me coming up and hitting him, I’d say, “I’ll battle you, see how good you are.” Whoever has the most moves wins.60
Interestingly, Delivery Boys, the juvenile hip hop musical parody, ridiculed this serious and potentially progressive aspect of hip hop culture. During this film’s final show number, the Brooklyn Bridge Break Dance Contest, the event’s corporate sponsor extols the virtues of breaking’s ability to circumvent violence. In fact, he even refers to this practice, and hip hop culture in general, as a “new hope for the young people of our nation’s inner cities” and a “new way of settling difference.” However, not long after the contest begins, increasingly aggressive dance moves between the rival crews (the Devil Dogs and the Delivery Boys) degenerate into an all-out gang brawl. Competitive performance, the very heart of hip hop culture, is shown to be the catalyst to gang violence in this film. Wild Style, in contrast, maintains hip hop’s utopian promise of channeling conflict into dance through organized competition.
It is difficult to argue convincingly that competitive rap and break-dance contests in the early 1980s indisputably stemmed gang warfare, but hip hop culture’s push to assemble complex grassroots inner-city organizations dedicated to solving an urban problem is in itself a momentous and laudable achievement. Without a doubt, many youth who were pulled towards hip hop crews interested in developing skills rather than fighting were positively affected, learning to cope with anger and frustration through means other than violence.61 As a testament to the continuing relevance of this facet of early hip hop culture, the sublimation of physical conflict through dance has continued to be explored in youth films of the later 1980s and into the 1990s, including Rooftops (1989) and Only the Strong (1993).62
Ahearn’s West Side Story–influenced “basketball number” brings dance and athletics together as two opposing teams or “crews” battle each other through rhyme and choreographed movements, all the while chasing the ball across an inner-city court. This number makes reference to a specific iconic musical number but it also neatly brings the relationship between violence and performance to bear on the concept of integration within the musical film genre. As noted in the opening chapter, the term “integration” refers to the myriad ways in which a musical number relates to the overarching thematic concerns of the narrative. Musical film numbers generally conform to two modes of performance—spontaneous musical outbursts derived from an everyday encounter and song and dance numbers confined to the actual space of the stage proscenium. The first instance often transcends the boundaries of realism to offer a spectacle of utopian artifice while the second usually consists of a realistic use of sound and space.63 Although both types of musical numbers may relate to the plot or theme of the film, the former is usually more closely linked with revealing thematic or emotional plot information because it arises directly from situations and speech contained in the film narrative. Thus, the naturally occurring musical performance is most closely associated with the concept of the integrated musical number within the genre.
In Wild Style’s basketball throwdown, the transition from speech to song as a natural occurrence arising from the plot is certainly in place, unavoidably so, since rapping is already directly derived from everyday speech. Individual members of the crews answer back and forth to one another in increasingly challenging rhymes directed both at individuals and the gang as a whole. Because crew competition is one of the overarching themes of Wild Style, by the time this number occurs, the motivation for the scene is in fact already inscribed in the film through many prior displays of creative rivalry.
The competitive theme of this musical number is highlighted by the lyrics of the rap because the names of the two opposing crews—the Cold Crush Brothers and Fantastic Five—are repeated throughout the performance. Members of the two groups also state their own individual names during the rhyme, emphasizing the unique components of each organization. The initial movements of the number are choreographed to match the competitive boasts asserted by the rappers who physically challenge one other as each new crew member is introduced. Camerawork in this sequence utilizes both rapid editing and sustained long takes that follow the ball through the air as it travels between players and the net. In the latter instance, the movement is so quick that the resulting images often resemble a blur of outstretched arms and leaping torsos while the two crews vie for possession of the ball. When the camera directly follows the actual movements of the basketball this underscores the escalating confrontational “dance” of the two crews by imitating the conventional style of filming sports games for televised broadcast. Thus, the musical content, dance expression, and camera movement of the number all work towards conveying a central concern of the film: the competitive configurations of hip hop culture that developed from organized youth contests.
As the camera enthusiastically follows the basketball, it also brings into view the surrounding spaces and faces of the inner city and shows us a chorus line of young female rappers commenting on the two crews. The edge of the cinematic frame reveals a vibrant picture of inner-city life as it captures other ball games, graffiti-laden walls, tenement blocks, and onlookers. Documentary images of street life in the South Bronx are completely fused with the spaces of a musical performance in this sequence. A sustained focus on the rappers movements, rather than preventing documentary aspects from entering into the screen, actually facilitates their inclusion.
Wild Style is not only a musical, but also a dramatized documentary or docudrama.64 As such, it complicates any traditional discussion of reflexivity within the musical, and also helps illuminate a central contradiction of the documentary film: the form attempts to heighten the realistic experience of the film world for the spectator through its exploration of actual events and persons, but paradoxically its employment of non-trained actors also functions to fracture the illusionism of the cinematic diegesis. Ahearn based Wild Style on his own observations and experiences of the South Bronx community in the 1980s. The main protagonists and the supporting cast were not professional actors but part of the community that the film attempted to capture and present as a fictionalized narrative loosely based on actual events. Thus, the “quality” of acting does not conform to mainstream Hollywood expectations. It is important to note here that many documentaries made before the innovation of compact and easily portable sound and visual recording equipment were, to a large degree, dramatized documentaries. Technology did not permit the filmmaker to record spontaneously until approximately the mid-twentieth century. Before this time, most approaches to documentary filmmaking concerning living people closely conformed to Ahearn’s method: the subjects would be studied and these observations were then organized and narrativized by the filmmaker. The subjects of the film would subsequently participate in the reconstruction of certain “truths” about their culture or particular situation by “acting” in the resulting film, which was, by all contemporary accounts, considered a documentary.65
Fig. 2.4. Basketball Throwdown in Wild Style (1983): Rival MC crews from the Bronx, The Cold Crush vs. The Fantastic. Photographer: Cathy Campbell; courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.
Writers like Ellin Stein enthusiastically detailed Ahern’s use of hip hop practitioners and art gallery mavens to play roles based on their own personal experiences in New York City.66 Other hip hop musicals also made use of talented dancers, rappers, and performers who were important figures within the subculture. For instance, Krush Groove featured “real” rappers and “authentic” talent such as LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C., the Fat Boys (the Disco Three), New Edition, the Beastie Boys, Kurtis Blow, and Russell Simmons. The film, which fictionalizes the story of Russell Simmons’s record label Def Jam and his relationship with Run-D.M.C. and Kurtis Blow, cast Run-D.M.C. as themselves (Blair Underwood played the role of Russell Simmons). Simmons was also involved in the writing of the film’s screenplay. Beat Street, likewise, has been lauded by critics for attempting to realistically capture ghetto life while using experienced hip hop practitioners.67 Additionally, the extras hired for club scenes in the film were actual patrons of the Roxy, a move that enhanced “the film’s authenticity,” according to the Afro-American.68 To gauge the importance of “authenticity”—location shooting and actors culled from hip hop subculture—when these films were first received, consider dance reporter Kevin Grubb’s enthusiastic (albeit overstated) account of Beat Street’s “documentary impulses”:
There are no studio sets in the forthcoming feature film Beat Street. The “set” for the movie, one of the first to focus on break dancers and rap musicians, is the urban landscape of New York: the crumbling tenements of the South Bronx, traffic-thronged city streets, dressed-down hip-hop clubs. In this authentic environment, Beat Street’s cast is right at home, for most of them have grown up here. Their dance and their music are products of an inner-borough upbringing, an outgrowth of a society that grudgingly condones subway graffiti, ghetto blasters, and head spins on the sidewalk.69
While Grubb accurately characterized the setting of Beat Street, the film’s “music man,” Guy Davis, was the son of renowned actor, playwright, and activist Ossie Davis, and female lead Rae Dawn Chong, daughter of actor Tommy Chong, was Canadian. The film, however, did feature other cast members who grew up in impoverished inner-city New York communities and were directly involved in hip hop culture. Moreover, even the most commercially-oriented hip hop musicals, like the Breakin’ films, included emerging hip hop talent such as Ice-T.
The hip hop musical as a subgenre is inconsistent in this respect since rapping could be performed by someone without experience in such vocal stylings, and graffiti might also be simulated by a film crew (as was the case in Beat Street) rather than using the available urban milieu and actual inner-city writers. A convincing depiction of breakdancing, however, must involve the casting of actual performers schooled in this style of dance. For this reason, even though breakdance-oriented films were the most commercially saturated of all hip hop cinema, these productions paradoxically had to utilize actual hip hop practitioners. Despite the garish costuming and repression of graffiti culture in the Breakin’ films, they were firmly linked to “real” hip hop talent through the casting of urban dance innovator Adolfo “Shabba Doo” Quinones, who had previously appeared on Soul Train and Saturday Night Live with his groundbreaking dance group the Lockers, and rising electric boogie dance star Michael “Boogaloo Shrimp” Chambers in leading roles. Quinones was quick to emphasize his “street cred” in interviews with the African American press. Shortly after the release of Breakin’ 2, for instance, he told the Afro-American that “being from the streets, I can assume all kinds of characters, based on what I saw in the ghetto in Chicago.”70 Quinones also contributed to Breakin’s script.71 Likewise, as noted earlier, Ahearn’s film takes us closer to “real” characters and spaces through the use of location shooting and the employment of amateurs connected to the actual events of the film.
Wild Style also inserts animation sequences into the live-action portions of the film, causing a further disruption of spatial continuity and narrative flow. These strategies can usefully be considered instances of reflexivity—a process by which a text acknowledges its medium of production, specific intertextual references, and in some cases, its reception and authorship.72 Wild Style makes use of several reflexive devices—lack of naturalism in acting style and the insertion of animated sequences within a live-action narrative—which function to demystify the cinematic text and allude to its status as a crafted object. Paradoxically, these moments of fracture and demystification, which are closely tied to experimental and avant-garde filmmaking strategies, are also strongly connected to the overall structure of the film as an exploration of hip hop culture.73 For instance, the animation that punctuates the film recalls the act of graffiti writing not only because the two are closely related forms of visual expression—they are both graphic arts—but also because many of these initial animated sequences include images of graffiti-style writing. Robert Stam suggests that animation and the musical film are linked by their shared tendencies towards anti-illusionism.74 Characters in both types of cinema are usually endowed with the magical ability to transgress the parameters of the physical world and transcend corporeal limitations, such as when Fred Astaire dances on ceilings and walls and when the Roadrunner survives numerous head on collisions with highway traffic.75
Both animated sequences that occur in Wild Style are set to music and feature, respectively, the words of the opening credits and a scene of sexual exploration at a late-night hotel room party. In the latter animation sequence, Phade, Raymond, and rapper Busy Bee attempt to seduce a trio of girls at the Alps Hotel, after a club competition victory by Busy Bee. The girls, who are lured to the local hotel after being promised a night at the Hyatt, are initially disappointed. However, they soon warm up to the three men and we witness an intense and rollicking party scene as rapid editing captures the revelers passing joints, sharing beer, and throwing around the money Busy Bee earned from the evening’s performance. This is intercut with animated images of sexually explicit acts and a live-action shot of lacy red bras falling to the hotel floor. Throughout this party sequence, the spectator is acutely aware that the animated figures, to some extent, are blocking the view of “actual” sexually explicit material. The cartoons are crudely drawn, distinguished by a bright but minimal palate, and each figure is rendered in only one color with a consistent black background. In this sequence, the sexual desire of the characters on-screen is transposed onto a group of drawn images instead of being articulated through a live-action performance number—the typical vehicle for expressing amorous desire in the Hollywood musical. These animated figures acknowledge the particular history of the musical genre, which although steeped in sexual tension, rarely visually articulates sexually explicit images.76 Such deliberately unsophisticated cartoon images of sexuality transgress the limits of the musical genre with their highly erotic content while simultaneously upholding its prudish antecedents by visually hiding the “real” scenes of explicit sexual content.
The opening sequence of Wild Style, which conveys the film credits through animated words, deserves special attention. Artists began working on the animation sequence in the summer of 1982, and the unique result was a collaboration between graffiti artist Zephyr (who plays Zroc in the film), Revolt (animation student Joey Ahlbum), and Becky High.77 It was intended to be a representation of the graffiti writer’s “black book,” described by Zephyr as “bound sketchbooks that we’d fill with ‘pieces’ or ‘styles,’ that we’d execute with thin black Flair pens and colored alcohol markers; Design markers were our favorite.”78 Graffiti artists carried their books with them so that their work was always available to be seen by other writers. Zephyr also notes that these books functioned as a conduit of influence between graffiti writers, and as a secondary circuit of movement, which distributed the artist’s work throughout the urban environment.79 The film sequence, which was created with paper and colored markers—the same materials writers used to create their “black books”—included words such as “BREAK,” “POP,” “WILD STYLE,” and “RAP,” an image of the New York skyline, stars, and a moving subway car. Words dominate the opening credits. For instance, the sequence begins with an animated image of the word “GRAFFITI” exploding to unleash the rest of the visual material. Subsequently, a human figure emerges from the letter “O” in the word “POP” after it appears on screen. Words appear first in this animated sequence and they give rise to pictorial forms and human figuration as the segment progresses. Wild Style’s animated words are also very different from typical animated opening credits. The words found in the film’s opening sequence seem to dance across the screen in perpetual motion, pulsating with movement; they truly are animated. This treatment of the text as image incorporates the perceived sense of movement accorded to the word within the particular style of graffiti referred to as “wild style,” which the film showcases. As Ahearn notes, the graffiti writer makes letters dance; he or she animates them.80
Fig. 2.5. Animation cell from Wild Style (1983) by Zephyr. Courtesy of Charlie Ahearn.
Wild Style’s initial animated sequence expresses this attribute of graffiti by equating the word with movement, a quality not usually associated with film credits or other conventional forms of writing. Letters dance just as people dance in musical film, and in this way the words of graffiti are conceived of as central characters in the film’s narrative. This opening gesture therefore ties the practice of graffiti, and the animation of the word, to the tradition of the Hollywood musical, a form that relies on the centrality of dance to express emotional states and plot advancements. Subway trains, perhaps the most famous urban canvas for graffiti, also suggest a perpetual “dance” throughout the city.
As the opening credits demonstrate, the word becomes image in graffiti writing; it is the center of visual interest and it displaces the primacy of the pictorial image grounded in mimetic principles. In Western art history, the pictorial image has traditionally been the center of artistic expression. This was challenged somewhat in the 1960s and ’70s with the rise of conceptualism, a practice that frequently presented the written word or a set of words as the center of artistic focus.81 In these projects, the formal rendering of the word was usually not an exercise in the display of artistic virtuosity. The text suggested an idea to the spectator, and the idea itself was the important aspect of the piece rather than the skill used to craft and fashion the actual object located in the gallery or museum. This institutional art shared a key concept of the urban vernacular of graffiti, which came to prominence at roughly the same time. In both practices, the word literally became the center of visual interest, yet graffiti maintains very traditional values that run almost counter to conceptual art. In fact, graffiti places a high value on artistic displays of virtuosity—an aspect forcefully absent in conceptual art—with the most intricate and skillfully executed textual images garnering the highest accolades in the subculture. Although such a traditional veneration of formal skills is apparent in the rapid development and proliferation of distinct styles in the early 1980s, graffiti culture also permitted a more democratic route to fame in that a writer who was prolific could command respect even if his or her tags and “throw ups” were hastily rendered and poorly executed.82
Graffiti also returns language to the “primitive” form of the picto-gram, a type of visual representation in which the signifier was closely wed to the signified.83 This kind of written communication was supplanted by the alphabet system, a form that is premised upon the “effacement of the signifier.”84 These histories of written language are particularly relevant to the painted image of Zoro we see in the film—a literal representation of a well-known character’s profile. The signifier bears a mimetic relation to the signified, yet meaning is deferred because the signifier relates not to the original character Zoro, but to a young artist who has co-opted his image as a signature. In contrast, it would seem that the word Zoro—and indeed all wild style forms of graffiti in which an artist’s chosen name is rendered through a highly stylized alphabet—is an intensification of the later historical development of the alphabet whereby written language is transformed into an arbitrary system in which the link between signifier and signified is completely broken. This assessment is complicated, moreover, by the fact that each graffiti artist is generally associated with a particular and distinct visual style. Therefore, the population of graffiti writers, and others in the community in general, would be able to decipher the meaning (the identification of a particular work with a specific person) of a piece through its stylistic characteristics or unique flourish. Thus, the word or signifier constituted through an arbitrary language system returns to the realm of the pictorial, but this return is only partial since the decipherability of the image is dependent upon a certain familiarity with the practice of graffiti culture. The circulation of graffiti images in the film, both in its live-action portions and animated sequences, challenges the threshold between pictorial and arbitrary signification.
Julian Stallabrass has argued that graffiti travels a parallel history with advertising culture in terms of the relationship between signification and referent. He notes, “Graffiti fails as a symbol because of the mismatch between real identities and the tags which are supposed to stand in for them but only end up representing themselves.”85 In his effort to show that graffiti mimics the aims of modern advertising—the repression of the commodity’s actual conditions of manufacture and the fact of its discrete material components—Stallabrass emphasizes the apparent erasure of the body at work in graffiti culture.86 He insists that the written name or tag becomes a meaningless form of branding whereby “identity is a progressively disappearing point, discarding all qualities behind the mask of the sign.”87 In contrast, I have been arguing that this is something Ahearn’s film implores us to see—graffiti culture is precisely about the presence of the body and the process of creation as a work of art. Ubiquitous tags and large graffiti pieces were not emptied of meaning as they invaded the urban environment in the 1980s. To the contrary, they participated in a dialogue in which spatial terrain was a constantly shifting and highly politicized arena of social “play.” Stallabrass’s evocative essay ends with an eloquent articulation of the historical processes of graffiti, what he describes as the overwriting of the graffiti surface—a cacophony of multiple voices that long for recognition as they crumble into one another. This unintentionally radical result is, for Stallabrass, a “comment on fragmentation, the loss of meaning, and the decline of writing under commercial culture.”88 As romantic as this vision is, it does not account for the historical specificities of voices that were part of this archeologically embedded dialogue. Further, Stallabrass does not relate graffiti to other tenets of hip hop culture and his essay works to tie this practice closely to the repetitious nature of advertising rather than explore the dichotomy of individualism and collectivity that characterize graffiti as an art form in the United States.
In contrast, as noted earlier, Wild Style sought to unite a romantic individuated persona of the graffiti artist with communal cohesion, as well as historical avant-garde art practice. This connection to twentieth century art history extended not only the content of the film but also to Ahearn’s formal strategies. The director has remarked that he was hoping to achieve a cubist strategy of editing within the film. His original commitment to this approach was somewhat undercut by the demands of his editor, but the finished work retains a disjointed and often abrupt quality. Ahearn notes that his initial intent to connect the overall artistic effect of the film to various aspects of hip hop culture was tethered to an understanding of hip hop as being intimately related to earlier twentieth century avant-garde movements. He writes that
the aesthetic of the DJ back-spinning a record relates to a kind of cubist idea of cutting up and rearranging the original. A lot of scenes I had arranged to music would have shown up visually like a record you’re back-spinning, so that they would run forward, backward, and recreate in a visual medium what is going on with the rap artists and the breakdancers. I wanted to spin the images on themselves.89
He has also described the practice of the hip hop DJ, graffiti writer, and breakdancer in terms of “kinetic cubism” whereby bits of records are rearranged, manipulated, and recombined by the DJ, while the breaker and graffiti writer use a highly stylized and original approach to manipulating the compositional figurations of the body, and the established linear forms of the letter.90 Cubism and Futurism’s interest in fracturing the spatial plane, Fauvism’s appropriation of bright non-naturalistic colors, and Abstract Expressionism’s embrace of everyday materials and broad muscular gestures structured Ahearn’s vision of hip hop culture. Thus, the aesthetic quality of the film’s various reflexive characteristics—disjointed editing and the intrusion of animation into the live-action format—are actually related to Wild Style’s attempt to fully represent the artistic sensibilities of hip hop as the inheritor of modern art strategies.
In Wild Style, the historical presumptions of reflexivity within the musical are vastly complicated by its link to the musical and performance strategies of hip hop. The film’s reflexivity is different from the variety associated with Hollywood musicals of the 1930s, which often included a knowing wink to the camera or an exaggerated gesture meant to reveal the personality trait of a character. These cinematic flourishes of the classical era, while disrupting the transparency of the medium, nevertheless worked towards an overall cinematic harmony.91 They also united spectators within a shared cinematic fantasy, and are generally considered to promote feelings of incorporation within the diegesis of the film for the spectator rather than fracture or disjuncture. When Maurice Chevalier winks or smiles directly into the camera during Love Me Tonight, for instance, he acknowledges the presence of the camera but simultaneously invites the film spectator to be in on the joke. In contrast, Wild Style fosters an ambivalent spectatorial experience. On the one hand, the narrative is held together by the established conventions of the Hollywood film musical and therefore works toward narrative coherence. On the other, the various elements of reflexivity I have described—animated sequences, disjunctive editing practices, and non-naturalistic acting—disrupt the flow of continuity and fracture the narrative space and coherent diegesis of the film.
Furthermore, if Wild Style’s basketball number can be considered a traditional integrated number, it nevertheless challenges the narrative links assigned to the integrated musical performance by Altman.92 Altman argues that the musical number functions to reconcile two mutually exclusive terms introduced in the plot of the film, usually the male and female leads. But how do we account for a musical film in which none of the “stars” are musical performers? Wild Style’s romantic leads are also not even present in two of the main musical numbers, the “Basketball Rap” and the “Stoop Rap.” The two stars of the film might not be musical entertainers, but like the typical folk musical, the concept of amateur performance suffuses every aspect of the film. Living in the inner city is described as performing for the teenagers and young adults in Ahearn’s film (the same can be said of Beat Street, Krush Groove, and to some extent several characters in Rappin’ and the Breakin’ series). The differences between Raymond and Rose, and everyone else in Wild Style, are somehow significantly reduced because, according to the film, everyone can be captured as a performer.
This attenuation of distance between “stars,” supporting actors, and spectators further enhances the documentary aspect of the film. Even though Wild Style was a totally scripted documentary drama, Ahearn’s camera spends a great deal of time filming urban spaces that don’t necessarily further the plot. The street and the everyday encounters of urban life are also in many ways the “stars” of the film.93 Thus, the two main integrated musical sequences entirely leave out our protagonist, and at moments the power and space of the street totally encroaches on the narrative trajectory of the film. In fact, Wild Style deliberately democratizes performance spaces, creating a productive generic tension. The ostensible discord between the musical genre’s utopian impulses and documentary cinema’s aspirations toward social critique has permeated criticism of this film. For instance Jean Fisher writes that
in some respects, despite its assembly of original and articulate talent, Wild Style represents a missed opportunity to establish an “alternative” movie in the spirit of its own subject matter, or to open up a serious debate on the impulses that generate a subcultural network of codes and on their ambivalent relation to a wider cultural context. With the exception of a few panning shots of the semi-derelict landscape of the South Bronx and passing references to the origins of subway graffiti, Wild Style does not attempt to function as social documentary.94
I am not sure what the “missed opportunity” referred to here is since the film showed occupants of a notoriously oppressive social space responding positively to the challenges presented by this harsh urban environment. It is precisely the juxtaposition of “semi-derelict landscapes” with images of vigorous and creative responses to poverty and social constraints that thrust the film into the realm of social criticism. Moreover, all of the images of graffiti in the film—not just the “passing references to the origins of subway graffiti”—function as social critique. This is especially true given that part of the rhetoric of graffiti writing in the 1980s was, contrary to the views of most mainstream culture, communal beautification. Of the public’s initial reaction to his crew’s first full graffiti car, Lee Quinones notes that “they probably didn’t know it was graffiti; they probably thought the city was doing something good for a change. They probably thought they paid some muralist to do it.”95
If documentaries have historically been concerned with everyday life and the exposition of various unusual, problematic, or unacceptable social conditions, the musical has been largely concerned with spaces of fantasy, imagination, and utopian desires.96 Wild Style brings these two approaches to filmmaking together by using documentary strategies in an inventive way that imagines a progressive social space of performance with the power to transcend the particular problems of inner-city life. Even if Ahearn received some criticism for what was seen as the “whitewashing” of certain negative aspects of the South Bronx—namely, heroin and violence—this enabled him to capitalize on the most important theoretical aspect of the musical: to imagine what an idealized community might feel like, or at least what it might look and sound like.97 In response to this type of criticism of Wild Style, Ellin Stein notes that Ahearn is not “oblivious to these problems but he feels that this is usually the only side of ghetto life presented in the media.”98 The majority of true hip hop musicals function in a similar manner—as a positive and affirmative counter to the tremendously pessimistic media coverage that plagued inner city communities at this time.
Wild Style overwhelmingly celebrates the power to be found in noncommercial spaces of creativity associated with hip hop culture in the early 1980s—the painterly gestures of graffiti production, the art of creating innovative rhymes, muscular “kinetic” dance moves in breakdancing, and cutting up a record. Most importantly, it suggests that the ever-present image of graffiti art offered a means to transform the “real” geographical spaces of the city and that youth culture more generally occupies a prominent place in the progressive reordering of communal relations.
