Introduction

It is conventional wisdom that hip hop culture has become the main-stream—a multi-billion dollar industry that caters to the urban underclass as well as the wealthy suburban teen. Americans love success stories and no other cultural phenomenon is quite as demonstrative of the acquisition of material wealth as the rap video industry with its ever-present images of gold jewelry, luxury cars, bottles of Cristal champagne, and multi-million dollar pads. In fact, in the fall of 2008, high-end auction house Simon de Pury hosted “Hip-Hop’s Crown Jewels,” where one could purchase “bling” from the personal collections of Missy Elliot, LL Cool J, and the late Tupac Shakur. The auction included a microphone-shaped pendant worn by LL Cool J, Biz Markie’s pendant designed to look like a cassette tape, and a twelve-pound diamond encrusted necklace consigned by Lil Jon, which reads “Crunk Ain’t Dead.”1 There can be no mistake: hip hop as a representational trope encompassing graffiti, breakdance, DJing, rap, and most recently, poetry has come full circle, and the irony of a twelve-pound diamond necklace proclaiming the viability of crunk, a subgenre of hip hop music, cannot be ignored. Once invisible to both the mainstream and academia, and then an object of study for folklorists in the early 1980s, hip hop has now become a symbol of media driven capitalist excess even as “old-school” performers like Grand Wizzard Theodore and Grandmaster Caz perform at the National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia.²

Hip hop has also “made it” in the world of academia where we find books, conferences, and entire courses devoted to its study. While Simon de Pury auctioned off Missy Elliot’s black diamond and gold turntable ring, the English Department at North Carolina A&T University offered a course entitled “The History, Literary Connections, and Social Relevance of Hip hop.” Cornell University’s Music Department has conducted a graduate research course designed to utilize the institution’s collection of hip hop print and ephemera; Georgetown University has structured an entire course around the subject of rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z entitled “Sociology of Hip-Hop: Urban Theodicy of Jay-Z” for their 2011 fall semester; and students around the globe are reading That’s the Joint: The Hip Hop Studies Reader.3

Rap artists, because of their constant visibility in the popular music industry, are generally given the most attention in mainstream media, and likewise, academia has focused most intensely on elements of hip hop music. Hip hop cinema and films that feature a hip hop soundtrack have also received a moderate amount of study in scholarly circles, yet nearly all of this attention has been directed towards the urban centered so-called “New Black Realism” of the late 1980s and early 1990s, associated with the work of Spike Lee, the Hughes brothers, and John Singleton.

The very first hip hop film musicals made in the early 1980s—the subject of this book—have generally been considered poorly made works, sandwiched in between two notable, and for the most part highly regarded, periods of African American cinema: the Blaxploitation films of the 1970s and the aforementioned “New Black Realism.” At best, this corpus of hip hop centered films, which includes Wild Style (1983), Beat Street (1984), Body Rock (1984), Delivery Boys (1984), Breakin’ (1984), Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo (1984), Rappin’ (1985), Krush Groove (1985), and Disney’s made-for-television Breakin’ Through (1984), has been regarded as a disposable and unremarkable cinematic effort, and at worst, an embarrassment to the later genesis of “real” films about the “hood.” For instance, Gary Dauphin argues that most hip hop musicals of the early to mid-1980s were simply awful. He writes,

Unlike the wholly indie-minded Wild Style, the crop of B-monikered breakdancing films that appeared in 1984 and 1985—Beat Street, Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Body Rock—were products of LaLa Land interest and production techniques, industry attempts to shake what was then a still-growing money tree before the fad died or contracted back to its local roots. With that kind of pedigree it’s no surprise that three out of the four pictures mentioned above quite simply stank.⁴

Paula Massood’s impressive study of “black city cinema” only spends two pages on these musicals, which she describes as “hip-hop influenced films” that “bear the early traces of the urban look, sound, and themes that Spike Lee developed in his films and the hood films of the 1990s would further refine” and Murray Foreman’s extensive and otherwise very comprehensive account of space and place in hip hop culture only devotes three pages to the films.5 Nelson George indicts all hip hop-oriented cinema and observes that “the most consistently disappointing cultural off-shoots of hip hop have been the movies made about it. Feature films or documentaries, by and large, have been technically crude, clueless about the culture, juvenile, or unfocussed missed opportunities.”⁶ In speaking specifically about Krush Groove David Toop writes, “In the years to come, like the rock and roll features of the ’50s, the only reason for watching will be the brief musical performances—in this case by LL Cool J, Run-D.M.C. and the Beastie Boys.”⁷ On the whole, the initial instances of hip hop on film have either been excoriated or ignored in journalistic accounts as well as in academic writing.⁸

The tendency to omit these films from hip hop film history is undoubtedly related to the heterogeneous and rather unruly nature of these early productions. They do not fit easily into the kinds of categories that tend to structure film histories of hip hop-oriented cinema, including those organized around the experiences of black directors, the trope of the African American gangster figure, and the delineation of exclusively black urban neighborhoods.⁹ In fact, black and white directors were involved in the production of early hip hop cinema, the communities depicted in the films cut across racial and ethnic divides, and any traces of “gangsterism” were generally relegated to the narrative periphery. I intend to show that the significance of these films, and especially their wide-reaching explorations of the contemporary urban environment, racial inequity, and the perpetually transformative nature of the inner city, is enabled by their protean subject matter, varied production histories, multiethnic focus, as well as, surprisingly, their adherence to the generic tropes and iconography of the musical film.¹⁰

Early documents of hip hop culture that utilize the musical format are divided here into two categories. What I call the true hip hop musical features recognizable urban locations, sympathetic portraits of inner city communities, and politicized communal performance strategies, while the surface hip hop musical designates films that move away from social exposition and location shooting in order to emphasize dynamic break-dance choreography, outlandish costuming, and the aesthetic rather than political aspects of hip hop culture. These terms will be further unpacked in the following chapter. This book will also discuss films that use break-dance sequences within narratives that are not broadly concerned with hip hop culture or even specifically with breakdance. Flashdance (1983) and Fast Forward (1985), for instance, belong in this latter group and are not technically hip hop musicals. They do not have hip hop soundtracks, they focus on other settings besides black and Latino neighborhoods, and most importantly, breaking is not the predominant form of dance within these films. However, I have included them in this discussion because they use aspects of hip hop culture in ways that help to illuminate the racial politics of music and dance in Hollywood film within the context of the 1980s.

When hip hop musicals appear, however briefly, in accounts of 1980s cinema culture, historians have neglected to address how these films employ the tropes of the musical genre in innovative and transformative ways.11 As already indicated, criticism has tended to focus on the quality of their soundtracks and the street credibility of their performers. Notably, all of these films follow rather prescribed generic film musical structures and patterns through a sustained focus on communal harmony, romantic unions, and performance success—familiar aspects of the genre traditionally associated with conservative American values. However, I argue that these conventions have been taken up and transformed by the hip hop musical in order to present an unusually positive view of inner city life during this decade. This book explores such unique and innovative elements of the hip hop musical while also revealing the connections between cinematic musical performance, the recording of city space, and the social and political climate in which these films materialized.

Furthermore, no attention has been given to the ways in which these films provide a set of visual and aural signifiers though which one can trace the mainstream media’s adoption and transformation of black and Latino cultural products. This process, whereby entertainment produced by communities of color is repackaged and sold to a wide audience as youth entertainment through the mass media, also shaped the most significant and enduring postwar musical phenomenon when Alan Freed first renamed rhythm and blues rock ’n’ roll.¹² In truth, a similar process has also characterized much earlier forms of American popular entertainment. During the nineteenth century, for example, Irish entertainers appropriated African American performance traditions in the staging of minstrel shows for white audiences. White American musical film actors also imitated the style of black dancers, and dubbed African American voices remain notoriously uncredited in Hollywood classical cinema.¹³ Whether this process involves the actual “theft” of black cultural forms by white entertainers or refashioning performers of color into acceptable forms for the consumption of broad audiences, this cultural meeting point speaks to particular historical inequities within the entertainment industry itself and to the limits of the representational modes and performance spaces that define a particular era.

It is not a stretch to argue that the concept of “American freedom” promised in the Declaration of Independence of 1776, and the literal making of the United States of America as a sovereign entity in the years that followed, have been premised upon the appropriation of Indian land and the expropriation of black labor. These twin atrocities guaranteed white freedom through the oppression of other racial groups by placing limitations upon the latter’s rights to geographical expansion and spatial ownership. The discourses of social hierarchy enabled in cultural and artistic spaces produced through the “making” of the nation, not surprisingly, mimicked the racialized political conditions of “American freedom.” As a distinctly American strain of commodified leisure and entertainment culture developed out of the class formations and social reorganization engendered by the rapid processes of industrialization in the nineteenth century, variously sketched “borrowings” from communities of color by mainstream interests (albeit often marked by particular class affinities) relied upon an alternately imitative and derisive relationship with racial “Otherness.” These cultural formations and their vast legacy have been intimately and inextricably wedded to myriad social and political forces working to profoundly shape the American experience, particularly in relation to interracial social engagement, class formation, economic as well as labor struggles, and the perceived tensions between rural and urban identity.

This introduction is not meant to serve as an exhaustive study of the historical relation between popular entertainment, mediated culture, race and ethnicity, and the spatialization of political as well as social struggles. Rather, my purpose here is to bring together some illuminating examples of this nexus in order to show how the hip hop musical is a unique and fascinating phenomenon within a much larger historical current. For instance, a series of broadsheets produced between 1819 and 1832 mocked black public music and dance celebrations commemorating America’s official prohibition of the Atlantic slave trade in 1808. These prints, including Grand Bobalition, or “Great Annibersary Fussible” (1821) and Grand Celebrashun ob de Bobalition ob African Slabery!!! (1825), burlesqued African American popular urban revelries and processions through both visual caricatures of black bodies and the use of an intentionally derisive dialect ascribed to black figures.14 The prints gestured to the tradition of the broadside ballad and featured crudely rendered images of black bodies and occasionally white rioters, achieved through an anachronistic woodblock technique.15 These bodies occupied the top of the sheet with columns of text underneath. The prints not only imagined the corporeal elements and speech acts of African American identity but some, such as Grand Celebrashun (fig. 0.1), also usurped black social rituals as the text mockingly describes a program of festivities, songs, and toasts to be undertaken during the revelries. Such sheets appropriated black bodies for white viewing pleasure, and also expropriated black cultural forms, transforming them into ritualized mockery.

Fig. 0.1. Grand Celebrashun ob de bobalition ob African slabery!!! (1825). Broadside Collection, portfolio 53, no. 28 c-Rare Book Collection, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The violence of this gesture became fully realized when actual black communal festivities that claimed access to white urban spaces, such as “Election days” and Pinkster, were subject to frequent attacks by white mobs (often made up in blackface) even as white urbanites continued to participate in such events.16 That the prints deliberately referenced an outmoded representational form in the broadsheet ballad, a format associated with spontaneous public performance, ritualized actions, and oration rather than private silent reading practices, further underscores the link between representational hostility and the provocation of actual mob violence. Such a vicious reaction to black public performance in celebration of abolition is further explained by the fact that rural black folk music, derived from slavery, made clever use of simple lyrics in order to deride white slavers or even communicate acts of revolt.¹⁷ Moreover, the history of black dance during slavery was also linked to slave rebellion and insurrections.¹⁸

As the desire to punish black public celebrations materialized in printed form, the theatrical stage offered yet another cultural arena in which to negotiate such anxieties. Racial and ethnic-based satire was a staple of mid-century theatrical productions as African Americans, both rural and urban, were burlesqued in working-class minstrelsy productions in Northern city centers such as New York City’s Bowery theater district.¹⁹ The minstrel show offered white spectators a purportedly faithful rendition of black culture through music, dance, stump speeches, and comedic routines. Stock characters such as the Northern “Coon”—a dandy who “put on airs” and was often in search of white women to seduce—and the Southern plantation “darkey”—a sentimental and dimwitted slave character—allowed Northern audiences to experience an “imaginary resolution to intractable social conflicts” that racialized all spaces of social interaction.²⁰ Such shows, and the unease that they provoked, could not be separated from anxieties over maintaining the differences between Southern rural traditions that depended upon established racial hierarchies and an emerging Northern urban culture, which promised more fluid spaces of racial interaction and fluctuating ethnic identity.²¹ The transformation of blackface minstrelsy—the first and most popular form of indigenous American nineteenth century theater—from entr’acte spaces and marginal venues to a codified and highly structured form of lower-class urban theater in the 1840s was, as Eric Lott points out, directly related to contestations over the fate of white workers in the North. Their desire for class stability and economic autonomy alternately united them with the cause of abolitionism and drove them to burlesque and to repudiate “blackness” as a protection against emasculation and downward class movement initiated by the forces of industrial capitalism.²²

Fig. 0.2. The Great Fear of the Period That Uncle Sam May Be Swallowed by Foreigners: The Problem Solved (1860–69). Prints and Photographs Division, Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.

The particularly class conscious theatrical circuit and volatile social milieu of minstrelsy also gave rise to low-comedy figures of the stage such as Mose and Liz—working class types associated with Irish descent, who could slip in and out of mock black dialect.23 As a social group similarly stigmatized, Irish immigrants were often portrayed as analogous to enslaved black Americans in numerous caricatures of the nineteenth century. Printed material proved remarkably effective in suggesting ethnic and racial affinities, and it could also indicate with astonishing economy the relationship between performance traditions and geographical spaces. Lithographs such as The Great Fear of the Period That Uncle Sam May Be Swallowed by Foreigners: The Problem Solved (1860–69 San Francisco: White & Bauer) (fig. 0.2) equated Irish immigrants with free blacks and slaves by appropriating representational tropes such as the devouring mouth of blackface minstrelsy to represent Irish and Asian immigrants. As these “Othered” ethnicities and races overwhelm Uncle Sam in the print, consuming him and then each other, a vast railway network spreads out over the landscape to signify the conditions of urbanization and industrialization that led to such an apparently precarious situation.

Minstrel shows frequently evoked the transgressive topography of black bodies—especially black female bodies—as porous, monstrous, and consuming, while emphasizing their “perverse” orality in song verses, skits, and make-up.24 Further, evidence suggests that Irish dance steps and the performance traditions of African slaves were already entwined through cultural exchanges that occurred on British plantations in the West Indies during the seventeenth century.²⁵ As these groups entered the United States in the following centuries, the American cultural imagination was keen to exploit such affinities as a way of denying newly arrived immigrants the social status and access to jobs that established European ethnic groups possessed. Evoking the “black minstrel mouth” as racially fluid, The Great Fear of the Period drew upon an established representational ethos of racial and ethnic doubling that effectively conflated the movements of black dancers and Irish “jiggers” so that the word “jig,” which was “originally used to describe an Irish folk dance,” came to denote black dance generally, and could even refer to a black person.²⁶

The race-conscious discourse of the stage flowed outward into newly enabled forms of mass culture at the close of the nineteenth century through stereograph images, postcards, and other popular forms of printed material. Freed slaves had been promised entry into citizenship and the pleasures of an urban-centered industrialized free market economy after the Civil War (even as poll taxes and literacy requirements for voting rights continued to erode black political empowerment) but conventional spaces of representation usually worked to confine African Americans to impoverished rural scenarios and occasional urban buffoonery. Such representations persisted in using the established motifs of Southern black caricature—predilections for watermelon and chicken—in demeaning ways. Numerous stereoview images from companies such as Underwood & Underwood, a plethora of “coon songs” with visually sophisticated sheet music covers published by Jos W. Stern Company, among others, and postcards from the turn of the century all depicted African Americans flanked by watermelons and chicken and positioned them near rustic shacks and fields or within a squalid interior setting. Occasionally, the urban “zip coon” figure emerged while brandishing a razor on a handful of sheet music covers. When “respectable” urban vaudeville shows arose from the rowdy performance traditions of working class theater and the tawdry dens of concert saloons—where drink, prostitutes, and live entertainment were purported to mix freely—this new form of popular amusement coalesced, more or less, into an established mode of performance that attempted to tame and then unify the motley audiences of late nineteenth century American cities.27 In this conciliatory mixing and blending of cultural and racial accents, blackface traditions continued to flourish when African Americans such as Bert Williams and George Walker entered the vaudeville circuit in blackface, gaining prestige and fame as they negotiated the constraints of blackface theatrical codes. Southern “darkey” themes remained an inescapable aspect of conventional expectations in the newly respectable variety format and the watermelon itself found its way onto the vaudeville stage with electrified glitz and sex appeal in a 1903 Brooklyn based act entitled “McMahon’s Water-melon Girls,” which included an enormous replica of the fruit illuminated with electric lights and dancing girls in watermelon costume.²⁸ This conjunction and profusion of imagery and live performance across disparate cultural forms undoubtedly whet the cinematic appetite for the deluge of watermelon and chicken eating films that would prove to be popular for the first ten years of cinema, even as pre-cinematic sites of mass culture continued to churn out all of the familiar tropes of the stereotype well into the twentieth century.

Once the cinema emerged as an exceptional site of representation, it on the one hand transformed racial stereotypes and ethnic identities, while on the other upheld preestablished codes of depicting race and ethnic markers in American culture. For instance, the Irish domestic worker, a common figure of caricature on the later nineteenth century stage, was revived on the screen only to be increasingly and viciously objectified and victimized through the cinematic apparatus in films such as How Bridget Served the Salad Undressed (1898), from American Mutoscope and Biograph Company, and the The Finish of Bridget McKeen (1901), an Edison Company production. Her screen persona mimicked conventional Victorian theatrical codes of the Irish domestic—incompetent, dimwitted, unattractive, and often dirty. At the same time, the technology of moving pictures could realistically render her body torn asunder by fire and the darkness of the theater increasingly facilitated the objectification and sexualization of her body.²⁹ Early silent cinema defined and mobilized “blackness” in a variety of ways: supposedly objective recordings of domestic activities such as washing children that were rooted in anthropological photography, short dance routines, and vaudeville performances of popular entertainers, or narrative comedies that directly appropriated earlier nineteenth century minstrelsy characterizations. The watermelon and chicken subject, as well as the figure of the Southern “darkey,” were popular early film subjects and remained an integral part of black representation in later silent cinema and even persisted well into the classical Hollywood era.30

Chicken and watermelon themed productions were particularly plentiful at the turn of the century with many titles recycled within and between film companies. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company’s A Watermelon Feast emerged in 1886; Lubin released Watermelon Contest in the following year; the Edison Company’s Watermelon Contest (1900) was released in June; and later films from Lubin followed with Who Said Watermelon (1902) and Watermelon Eating Contest (1903).³¹ Edison’s The Watermelon Patch (1905), a neglected tour de force of racialized anxiety directed by Edwin S. Porter, is a relatively late entry within the general category of early “theft films.” The “chicken subject” proved nearly as popular with American Mutoscope and Biograph Company releasing Who Said Chicken? in July 1900, while Lubin’s Who Said Chicken? followed in July of the subsequent year. Lubin released The Chicken Thief in 1902 and a different version of the same title in 1903, while American Biograph and Mutoscope Company offered yet another film of the same title in 1904. This list encompasses static, one-shot images of black Americans engaged in eating but also extends to include longer and more complex “theft films” such as A Nigger in the Woodpile (1904), a film about black thieves (whites in blackface) pilfering firewood. As technological advances in filmmaking provided an increasingly complex system that could be exploited to elaborate on the narrative assumptions of early African American eating films, filmmakers could now explain the origins of the food being consumed by blacks, construct elaborate chase sequences, and concoct violent scenarios to punish black thieves.

Early single-shot watermelon and chicken films usually located black Americans in rural settings with little narrative exposition. They offered viewers a spectacle of alternately grotesque and childlike consumption for the purpose of emphasizing the perceived instinctual and voracious nature of African Americans. The glee with which Lubin’s summary of Who Said Chicken? emphasizes the bodily proportions of its black subject is particularly telling.

All coons like chicken. This fellow is no exception to the rule and to see the expression on his face when somebody mentioned the toothsome bird to him proves the fact conclusively. The subject is that of a darkey of immense proportions talking to the audience. The head occupies the entire screen. Incidentally, the subject was that of a southern darkey, said to be 98 years of age. He has about three teeth left and they look like old fashioned tomb-stones. A perfect picture of facial expression.32

The subject emerges as an immense specter of Southern slavery—he is after all, reputed to be born in 1803, long before slavery was officially banned following the Civil War, and even prior to the American cessation of the international slave trade in 1808. As his consuming and overwhelming visage fills the frame according to the summary, the film firmly locates black identity within the antebellum South, and black subjectivity within physical rather than intellectual qualities.

Filmmakers repeatedly returned to popular one-shot eating contests, but these corporeal spectacles of consumption were produced alongside more complex narratives of theft and punishment. When American Mutoscope and Biograph Company released a film with the title Who Said Chicken? a year before Lubin’s, it took place in an urban setting; the primary emphasis of this production was on the theft rather than consumption of goods. The American Mutoscope and Biograph Company summary alerted exhibitors to the urban setting of the film in the first sentence. It simply read: “A street scene,” and it went on to describe a scenario in which a “colored chicken thief” outwits a policeman, with the help of an Irish maid.³³ This film is unusual in that its black thief escapes punishment by white authority—he thus appears to have control over the urban environment—yet it is typical in that it makes an association between black and Irish subjectivity as disruptive elements within the social order.

More often than not, black thieves pursued by white farmers and policemen are dealt violent and horrific punishments within the theft narrative. Bear traps (The Chicken Thief, 1904), exploding dynamite (Nigger in the Woodpile, 1904), and the horror of being burned alive (The Water-melon Patch, 1905) are all meted out as justifiable and comic results for the thievery of food and other necessities by African Americans. Such films were made more than a quarter century after blacks were granted suffrage and I suggest here that they are in many ways preoccupied with the relationship between African American citizenship and industrial capitalism. If such productions are connected to Southern arguments suggesting that thievery was pervasive among the freed slave population because blacks were no longer provided for by white masters, and had also slipped out from under the disciplining gaze of slavery, they also spoke to contemporary anxieties about the ability of African Americans to perform wage labor and navigate a commodity marketplace.34 As black men competed with each other in acts of cinematic gluttony in the typical watermelon and chicken picture, they were simultaneously displaced from Northern industrial life through both the films’ rural setting and the staging of black masculine competitive energy as bodily, inane, and animalistic. This is in contrast to the measured, constrained, and repetitive nature of urban wage labor that had been cultivated by Republican political forces and ideology in nineteenth century Northern cities. Blacks were frequently playing themselves in these films rather than having their images usurped by whites in blackface, but the pictures invariably mocked black citizenship and diminished the role of productive African American labor within industrial capitalism.

Early silent film catered to the racialized economics nurtured by slavery and the volatile processes of Southern reconstruction in the wake of the Civil War. Yet, it also worked to negotiate new anxieties stemming from the growth of urban black communities and the rise of an African American middle-class that threatened to encroach on hitherto white residential city blocks around the turn of the twentieth century.³⁵ As the cinema established itself as a major commercial force by the mid-teens, African Americans struggled to gain a foothold in better paying industries and worked to create black owned business networks in urban centers.³⁶ Silent film, as noted above, negotiated these anxieties by circumscribing black Americans within a cinematic fantasy of the Antebellum South in a barrage of chicken and watermelon eating productions. The Northern dandy of minstrelsy occasionally emerged as a haplessly inept negotiator of urban territory—for instance, in later “race movies” produced by the Chicago-based, white-owned Ebony Film Corporation. The company’s Two Knights of Vaudeville (1915) was a cinematic meditation on the unruly nature of African American audiences in metropolitan entertainment venues, while Spying the Spy (1918) mocked black patriotism in an urban context even as thousands of African American soldiers participated in the Great War.

In light of such productions, African American critics continually assessed the ways in which filmmakers refused to acknowledge the advancements of blacks since the end of slavery. This implied, of course, not only educational and monetary gains, but also a distinct move from rural to urban settings for many black families. The migration of African Americans to urban centers at the beginning of the twentieth century has been thoroughly studied by contemporary historians, and this phenomenon became an important aspect of self-definition for the black community during the teens and twenties. For example, in 1921 a reporter for the Chicago Defender noted that

during the last ten years there has unquestioningly been an amazingly large migration. In 1910 there were, already 1,049,000 out of a total population of 9,787,000 living in the North and West, and in twelve Northern cities there has been an increase of 200,000 Colored people since 1910, most of them unquestionably coming from the South … in the North he can get better educational advantages for his children, at least theoretical equality as a worker, fairer trials, and greater security from mob violence.37

The article also asserts that “the migration northward was a protest” and that its reverberations will force a change in attitude towards black citizens by the white population. It was registered as a transformative and politicized demographic shift that would prove “the old Northern attitude toward the Colored population no longer … adequate for a group rapidly increasing in numbers, intelligence, and self-respect.”³⁸ The move northward was clearly equated with a rising tide of collective self-respect within the African American community that had the power to both transform white prejudice and facilitate the social, political, and educational gains of blacks.

Significantly, the black community was seeking to consciously transform itself. African American writers and intellectuals seized upon and attempted to direct a great and unprecedented explosion of artistic, theatrical, musical, and literary talent largely centered around the Harlem neighborhood of New York City. This movement, the Harlem Renaissance, and the discourse of the New Negro—a term that had been utilized and consistently refashioned by the African American community in the preceding decades—produced a body of artistic output and political thought that was directly tied to a particular sense of new black urban identity, as well as to the exploration of racial identity in a sociological and psychological context throughout the 1920s and into the 1930s.³⁹ Writers, artists, and intellectuals such as Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, Claude McKay, Marcus Garvey, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Jacob Lawrence, transformed white conceptions of black culture as they articulated a complex and multifaceted sense of contemporary African American identity that explored the historical conditions of black identity rooted in slavery and looked forward to alternative social and political formations such as Pan-Africanism and Socialism.

Musicians and actors, including Bill Robinson, Louis Armstrong, Josephine Baker, and Paul Robeson, were also central to this movement. Yet the status of actors, dancers, and musicians was complicated by class-inflected tensions between key players of the Harlem Renaissance and an increasing disdain for “low” entertainment in tandem with a fervent embrace of black “folk” culture. In truth, Harlem Renaissance intellectuals never embraced the “race film” industry.40 The proliferation of the African American press at this time, however, gave voice to black critics who were acutely aware that the representation of music and dance performance, and the role of the black entertainer in general, were unmistakably related to political and social mobility. For instance, perspicacious black critics such as Lester Walton emphatically decried the persistence of Southern plantation “dialect” ascribed to black actors in film intertitles. Walton alarmingly noted in 1918 that this practice was becoming more evident in the pictures while at the same time black Americans were increasingly divorced from the social and geographical milieu of the South.⁴¹ Stressing the incompatibility of such “dialect” with the reality of contemporary lived black experience, he noted that “to be able to speak Negro dialect is as much of an accomplishment for the average colored American as it is to know Spanish or French.”⁴² An anonymous article from the Afro-American lamented in 1923 that How Come, a current play showing at the Gayety, a white theater, insulted the black race through its use of an iconography steeped in stereotypical Southern minstrelsy. The author writes that

the resentment we have in mind is first concerned with the plot. In casting about for a framework for the show, it is to be regretted that the librettists could find nothing more commendable than the chicken subject, which with its ally watermelon, have served the white comedian, humorists and others for a half century or more in burlesquing the Negro.⁴³

Although language is not specifically mentioned in the above article, a burlesque production centered on “chicken and watermelon” would have undoubtedly employed “dialect” in its characterization of African American subjects. Adding to the complexity of discussions centering on “dialect” in white-produced narratives, the African American literary community debated the use of “dialect” in works produced by black writers.44 It is important to note that while Walton and other black critics routinely criticized the limitations of black subjectivity within theatrical and cinematic avenues, the African American performer was simultaneously constructed in the black press as a formidable icon of political progress. As Hollywood film continued to relegate blacks to peripheral roles during the transition to sound, and the triumph of the musical genre in the early 1930s offered very limited opportunities for performers of color, the African American press seized upon the body of the black entertainer as a privileged site for tracking the social and political progress of black Americans. Far from only offering a pleasing spectacle of docility to white audiences, black entertainers often played unique roles in representing collective values and “race progress” in the African American community. During the 1920s, for instance, the black press became acutely aware of the ways in which musicians and dancers acted as emissaries for the African American community both in the United States and overseas. A regular column that ran in the New York Amsterdam News during the 1920s, “News of Our Entertainers in Europe,” boasted that the newspaper was the “Only Publication of Its Kind That Offers This Feature to the Thousands of Its Readers in This Country.” Undercutting this claim, the Chicago Defender consistently ran articles that meticulously charted the reception of black entertainers in the United States and Europe during this decade. These columns also reported the mistreatment of black entertainers, including large-scale protests against prominent African American performers such as Josephine Baker as well as individual incidents involving relatively unknown chorus girls in smaller shows. For example, Ivan H. Browning reported in 1928 that

it is rumored that Jack Bucannan the English actor and producer who is producing Topey and Eva with the well-known American Duncan sisters wanted eight or ten red hot American dancing girls to do a couple of feature numbers in the show, but the idea was turned down flat by the Duncan girls who did not fancy that at all and did not want the Colored girls in the show at all, and now it has been decided to have white girls make up brown in order to carry out the idea.⁴⁵

An anonymous article from the following year reports that foreign jazz musicians, including black Americans—“Our jazz boys who have been and are making a fine living in Paris”—will be losing their jobs overseas when a recent law limiting the employment of non-native-born entertainers is enforced.46

At the same time, these pages are filled with stories that privilege the connection between race progress and the entertainment industry, and announce with pride the various advancements made by blacks in the field of entertainment. In 1922, an advertisement appeared for a musical show entitled “A Night with the Negro,” which proclaimed itself “an inspiring exposition of the advancement of our people.”⁴⁷ In 1923, the Defender reported that Ethel Waters was the “first of the Race” to perform a “real ‘radio’ stunt,” while an ad below this article boasted that Black Swan records, an African American-owned-and-operated business, offers the first opera record ever by a “colored singer.”⁴⁸ The Defender also printed prominent theater critic Mark Hellinger’s remarkable account of Bill Robinson’s performance in Blackbirds of 1928, following the show’s interruption by a group of agitators. These agitators, described as white, male, and “fairly well ginned” were, according to Hellinger, “members of some southern society in New York City for a reunion” who “applauded in the wrong place and did their best to break up a show.”⁴⁹ The insults were further intensified when “one chap rose from his seat unsteadily and waved a $10 bill at the chorus” and apparently shouted, “Get hot here, Colored gals. This is for the first one that meets me after the show. Don’t kill yourselves in the rush. Ha, ha, ha.”⁵⁰ I quote at length from the rest of the article because it demonstrates so strongly the ways in which the African American press articulated Robinson as both a “star” and an engaged member of the black community who could use his privileged position in unique ways to counter the negative experience of white racism and invert established racial hierarchies. This article gives voice to Robinson as a politicized figure as it transcribes the sounds of his “taps” and intersperses them with his eloquent castigation of white interlopers during the stage performance. Hellinger writes:

Robinson stepped to the footlights. “Keep playing boys,” he said softly. The music went on. Bill Robinson danced. Slowly. Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. And as he danced he spoke. “What you men have done tonight,” he murmured, “is a disgrace to your race. You down there. You. And you. And you.” Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap. “If I stepped down the street,” he continued, “entered the New Amsterdam theatre and waved a bill before a chorus girl, I’d be mobbed. If I did a thing like that I’d deserve whatever punishment I received.” Tap. Tap. Tap. “For 30 long years I’ve been dancing and trying to entertain everyone to the best of my ability. The thing that happened here tonight has never been done before. I consider you—and you—and you the lowest men I have ever played before.” The audience went wild. For five solid minutes they applauded. One by one the “gentlemen” reached for their hats and disappeared into the night. Good boy Bill.51

This account deftly weaves the story of Robinson’s triumph over white animosity and racially inflected sexual threats towards the chorines into a corporeal “recording” of the dancer’s routine. Hellinger notes that “no one did anything” until Robinson ascended the stage and tapped out his measured and intelligent assessment of the situation, which galvanized the crowd into action and drove the hecklers—who apparently numbered in the dozens—from the theater. The art of tapping and the body itself becomes inscribed within the story as a profound tool of resistance, and vestiges of this corporeal politicization will be explored through the performances of breakers and rappers in the later hip hop musical. As extraordinary as Hellinger’s account might appear, tap dance always incorporated a verbal dimension that facilitated boasting, jeering, and general bravado.⁵² What Robinson did was to deftly deploy this aspect of tap in order to defend his community from a group of Southern “good ole boys,” and it is a significant testament to the politicization of the dancer’s body for the African American community. Further, when the Baltimore Afro-American reviewed Bert Williams, Son of Laughter, a posthumous literary tribute to the vaudeville sensation, Broadway player, recording artist, and arguably most successful black entertainer of the early twentieth century, they quoted Booker T. Washington, a highly influential African American political leader. Washington said of Williams: “He is a greater man than I am. He has done more for the race than I have ever done. Why? Because he has made people laugh. He laughed his way into the hearts of men and into the hearts of the greatest men of every race in the whole world.”⁵³ In fact, as late as 1934, John Frederick Matheus, who penned plays and wrote for the black press, noted that it was performers such as Josephine Baker, Florence Mills, Adelaide Hall, Jules Bledsoe, and Ethel Waters who fought “the caricature that masquerades as Negro personality” and who on their tours abroad “have waged and are waging war for its suppression.”⁵⁴ There are of course numerous weekly performance reviews and listings in the entertainment sections of African American newspapers at this time, but it is really these pages that constructed the black entertainer as the figure par excellence who would directly influence general attitudes about the black community in the United States and throughout Europe, and who would become the primary figure around which social change could actually be experienced and recorded. Performers of color continued to bear this burden many decades later as dance groups like the Kid Fresh Break Dance Crew, Rock Steady Crew, and New York City Breakers entered into arrangements with institutional dance promoters and corporate entities who promised to bring their talent to mainstream American consumers and overseas audiences in the early 1980s.

During the 1940s, unfortunately, it became clear that such a correlation between the elevated status of some black musicians and dancers and the plight of the ordinary black American was not immediately at hand, as the United States prepared its citizens (and transformed its manufacturing process) for entry into the Second World War. The reorganization of industrial production only exposed the degree to which African American entertainers had not been able to fully transform the attitudes and laws that oppressed black citizens in quotidian life. Indeed, racial tensions increased regarding the demand for black civil rights, beginning with A. Philip Randolph’s call for a march on Washington in 1941 to protest the exclusion of African Americans in the wartime defense industries. Randolph’s pressure eventually resulted in an executive order that banned racial discrimination in defense manufacture, and the years that immediately followed were met with deadly race riots in Detroit and New York City.55 Increased industrial production in preparation for the war effort, however, coincided not only with cases of de facto racial exclusion in the work place, but also organized labor’s continuing indifference to blacks who did gain a foothold in some industries. This created a volatile situation. For instance, the infamous Ford strike of 1941, which erupted before President Roosevelt issued the executive order to ban racial discrimination in defense manufacture, escalated into violence as the automobile company encouraged African Americans to cross primarily white picket lines while the CIO (Congress of Industrial Organizations) charged that the employer was hiring black boxers to help physically defeat striking workers.⁵⁶ The Afro-American’s coverage of the Ford strike ran with a photograph depicting violent black workers brandishing iron pipes on the picket lines. Further, Randolph’s scathing editorial piece, which decried FDR’s indifference to black workers, graced the front page of the same issue, and featured a drawing of angry black Americans taking to the streets with placards announcing “WE WANT OUR SHARE OF JOBS” and “DEFENSE JOBS FOR ALL.”57 (fig. 0.3)

Fig. 0.3. Newspaper illustration depicting African Americans demanding jobs in the defense industries, Apr. 12, 1941. Courtesy of the Afro-American.

As the collective frustrations of an understandably incensed African American population emerged to occupy public spaces in industrial strikes and promised to materialize en masse in the nation’s capital, Hollywood representations of blacks, with few exceptions, remained largely depoliticized and constricted to rigid codes of musical or comedy performance, and a handful of roles as maids and household domestics. Hollywood black-cast folk musicals, including Hearts in Dixie (1929), Green Pastures (1936), and Cabin in the Sky (1943), showcased tremendous African American musical talent but repeatedly placed the black community within a timeless rural setting or antebellum past. This had the effect of depoliticizing black performance by removing it from the present and cleaving the African American entertainer from the contemporary stage of political action, the urban milieu—a move that would not be undone in any meaningful way until the rise of Blaxploitation and early hip hop film.

Another representational space briefly opened up between 1940 and 1947 with the introduction of the “Soundie,” a three-minute musical film exhibited in a jukebox-like machine.58 They featured established and burgeoning white artists, as well as black jazz musicians, comedians, and dancers, including Duke Ellington, Bill Bojangles Robinson, and Dorothy Dandridge. The “Soundie” frequently placed its performers within non-realistic fantasy spectacles or rigidly defined stage parameters. Yet when the medium shouldered the burden of wartime propaganda, it was also used to transmit a unified and supposedly realistic portrait of the American people. As this depiction of hardworking yet happy citizens demonstrating labor skills, intellectual acumen, and even beauty emerged on film, black Americans, and indeed most traces of ethnic difference, were banished from the screen. Particularly telling is the racial exclusion in patriotic “Soundies” such as Defend America (1941) and America I Love You (1942), which imagined the United States as a uniformly white nation of farmers, lawyers, financiers, preachers, bakers, munitions workers, and lovesick girls. Furthermore, wartime newsreels habitually repressed the contributions of black soldiers and cut their images from documentary footage before the films were screened.59 Randolph may have been given the full force of the law in his bid to end discrimination in defense manufacture, and black soldiers were a vital part of America’s victory in the war, but the American cultural imagination continued to produce spaces of startling racial exclusion.

The circumscription of black performers within fantasy settings and rigid prosceniums in the “Soundie” also coincided with the use of African American musical talent in Hollywood features as musical interludes in otherwise non-musical films that usually took place in an urban setting. Donald Bogle elaborates on this Hollywood practice, noting that “because musical numbers were not integrated into the script, the scenes featuring the blacks could be cut from the films without spoiling them should local (or Southern) theater owners feel their audiences would object to seeing a Negro.”⁶⁰ This practice reveals how easily economic concerns within the film industry could be aligned with discriminatory desires and passed off as good business sense.⁶¹ For the most part, Hollywood musicals of the 1940s, especially those made by Fox, such as Down Argentine Way (1940), Orchestra Wives (1942), and The Pirate (1948), also followed this pattern.⁶² They almost exclusively featured all-white dramatic performers, romances, and social situations, yet introduced black entertainers in dinner club performances and other proscenium settings. When the musical adopted wartime concerns as subject matter in productions such as Star Spangled Rhythm (1943) and Carolina Blues (1944), patterns of racial exclusion remained in place with black actors barred from the narrative setting while appearing in musical numbers.

“Soundies” were viewed in a public entertainment context but, unlike the site of feature-length cinema practice, they were screened in bars, hotels, or taverns with a potentially fluctuating audience. Just as the status of these machines was rather indeterminate, their use by patrons was also somewhat imprecise. As the reels contained a certain number of films which changed weekly, the viewer could not control what program they would see next and therefore a certain element of randomness characterized the spectatorship of these films in a hitherto unprecedented way.63 However, if “these eight-song preassembled reels adhered to a loose formula, which included a variety of set genres” there was one element of performance that appeared to be more rigidly controlled through reel placement—the racial identity of the entertainer—and it became customary to place an African American performer in the last position of the reel.⁶⁴ This practice echoes the racial organization of vaudeville, which typically included only one African American act per show.⁶⁵ Amy Herzog notes that “shorts by African American artists were listed in a separate ‘Negro’ section,” implying that “racial divisions might have affected the distribution of these Soundies, although little data regarding actual distribution patterns has survived.”⁶⁶ This is more than likely the case, given the fact that this practice so closely mimicked contemporary Hollywood racism cleverly masquerading as “business” savvy, and the organization of earlier pre-cinematic forms of variety entertainment. In addition, just as black performers were bracketed from the narrative of mainstream cinematic productions (in their restriction to proscenium performances)—and Southern exhibitors could simply remove all traces of black performances in feature-length films if desired—the “Soundies” were also organized to precisely control the dissemination of African American entertainers through their variety format, which was, after all, not as “random” as a cursory viewing might suggest. Political and economic tensions threatened to bring the African American community into hitherto predominantly white public spaces, and indeed into fully desegregated civil life in the years to come, yet mainstream American entertainment continued to find ways to delimit and even “cut” black Americans from its cultural imaginary.

The immediate postwar era ushered in a significant social and spatial shift—the flight of white American families to suburban enclaves and the further expansion of communities of color within urban centers—which would come to form the dominant frame of reference for depicting social rituals and familial organization in teen cinema beginning in the 1980s, including hip hop musicals. White families benefited from unprecedented expansion in financial freedom, rates of home ownership, and leisure time. Such improvements were largely facilitated through governmental initiatives to ease returning GIs entry into civilian life immediately following the Second World War. Not surprisingly, black soldiers and their families, while making some progress in educational opportunities and housing standards, were habitually denied access to these programs, which gave white families of blue collar status access to middle-class educational opportunities and financial security.67 Even if an African American family did qualify for mortgage assistance through the home loans program administered by the Veterans Administration, many of the newly planned prefabricated suburban idylls, such as the ubiquitous Levittowns developed by Levitt and Sons, found ways to prohibit black families from moving in, further constricting them to urban ghettos and rural poverty.⁶⁸ Indeed, the exclusionary nature of the postwar suburban dream was enacted on multiple fronts.

Despite such a pronounced and rapidly expanding racialized geographical fissure however, the emergence of rock ’n’ roll and the increasing consumer power of American youth threatened to destabilize this growing divide in the following decade. The intensified struggle for African American civil rights, sparked by the reversal of Plessy v. Ferguson in 1954 and the racial integration of public schools, also coincided with tremendous public anxiety over the potential for both racially motivated violence and interracial socializing at rock ’n’ roll venues, particularly when the roster included white musicians and black performers.⁶⁹ As conventional teen music culture embraced black musicians, live rock ’n’ roll gigs, radio shows, fan culture, teen films, and record sales became part of a larger discourse about interracial “mixing,” the dissolution of sexual mores, the integration of urban and suburban performance traditions, as well as the apparent gap between parental values and youth culture.

Most dramatically, teenagers could not only hear their favorite rock ’n’ roll performers on the radio and attend the odd live show, but they could also witness the extraordinary talent of The Platters, Chuck Berry, Little Richard, and Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers in a steady run of teen rock flicks—the first popular cinema directed exclusively at a youth audience. Black musicians remained firmly within the proscenium and outside the narratives of young love, irresponsible spending habits, and an inexplicable (to the parents’ generation, at least) need to dance in such films as Rock Around the Clock (1956), Don’t Knock the Rock (1956), and Rock Rock Rock! (1956), but the newly created intimate settings for white suburban teens’ engagement with black entertainers in these films suggests an increasingly erotically charged and porous threshold between audience and performer.

When Little Richard performs at a teen dance in Don’t Knock the Rock, his piano is set on the dance floor as he shakes and shouts just a few feet from his young fans. During the performer’s second song of the set, “Tutti Frutti,” the film awkwardly gestures towards the possibility of interracial socializing as the winners of the Harvest Moon Contest (presumably a dance competition) are announced. The all-white rural teen audience, with their frenzied footwork, dizzying lifts, and wildly swaying blond top knots, return to their seats as a lone African American couple emerges to celebrate their victory with a dance while the white teens look on in admiration. In this film, black and white dancers and musicians were sharing the same intimate entertainment spaces, although, admittedly, teens were not dancing together at the same time. Nonetheless, this certainly nudged at, and was undoubtedly meant to unsettle, the most sensitive anxieties that rock ’n’ roll evoked for conservative pro-segregationists like Asa Carter, executive secretary of the North Alabama Citizens Council, who just months prior to the release of the film, fretted about not only interracial mixing but went so far as to call for juke box operators to “ban ‘rock and roll’ music and records with colored performers.”70

During the final performance in Rock Rock Rock!, which takes place at a white high school prom, Lymon and his band, made up of young African American and Puerto Rican New Yorkers, sway on the stage to their hit song “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent.” In this moment, the intimacy of the setting suggests that Lymon, or perhaps one of his older bandmates, could have surely descended the stage to dance side by side with any high school girl of his choosing. This possibility is particularly heightened by a reaction shot from a female prom-goer who gazes lovingly at the charismatic performers during their number.⁷¹ Prior to this spectacular musical denouement, Tuesday Weld and a teen friend moon over the sentimental pleas of black vocal group The Moonglows’ hit “I Knew From the Start” in the privacy of the living room while watching music impresario Alan Freed’s Rock ’n’ Roll Jubilee of Stars on the tube. It is unclear, however, whether their emotional reaction is initiated by the appearance of the suave crooners on the television and their image as teen heartthrobs or merely the sentiment of their highly romantic and suggestive lyrics—or perhaps both. Furthermore, in Rock, Rock, Rock!, Lymon’s group boldly appears at the high school prom hosted by Alan Freed with the letter “T” on the front of their sweaters and the word “teenager” emblazoned across their backs, calling for entry into the emergent youth-oriented consumer culture of the postwar era. (fig. 0.4)

Fig. 0.4. Frankie Lymon and the Teenagers performing in the film Rock Rock Rock! (1956). Courtesy of Photofest.

While there were obviously black people between thirteen and eighteen years old in the United States at this time, the word “teenager” was largely synonymous with middle-class white suburban identity during the 1950s, if one looks to popular magazines, film representations, and literature.72 Indeed, the panic over juvenile delinquency in the early twentieth century and the birth of the modern, youth-oriented culture industry (which, according to most accounts of teen culture, more or less crystallized conceptions of the American postwar teenager) primarily imagined, evoked, and addressed the white family unit.

This last point is especially revealing, since it has largely gone unremarked that the black press used the word “teen-ager” at least as early as the 1940s.⁷³ Black-oriented beauty product companies like Dr. Palmer’s targeted teenagers in their advertising beginning at mid-century, as they attempted to entice them to both control teen acne and lighten their skin.⁷⁴ In 1954 Lester Granger, the director of the National Urban League and black civic leader, painted the African American teenager as a dangerous buffoon when he addressed the annual convention of North Carolina Teacher’s Association. According to the Washington Afro-American, he suggested that blacks were demonstrating that they were “not ready” for racial integration because of “the clownish behavior and hep cat ways” of “teen-agers” and the “high incidence of delinquency.”75 Granger may have connected delinquency with music (“hep cat ways” is a reference to an appreciation of and involvement in jazz music) in black teen culture yet Lymon cleverly insisted through his songs and musical persona that he and his group were without a doubt teenagers, but certainly not juvenile delinquents. The band even appears in similar letter sweaters on album covers and promotional photographs. I have already mentioned The Teenagers’ hit “I’m Not a Juvenile Delinquent,” but it is worth looking more closely at its lyrics since it is hard to imagine a more emphatic declaration of this sentiment. After several lines imploring that they are not juvenile delinquents, with the word “no” preceding the statement numerous times, the song continues with:

Do the thing that’s right

And you’ll do nothing wrong

Life will be so nice, you’ll be in paradise

I know, because I’m not a juvenile delinquent

Certainly black youth were less apt to be summoned in the pages and electronically mediated imagery of mainstream postwar advertising culture, given that white adolescents were more numerous and had more disposable income, but appeals to a black teenager did exist, at least within the pages of African American–oriented media. And these appeals were remarkably extended through the format of the postwar teen rock film as its threshold spaces—marked by a variety of novel proscenium settings (television studio audience, at-home television viewership, prom stage)—flirted with the possibility of representing interracial socializing and even desire on screen.

I dwell at length here on the rock ’n’ roll teen film because it is one of the only instances where performers of color appear regularly in a cycle of youth-oriented American cinema. Although the political and transformative results of such an inclusive practice may be debated, it shows the extent to which popular culture and the intersection of racial politics and American youth had the potential to signify meaningful and significant challenges to prescribed racial boundaries. Even though white Americans were motivated to move to the suburbs and create racially homogenous social and geographical boundaries, these new intimate spaces and their attendant technology—Levittown living rooms with televisions and radios, and spacious bedrooms equipped with turntables—as well as the desires of an increasingly autonomous and powerful teen culture that was enthralled by African American music, could potentially hasten the forces of social integration. Black bands may not have played regularly at predominantly white high schools immediately following the integration of the public education system, but Alan Freed’s racially integrated performances certainly gestured towards the pleasures of that possibility.

When African American funk bands infiltrated the music scene two decades later in the midst of the Black Power Movement, geographical concerns literally moved to the center stage of both black musical performance and lived experience. While organizations like the Black Panther Party armed themselves in an effort to protect their neighborhoods from the racially motivated violence of the Los Angeles Police Department and other hegemonic entities of power, bands such as Parliament and its sister act Funkadelic (both led by George Clinton) created a lexicon of black imagery that inverted conventional attitudes of derision towards working-class communities of color.76 Parliament recorded and celebrated the growth of African American urban communities in their 1975 release “Chocolate City” and also created an outer space mythology of black history in which the origin of black people was not only not American—it was literally out of this world. If mainstream America had a problem fitting black citizens comfortably within its geographical contours there was another option. Parliament’s ingenious response was to stage an outlandish extravaganza during their live shows, which included a shimmering spacecraft descending from a cloud of smoke to deliver black mythical figures and entertainers in the guise of alien beings such as Dr. Funkenstein and Star Child (both alter egos of Clinton). That funk music became the soundtrack for Blaxploitation cinema during the 1970s is no accident. If this emergent African American-centered form of popular cinema produced a new and sometimes harrowing vision of Afrocentric urban geography, funk was a musical form that could occupy multiple politicized spaces. These ranged from Curtis Mayfield’s socially engaged vision of ghetto life in songs such as “Freddie’s Dead,” from the soundtrack of Superfly (1972), to Funkadelic’s fifth studio album, Cosmic Slop (1973), which addressed the issue of prostitution on at least two tracks, and Parliament’s insistence on Dr. Funkenstein’s fantastical and otherworldy origin. Together, Blaxploitation cinema and its funk soundtrack formed a new aesthetic of imaginative black American geography that was constantly being reinvented. When Parliament took to the stage in the 1970s, their futuristic, yet ghetto-centric grooves were felt by black and white audiences alike; black funk artists charted on both popular and R & B Billboard music charts; African Americans owned successful record companies (even as white music executives continued to exploit many entertainers of color); and African American directors of Blaxploitation cinema were able to produce successful films that directly spoke to the black community (even as some black political groups—such as the NAACP—condemned them).

This heterogeneous historical preamble is admittedly abbreviated and far from complete, and I have not explored related topics such as the representation of American Indians in early anthropological dance films, which served to displace anxieties about colonial atrocities and the appropriation of Indian land. Rather, I have chosen to focus primarily on delineations of African American identity and agency. This is due to the fact that the relationships between American entertainment culture, race, and social struggle have been most significantly dramatized within black American history, especially as it relates to defining community and conceptions of rural, suburban, and urban spaces. With this caveat in mind, the preceding historical discussion establishes several key points about American performance traditions. Firstly, entertainment culture in the United States has, at numerous historical junctures, facilitated negotiations between social mobility, urban and rural identity, and perceptions of racial and ethnic identity. Secondly, although the most significant and enduring social “Other” in mainstream American culture—the African American community—has frequently been maligned and grossly misrepresented through theatrical performance and the circulation of music and dance traditions by the mass media, black entertainers have also served as exemplary figures of political agency, from Bill Robinson’s percussive admonishments of white theater hecklers to George Clinton’s mapping of extraterrestrial black geography. Thirdly, I emphasize that my historical examples indicate instances where mainstream representational spaces expropriate the performance traditions of culturally and racially “Other” bodies—for instance, in nineteenth century print culture. Yet I also gesture towards examples in which historically disempowered groups seize the avenues of mass media and/or entertainment forms for progressive ends, such as the formidable entity of the black press in the early decade of the twentieth century. I am cautious, however, to eschew a reductive binary historical framework whereby cultural production concerning race, geographical space, social mobility, and class is viewed as either wholly positive or negative in its effects. As my discussion of hip hop cinema in the following chapters will show, mainstream film, and even outright exploitation hip hop fare made by people outside of the hip hop community, could incorporate radical political and social plot elements and themes, while the contemporary African American press, on occasion, castigated the burgeoning facets of hip hop culture and its practitioners.

The hip hop musical film of the 1980s featured entertainers from different ethnic populations and enabled a performance tradition that negotiated race, cultural difference, and economics within recognizable geographical parameters on screen. Urban locations central to the films that I discuss, such as Pittsburgh’s Hill District, The South Bronx, and East Los Angeles, have hosted successive waves of European and Latino immigrants as well as migrating African American communities. These regions (and other similar inner city neighborhoods) have become symbols of population instability, cultural transformation, and economic impoverishment—an “Othered” space of ethnic and architectural flux frequently targeted for redevelopment initiatives and the erroneous miscalculations of social scientists. Such neighborhoods have also come to represent important literary and artistic centers of black culture throughout the twentieth century, and more recently, regions like East Harlem have emerged as the core of Latino social and political life in the United States. Indeed, while African Americans have historically fashioned significant elements of music and dance traditions in the United States, a growing Spanish-speaking population has recently transformed conceptions of social categories and identities as well as contributed to American popular music and dance styles, including hip hop.77

Many aspects of hip hop culture and the geographical regions where it first thrived in the United States are multiracial and ethnically diverse—Puerto Ricans were at the forefront of breakdancing talent in the early 1980s and there were many white graffiti writers such as New York City’s Zephyr “bombing” the trains when Ed Koch waged his war against the “graffiti disease”—yet both the mainstream media and the black press often presented it, or at least individual facets of hip hop, as a uniquely African American enterprise. Significantly, the hip hop musical functioned as a highly adaptable and malleable space of racial and ethnic consolidation. I present cases where hip hop, and the hip hop musical film in particular, evoked a pan-ethnic performance culture that served as a panacea for social conflict. I also present moments where it alternately signified black cultural uniqueness and urban identity. The point is that these films capture a historically important nexus in which American social life is negotiated through performative gestures that reformulate the urban milieu within ethnic and racial markers. These films also show that gender, class negotiations, and differing forms of economic relations play a significant role in the mobilization and politicization of such performance cultures.

While the racial inequities of nineteenth century America were written into law, the plight of many different ethnic populations in the United States at the closing decades of the twentieth century were far less easily defined in terms of access to communal empowerment, jobs, education, and space. The hip hop musical repeatedly imagines fluctuating coordinates of power through the relation between an artist (or group of artists) and his community. Some films, such as Wild Style, envision a pan-ethnic street crew where place of residence takes precedence over racial identity. Overwhelmingly, however, the hip hop musical calls forth a struggle between street culture and the commodification of performance. The “threat” to cultural authenticity takes on many guises, including the recording industry, the world of professional theater, and the art gallery. A persistent dualism raised within these films is the negotiation between “selling out” by achieving personal success and the individual’s role in bettering their community.

In fact, a battle between the “authentic” and the commercially contrived makes its imprint upon all aspects of the hip hop musical film. This issue is so important because it dramatizes the economic and social inequities that defined racial categories and their contingent geographic boundaries in the 1980s. The films do not directly tell us that their young characters have no opportunity to attend college; it is implied simply by their geographical location and economic status. As the main characters of these hip hop musicals straddle a precarious position in relation to mainstream cultural institutions and the entertainment industry, their situation is symptomatic of the subjection that many inner city communities actually faced when confronted with larger entities of power, such as civil government, real estate development, and federal programs and agencies during the Reagan years.

The social groups depicted in several hip hop films were deeply affected by federal cuts to social service programs, gentrification, and rising rates of dereliction. In 1981, the year that Ronald Reagan ascended to office, nearly half of all black children and 36 percent of Hispanic children in the U.S. lived below the poverty line, while the poverty rate for whites was just over 15 percent, and all children, regardless of race, was 20 percent.78 Madeline Kimmich notes that “federal outlays for twenty-five programs affecting children—social services, health, nutrition, education, employment, and income support—decreased by 11 percent between fiscal years 1981 and 1984, after adjusting for inflation.”⁷⁹ In 1982 John E. Jacob, president of the National Urban League, summarized the contents of the NUL’s “annual assessment of the status of blacks” for 1981.⁸⁰ He noted:

Never in that time (since the report was first issued in 1976) has the state of black America been more vulnerable. Never in that time have black economic rights been under such powerful attack. Never in that time have so many black people been alienated from their government.⁸¹

Moreover, a variety of housing programs that had been initiated in the 1970s to alleviate the problem of unfit housing stock and dereliction in urban communities of color were either reduced or terminated under the Reagan administration, further straining the cohesion of the family unit in urban communities of color.⁸² The structure of the Hollywood musical film, with its emphasis on community, family, and the home, neatly crystallized the increasingly vexed engagement with, and outright obliteration of, official channels of governance experienced by inner city populations in the 1980s. This project explores such crucial issues and examines hip hop’s actual spatial movement from inner city neighborhoods to various mainstream venues (such as large ballet productions), while also analyzing the ways in which hip hop culture took root in more conventional representational spaces, moving from the independent art film (Wild Style) to mainstream cinema (Flashdance) and parody (Delivery Boys).

The book grew out of a paper I wrote for a graduate course on the musical film as a doctoral student at New York University. Viewing Charlie Ahearn’s Wild Style piqued my interest in historical and theoretical writings on musical film and led to an exploration of the roots of hip hop in New York City. As I watched Wild Style, Beat Street, Krush Groove, Breakin’ Through, Rappin’, Delivery Boys, Body Rock, and the Breakin’ films, I realized that such early incarnations of hip hop cinema had as much, if not more, to say about the plight of inner city youth, hip hop as a social practice, and the instability of urban spaces than the subsequent films of “New Black Realism” which emerged just a few years later. This book thus provides an interdisciplinary investigation into the emergence of hip hop musical cinema that places these films in a variety of relevant contexts, including urban history, dance culture, and youth studies. It emphasizes the contradictions and complexities of these films, while stressing their importance to the social history of the 1980s, particularly in relation to urban culture. Some productions—for instance, those that present a singular historical achievement or unique narrative strategy, such as Wild Style and Flashdance—are discussed more fully than others as the book proceeds. Such a method of analysis reveals that the hip hop-oriented musical, and the use of hip hop in musical films more generally, constitutes a profoundly important development within this genre because it pushed the boundaries of musical cinema to include the images and sounds of an emergent inner city youth culture, while also frequently acknowledging contemporary social and economic inequities.

In Chapter 1, I make the case that these early hip hop-oriented films are indeed musicals through a close examination of their structural and thematic elements. The book also provides a revisionist history of the postclassical musical that makes room for early hip hop-oriented cinema, and significantly alters theories about the trajectory of the generic development of the musical. In doing this, my account challenges several of the assumptions made by scholars of this era. For example, this book troubles the notion that musical film from the 1980s was either conservative in its thematic concerns and narrative structure, or a deconstructionist exercise, which called into question the values of the so-called classical-era “music man”—a character who historically embodies both successful romantic partnering (he gets the girl) and triumphant musical/dance performance (he becomes a star). These arguments by scholars suggest a binary schism within the genre, and are largely based on an analysis of the trio of successful conventional youth-oriented musicals that defined the teen musical in the 1980s—Flashdance (1983), Footloose (1984), and Dirty Dancing (1987)—as well as earlier films like Saturday Night Fever (1977), All That Jazz (1979) and Pennies From Heaven (1981), which curtailed the expressive power and romantic grasp of the conventional “music man.”

I attempt to do something different here. Firstly, discussions of post-classical, youth-oriented musical film have largely overlooked the racial diversification of the teen musical at this moment. In fact, I argue that hip hop culture made its biggest entrance into mainstream media through the narrative format of the musical film. Nearly all hip hop musicals embrace several features of the classical film musical: the formation of a romantic couple, the desire for communal harmony and order, as well as a final show. While these features are generally put to conservative ends in the classical era, when they form the structural base of the hip hop musical they instead allow for innovative and often radical social and political transformations. This is achieved through their documentation of contemporary urban landscapes, use of non-professional actors, centrality of communities of color, and, in the case of Wild Style especially, innovative cinematic language.

Secondly, I argue against the assertion that postclassical “music men” of the 1980s are no longer invested with the ability to make claims upon space through the act of performance. The appropriation of space and subsequent narrative manipulation through dance was a hallmark of classical-era “music men” such as Fred Astaire and Gene Kelly, whose routines in Top Hat (1935) and An American in Paris (1951), respectively, emphasize their mastery and in some cases even ownership over public spaces. While previous scholars have argued that the postclassical “music man” can no longer orchestrate or signify ownership of space through performance in films such as All That Jazz and Pennies From Heaven or that his ability to do so is present but highly limited in its impact (Footloose, Dirty Dancing), hip hop musicals repeatedly show us “music men” who are able to appropriate city spaces (and in some cases enact important social change) through the various performative outlets of hip hop culture. This is a crucial development in the larger context of the history of musical film because classical-era Hollywood musicals have habitually denied African American performers and other people of color the transcendent abilities of the “music man.”

As I move onto a close study of Charlie Ahearn’s groundbreaking independent hip hop film Wild Style in Chapter 2, I provide an even more in-depth examination of the relationship between hip hop culture and the musical genre. This film redefines notions of home and community as it transforms traditional generic parameters in order to document the resourceful and creative South Bronx community in the early 1980s. Additionally, the chapter addresses Wild Style’s reflexive strategies, location shooting, and use of animation, all of which are derived directly from hip hop artistic strategies.

Chapter 3 puts the hip hop musical in dialogue with other youth-oriented cinema of the same era in order to reveal how early hip hop film presented a challenge to the dominant values of white-centered suburban teen cinema of the same decade. The former evokes hip hop culture as a social and economic system that celebrates difference, innovation, and creativity. This is in sharp distinction to the emphasis on conformity and consumption found in 1980s mainstream youth cinema, such as in the films of John Hughes. Culture is made, not just consumed, in the hip hop-oriented youth musical. In the end, this chapter argues that teen film from this era was acutely concerned with the perceived racialized geographic contours of American life that associated white America with suburbia, and people of color with the city. The teeming, racially homogenous malls of Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Valley Girl (1983), and Weird Science (1985) are spaces of semi-private community ritual in which teenagers shop as well as socialize. However, they also function as symbols of racial exclusion that screen out both poverty and ethnic diversity. The hip hop musical, by contrast, defines community ritual as inclusive, spontaneous, and public through its staging of music and dance numbers in a variety of civic venues and spaces within the urban environment.

Latent social tensions regarding the transgression of boundaries between urban neighborhoods and suburban communities came to the surface in teen film, not just in representational form, but in cinema spec-tatorship as well. My research uncovered instances of violence and public unrest that broke out during screenings of Krush Groove, and demonstrates that youth audiences responded to the content of teen films in ways that dramatized the apparent dichotomy between the racialized geographical spaces of this cinema. The rise of the multiplex theater frequently allowed for encounters between groups of teens from different racial backgrounds and communities, yet the implications of this aspect of multiplex spec-tatorship have not, to my knowledge, been fully examined. By shedding some light on this history, I hope that I have opened up a fruitful avenue of exploration for future research. Racial diversity was banished from the mainstream 1980s teen film by setting the narrative action in supposedly all-white communities but the hip hop musical focused on underprivileged urban communities of color rather than white middle-class teens. By examining these two distinct but related cycles of films together, I provide a more nuanced account of youth-oriented cinema from this historical period than has been previously drawn.

The last part of the book focuses on the evocation of breakdance—an inner-city dance practice originating in the 1970s that was an integral part of hip hop culture—in both film and print. It offers a history of the dynamic relation between ballet and breakdance, drawing on popular magazines, academic and professional journals, newspapers, and film of the 1980s. A vigorously contested gender dynamic allowed breakdancing to express significant aspects of cultural identity in a broad array of media and performance traditions that included an unusually heterogeneous audience and devoted legion of practitioners. Here I establish that, contrary to popular opinion, breakdancing in the early 1980s was practiced by women and girls. Furthermore, the female breaker was able to use the dance form in a critical manner that negated the marginalization of women in certain avenues of hip hop culture.

As the art of breakdance came to national attention in the early 1980s, it was continually redefined by a negotiation between “authentic” street culture and the protean arms of institutional power—the ballet academy, advertising, and dance magazines—that tried to grasp for control over its meaning and place within American life. This chapter reveals that institutional forces initially brought the two dance forms together through both community outreach programs and theatrical shows. When street trained breakers were courted by the world of professional ballet and jazz dance, the relationship was presented as a way to invigorate and even “remasculinize” the rigid performance codes of ballet. Paradoxically, it was also envisioned as a mechanism of control used to “tame” an apparently wild and uncultivated mode of expression. This unusual aspect of 1980s dance culture found its way into the first wave of hip hop films including Breakin’, Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo, and Breakin’ Through, while also influencing, and even to a degree, structuring the enormously successful mainstream film Flashdance.

The short breakdance sequence in this 1983 blockbuster is generally considered to be the earliest inclusion of this aspect of hip hop culture in mainstream cinema. And, although it is usually dismissed as a curious footnote in the history of American film, the use of breaking in Flashdance can actually be read as a complex instance of ambivalent desire underpinned by the musical genre’s historical negotiation of race, gender, erotic energy, and performance on screen. Previous accounts have ignored race as a significant factor in this film, and instead focused on Flashdance’s delineation of female subjectivity. Upon close examination of the cinematic text, however, it becomes apparent that the definition of gender and sexual identity in the film were inseparable from issues of race, class, and performance. My reading demonstrates that the transformation of the female heroine from working-class stripper to upper-class dancer is actually predicated on her relationship to black and Latino youth culture. Further, it establishes that Flashdance works towards the expulsion and repression of all racially “Other” aspects from the main narrative, while at the same time these repressed elements, however marginalized within the narrative, return as surplus visual cues. Flashdance is usually understood to be a transparent window into the regressive gender politics of the 1980s, but I argue that much more complex operations are at work in this film, revealing that gender cannot be cleaved from an understanding of the categories of both race and class.

This book fills a gap in hip hop scholarship in that it examines hip hop culture on film and its relationship to classical film genres and institutional dance traditions. Moreover, this connective understanding of early hip hop cinema reverses the claim that, with few exceptions, the hip hop musical was uniformly apolitical and unworthy of serious narrative analysis. Rather than simply expressing the angst of inner city youth or merely providing a backdrop for partying, hip hop culture, I argue, is actually the catalyst for social change in many of these films. It presents a blueprint for communal cohesion by including everyone and by literally taking place everywhere—any stoop, street corner or basketball court will do.