1. Jon Caramanica, “Hip-Hop Heirlooms,” Vogue, Fall 2008, “Fashion Rocks” supplement.
2. See Sharon R. Sherman, “Bombing, Breakin’, and Getting Down: The Folk and Popular Culture of Hip-Hop,” Western Folklore 43 (Oct. 1984): 287–93, Cheryl L. Keyes, “Verbal Art Performance in Rap Music: The Conversation of the 80s,” Folklore Forum 17, no. 1–2 (1984): 143–52, and Barbara Crossette, “A Three Day Celebration of Bronx Folk Culture,” New York Times, May 15, 1981. The latter covers the Conference on Folk Culture in the Bronx, which took place in the spring of 1981 and included a session on breakdancing that ran at the same time as a program entitled “A Synagogue on Intervale Avenue: Aging with Dignity in the South Bronx.” The breakdance portion of the event included dance on film and a live demonstration, as well as a presentation from Martha Cooper, the former press photographer whom the article states “discovered” breaking when “sent to cover what her editors and the police had called a ‘riot.’” For coverage of the 2007 National Folk Festival in Richmond, Virginia, which celebrated the twenty-fifth anniversary of Wild Style, see Cynthia McMullen, “Hip Hop on Down: Wild Style Reunion to Feature Old-School Performers at Folk Fest,” Richmond Times Dispatch, Sept. 2, 2007.
3. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal, eds., That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (New York: Routledge, 2004).
4. Gary Dauphin, “Hip hop at the Movies,” in The Vibe History of Hip Hop, ed. Alan Light (New York: Three Rivers Press, 1999), 203.
5. Paula Massood, Black City Cinema: African American Urban Experiences in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2003), 122–24. See also Murray Forman, The ’Hood Comes First: Race, Space, and Place in Rap and Hip-Hop (Middletown, Connecticut: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 255–58.
6. Nelson George, Hip Hop America (New York: Penguin, 1998), 108.
7. David Toop, Rap Attack 2: African Rap to Global Hip Hop (London: Pluto Press, 1984), 164.
8. See Tricia Rose, Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1994), 4, 33. Rose, in her otherwise thoughtful and engaging study of rap music and hip hop culture, implies that early mainstream hip hop cinema was somehow “threatening” to the well-being of rap music: “By 1987, rap music had survived several death knells, Hollywood mockery, and radio bans and continued to spawn new artists, such as Public Enemy, Eric B. & Rakim, and LL Cool J” (4). The author does not explicitly state what she means by “Hollywood mockery” but given the omission of these films from her book, and the fact that hip hop musicals ceased to be produced by 1985, I can only surmise that she is referring to the cycle of films that are the subject of this book.
9. See Mark Winokur, “Marginal Marginalia: the African American Voice in the Nouvelle Gangster Film,” Velvet Light Trap 35 (Spring 1995): 19–32, Michael Eric Dyson, “Out of the Ghetto,” Sight and Sound 2, no. 6 (Oct. 1992): 18–21, Grant Farred, “No Way Out of the Menaced Society: Loyalty Within the Boundedness of Race,” Camera Obscura 12, no. 2 35 (May 1995): 6–23, and Steven Kendall, New Jack Cinema: Hollywood’s African American Filmmakers (Millbrae, CA: J. L. Denser), 1994. The three articles link their corpus of films through black urban identity and/or the African American gangster figure of hip hop music and culture. The last entry, published by a non-academic press, labeled these later films about ghetto-centric culture by an alternate nomenclature “New Jack Cinema” and explored the experiences of African American directors and black filmmaking in general.
10. There does exist one other attempt to organize the first hip hop cinema productions into a book-length corpus. This work, a Ph.D. dissertation by Aaron Dickinson Sachs entitled The Hip-Hopsploitation Film Cycle: Representing, Articulating, and Appropriating Hip-Hop Culture, University of Iowa, 2009, does not recognize or assess the significance and influence of the Hollywood musical genre in its discussion of what the author calls “hip-hopsploitation” cinema. Instead, Sachs discusses these films within an exclusionary model of exploitation cinema in order to advance the thesis that hip hop culture was originally represented in film as multicultural and pan-racial, rather than distinctly African American, prior to the assent of “New Black Realism.” I am in disagreement with parts of this work, but the author does endeavor to provide a compelling account of the relation between hip hop and media technology.
11. Melvin Burke Donalson, Hip Hop in American Cinema (New York: Peter Lang, 2007), 7–24. This book does contain an informative but very cursory introductory chapter on the hip hop musical. Unlike most academic assessments of early hip hop cinema, Donalson acknowledges the films’ significant connections to the Hollywood musical genre.
12. Thomas Doherty, Teenagers and Teenpics: The Juvenilization of American Movies in the 1950s (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 72.
13. See Carol Clover, “Dancin’ in the Rain,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), 162.
14. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African-American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press), 90–92. Gates notes that another print in this series, Dreadful Riot on Negro Hill (1827), contains one of the earliest written attempts to represent black vernacular speech in verse form.
15. Tessa Watt, Cheap Print and Popular Piety, 1550–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 11–38. The broadsheet ballad or penny ballad emerged as an early modern European form of print, which was sung or spoken aloud and associated with communal ritual and performance.
16. David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class (London: Verso, 1999), 101–107.
17. Katrina Hazzard-Gordon, Jookin’: The Rise of Social Dance Formations in African-American Culture (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1990), 46.
18. Ibid., 31–32. Regarding slave festival days and dances, the author notes that “no matter how much these occasions were intended to encourage resignation, slaves were able to seize dances as opportunities to resist white domination. A considerable amount of insurrectionary activity took place during slave holidays and days off, and even in tightly controlled situations themes of resistance were evident in both rural and urban settings. … Numerous slave insurrections resulted in legislation aimed to prevent slaves from visiting other plantations; from using drums, horns, or any other instrument that might signal rebellion.” See also Jacqui Malone, Steppin’ on the Blues: The Visible Rhythms of African American Dance (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1996). Malone’s account downplays the insurrectionary aspect of African American dance under slavery and instead focuses on the role dance and music played in linking geographically separated slave communities to each other through shared relations to African culture.
19. Eric Lott, Love & Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993). Lott argues that the practice of minstrelsy was largely based on “cross racial desire,” however repressed, rather than just the derision of black cultural practices. See also Michael Rogin, Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996). Rogin is far less accommodating than Lott in his view of blackface racial solidarity and hybridity. He highlights the performance tradition’s asymmetrical power relations and the very real exclusion of African American performers from the stage as whites appropriated black theatrical personas.
20. Lott, 29.
21. Ibid., 17. The author even suggests that the minstrel show not only played a part in “the racial politics of its time” but also largely “was the racial politics of its time—from its northern emergence as an entr’acte in about 1830 to the various New York stage versions of Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the mid-1850s.” Emphasis in original text.
22. Ibid., 63–87.
23. Alexander Saxon, “Blackface Minstrelsy,” in Inside the Minstrel Mask: Readings in Nineteenth Century Blackface Minstrelsy, eds. Annemarie Bean, James V. Hatch, and Brooks McNamara (Hanover: Wesleyan University Press, 1996), 67–85.
24. Lott, 143–52.
25. Constance Valis Hill, Tap Dancing America: A Cultural History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 5.
26. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, Jazz Dance: The Story of American Vernacular Dance (New York: Da Capo Press, 1994), 36–37.
27. Robert W. Snyder, The Voice of the City: Vaudeville and Popular Culture in New York (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 12–25.
28. Ibid., 121. This act was performed at Hyde and Behman’s Theater.
29. Even as the screen produced violent and grotesque images of female Irish bodies, stars like Maggie Cline, “The Irish Queen,” found success on the vaudeville stage.
30. Ed Guerrero, Framing Blackness: The African American Image in Film (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993), 10. Guerrero argues that the “plantation genre” emerged with Birth of a Nation (1915) and persisted in Hollywood film up until the 1970s, when the genre underwent a “sharp reversal of perspective” in the wake of intensified struggles for black civil rights during the 1960s.
31. Robert Jackson, “The Celluloid War Before The Birth: Race and History in Early American Film,” in American Cinema and the Southern Imaginary, eds. Deborah Barker and Kathryn McKee (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2011), 29. Jackson notes that historical evidence suggests “such films were considered a discrete genre” and that while at least ten watermelon themed eating films survive from roughly the first decade of cinema, many more were likely produced.
32. Lubin Summary, reproduced on the American Film Institute website, www.afi.com.
33. American Mutoscope and Biograph Company Summary, reproduced on the American Film Institute website, www.afi.com.
34. Jacqueline N. Stewart, Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 73. Stewart argues that black criminality was such a pervasive and highly codified stereotype in the first few decades of cinema that the appearance of a black actor (or white actor in blackface) with a chicken or a watermelon already assumed an act of criminality or theft, which had taken place off screen.
35. Allan H. Spear, “The Making of the Black Ghetto,” in The Urbanization of America: An Historical Anthology, ed. Allen M. Wakstein (New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1970), 272–75. Spear notes that when the number of blacks increased in Chicago between 1890 and 1910, an emerging affluent African American class sought housing in previously all-white neighborhoods. As a result, “community groups” such as the “The Hyde Park Improvement Club” emerged in order to prevent African Americans from purchasing and renting in white middle- and upper-class neighborhoods. See also Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., and Song-Ho Ha, “A Unity of Opposites: The Black College-Educated Elite, Black Workers, and the Community Development Process,” in Historical Roots of the Urban Crisis: African Americans in the Industrial City, 1900–1950, ed. Henry Louis Taylor, Jr., and Walter Hill (New York: Garland Publishing, 2000), 32. The above authors argue that as home ownership became a reality for more and more Americans, neighborhoods were transformed into “defended territories and battlegrounds between blacks and whites in the 1910s and 1920s.”
36. “Violent Riots Close Ford’s,” Afro-American, Apr. 12, 1941. This article recounts the violent events of a massive autoworkers strike at Ford’s River Rouge Michigan plant in 1941, and reflects on the automobile industry’s role in drawing black laborers to Northern cities. “Colored workers have been employed by Henry Ford since he first opened his shop to make the original Model A machine. And when he announced that he would pay wages of $5 a day for common labor in his plant in 1914, which had been moved to Highland Park, the influx from the rural and urban centers of the South converged on Detroit in force. From 1915 to 1919 there was a steady stream of newcomers flooding the city. Everyone was talking about Ford and the high wages he was paying. At the same time there was a shortage of houses, rents soared, and the Motor City was in the midst of its pre-depression day boom.”
37. “The Negro in the North,” Chicago Defender, Apr. 23, 1921.
38. Ibid.
39. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and Gene Andrew Jarrett, The New Negro: Readings on Race, Representation, and African American Culture, 1892–1938 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2007), 1–20.
40. Jane M. Gaines, Fire and Desire: Mixed-Race Movies in the Silent Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 5. The author remarks that “the Harlem elite virtually ignored these popular films and wrote them off as having nothing to do with art.” Further, she makes the important point that “race movies” were never understood at the time of their production to be “high culture” even though historians have retrospectively attempted to transform the status of “race movies” and elevate them to such a stature.
41. Lester A. Walton, “Screen Dialect,” New York Age, Jan. 1, 1918. Thank you to Jay Hufford for making this research available to me.
42. Ibid.
43. Afro-American, “Reform Needed on Race Stage,” Aug. 24, 1923.
44. Gates, Jr., 172–80.
45. Ivan H. Browning, “Across the Pond,” Chicago Defender, Dec. 15, 1928.
46. Chicago Defender, Jul. 22, 1929.
47. Chicago Defender, May 13, 1922.
48. Chicago Defender, “Ethel Radiates,” Apr. 29, 1923.
49. Mark Hellinger, untitled, Chicago Defender, Sept. 29, 1928.
50. Ibid.
51. Ibid.
52. Valis Hill, 13.
53. “New Bert Williams Book Appears,” Baltimore Afro-American, Apr. 6, 1923.
54. John Frederick Matheus, “Some Aspects of the Negro Interpreted in Contemporary American and European Literature,” in Gates and Jarrett, eds., 210.
55. Thomas Sancton, “The Race Riots,” New Republic, Jul. 5, 1943. Reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights, Part One: American Journalism 1941–1963 (New York: Library of America, 2003), 37–48. See also Ralph Ellison, “Eyewitness Story of Riot: False Rumors Spurred Mob,” New York Post, Aug. 2, 1943. Reprinted in Reporting Civil Rights Part One: American Journalism 1941–1963, 49–51.
56. “Violent Riots Close Ford’s.” Although black newspapers such as the Afro-American appeared sympathetic to black laborers and their desire to continue earning a decent wage at the Ford plant without being interrupted by the demands of white unions who had largely excluded them and ignored them, the NAACP urged African American workers to side with the strikers. Further, the Afro-American detailed the financial rewards provided to black laborers by Ford in an employment environment frequently hostile to black workers; Boeing Aircraft, for instance, had a closed contract with the American Federation of Laborers that excluded black workers in at least one of their plants.
57. A. Philip Randolph, “Why F. D. Won’t End Defense Jim Crow,” Afro-American, Apr. 12, 1941.
58. For a brief overview of the “Soundie” phenomenon, see Maurice Terenzio, Scott MacGillivray, and Ted Okuda, The Soundies Distributing Corporation of America: A History and Filmography of Their “Jukebox” Musical Films of the 1940s (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1991).
59. Thomas Doherty, Projections of War: Hollywood, American Culture, and World War II (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 220–21.
60. Donald Bogle, Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, and Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films (New York: Continuum, 1989), 121. See also Thomas Cripps, Slow Fade to Black: The Negro in American Film, 1900–1942 (New York, Oxford University Press, 1977), 357.
61. Stormy Weather (1943), an all-black cast musical showcase staring Lena Horne and Bill Robinson, is an exceptional anomaly at this historical juncture. Produced by Fox, it featured a romantic storyline between two black characters as well as a steady run of top African American musicians and dancers, and acknowledged the role of black Americans in the U.S. military.
62. Sean Griffin, “The Gang’s All Here: Generic Versus Racial Integrations in the 1940s Musical,” Cinema Journal 42, no. 1 (2002): 21–45.
63. Amy Herzog, “Discordant Visions: The Peculiar Musical Images of the Soundies Jukebox Film,” American Music 22, no. 1 (Spring 2004): 27–39.
64. Ibid., 30.
65. Snyder, 44.
66. Herzog, 30.
67. Hilary Herbold, “Never a Level Playing Field: Blacks and the G.I. Bill,” Journal of Blacks in Higher Education no. 6 (Winter 1994–5), 104–8.
68. Bruce Lambert, “At 50, Levittown Contends With its Legacy of Bias,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1997. The original Long Island, NY, Levittown lease agreements (that included an option to purchase) in the late 1940s stipulated that only white tenants could move in.
69. Glenn Altschuler, All Shook Up: How Rock ’N’ Roll Changed America (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003), 1–34.
70. “NAACP Blamed for ‘Rock and Roll’ Music in South,” Baltimore Afro-American, Apr. 3, 1956.
71. Altschluer, 61. In 1957, Frankie Lymon did cause a scandal by reaching out to dance with a white girl at the end of Alan Freed’s Rock ’N’ Roll Dance Party, a move that led to the show’s subsequent cancelation.
72. Ilana Nash, American Sweethearts: Teenage Girls in Twentieth Century Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 53. Perceptive historians such as Nash have shown that despite the overriding “whiteness” of most youth-oriented popular narratives, products such as serialized teen literature—in Nash’s example, Nancy Drew detective stories, which relegated “minorities and the working class” to the status of “villains or … incidental characters, usually menial laborers”—could be negotiated by young readers from communities of color in ambivalent yet often ultimately satisfying ways. See also Kelly Schrum, Some Wore Bobby Sox: The Emergence of Teenage Girls’ Culture 1920–1945 (New York: Palgrave, 2004). Schrum uses some high school yearbooks from African American schools in her research but she does not examine racial difference as a significant facet shaping one’s experience of adolescence in the United States.
73. “Truman and the Poll Tax,” Afro-American, Apr. 9, 1946. The author notes, “President Truman told a group of teen-agers in Chicago last Saturday that the repeal of the poll tax is a matter that should be left up to the Southern States.” The article does not mobilize the word “teen-ager” in relation to consumer culture or delinquency but rather employs the term to denote a group of young people as a political entity.
74. Dr. Palmer’s targeted teen consumers in a 1955 advertisement in the May 31 edition of the Baltimore Afro-American as it announced that “teen-age girls, and boys too, who are experiencing the pimples of youth should find Dr. FRED Palmer’s of great help in ending the embarrassment of ugly pimply skin.” While Dr. Palmer’s generally counted teenage skin ailments as one of the many problems it could cure, teens were specifically addressed in their 1963 advertisement, ominously titled “Teen-age Torture” as it linked “complexion success” with “date success.” The cure-all elixir Black and White ointment also listed “Teen-age Pimples” as one of the conditions, along with ringworm and eczema, that it could treat in a February 4, 1956, half-page ad in the Afro-American.
75. “Gray Gets Our Vote,” Washington Afro-American, Jun. 22, 1954.
76. Amy Nathan Wright, “A Philosophy of Funk: The Politics and Pleasure of a Parliafunkadelicment Thang!” in The Funk Era and Beyond: New Perspectives on Black Popular Culture, ed. Tony Bolden (New York: Palgrave, 2008), 38. Wright argues that the song “What is Soul” attempted to transform mainstream sociologists’ prevailing assessments of black urban working people as a pathological underclass, who were largely to blame for their impoverished material condition, by utilizing poetic and sometimes humorous language to articulate the African American urban experience. Clinton locates soul in “What is Soul” as the material impoverishment of “a ring around your bathtub” and the desperation of “a joint rolled in toilet paper” but it is also “rusty ankles and ashy kneecaps”—a nuanced and evocative description of inner-city life that beautifully fused bodily sensations, corporeal conditions, and memory with the dilapidated urban environment.
77. David Theo Goldberg, Racial Subjects: Writing on Race in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 64–66. Immigrant communities from Mexico, Argentina, Columbia, The Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, and many other Spanish-speaking regions made their presence increasingly felt in the social, political and cultural life of the United States towards the end of the 1970s. The U.S. Census Bureau responded by creating a new and unprecedented category of self-identification on the 1980 census count—Hispanic—that unites all people who trace their origins from any Spanish-speaking region. This undoubtedly reifies and reduces the obvious differences between national communities, yet it also attests to the undisputable influence that this arguably coherent cultural and political force has exerted in the United States in the last half-century.
78. Madeline H. Kimmich, America’s Children: Who Cares? Growing Needs and Declining Assistance in the Reagan Era (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute Press, 1985), 1. See also Carmen DeNavas-Walt, Bernadette D. Proctor, and Jessica C. Smith, Income, Poverty, and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2009, U.S. Department of Commerce and Economics and Statistics Administration, U.S. Bureau of the Census (Washington, D.C.: U.S Government Printing Office, 2010): Report P60, no. 238. Table B-2, 62–67. During the first two years of President Reagan’s tenure, the poverty rate for black children increased by more than 5 percent while the rate for Hispanic children was even higher at 6.3 percent. In this two-year period, the poverty rates for white children increased by 3.1 percent. This dramatic increase in poverty among American children occurred during a significant economic downturn and was not entirely the result of reductions to federal aid programs. However, comparing poverty rates among children between the four years prior to Reagan’s election and those following his two terms in office are very telling. Between 1976 and 1980, poverty among white children increased by 2 percent, black children by 1.7 percent, and Hispanic children by 3 percent. Between 1980 and 1988, the years bracketing Reagan’s presidency, poverty rates among white children actually fell by .8 percent, while the poverty rates for black and Hispanic children rose by 1.2 percent and 4.4 percent, respectively.
79. Kimmich, 3. The author notes that “restrictions on federal funding were usually imposed in two ways: as direct reductions in grant programs (often accompanying a shift from service-specific grants to a block grant), or as changes in eligibility criteria or service coverage in entitlement programs.”
80. “NUL State of America Says: Blacks Are a Forgotten People,” Baltimore Afro-American, Jan. 19, 1982. This article presents an overview of the National Urban League’s series of reports for 1981, dealing with education, economics, and affirmative action.
81. Ibid.
82. Ronald Lawson and Reuben B. Johnson III, “Tenant Responses to the Urban Housing Crises, 1970–1984,” in The Tenant Movement in New York City, 1904–1984, eds. Ronald Lawson and Mark Naison (New Brunswick, New Jersey: Rutgers University Press: 1986).
1. Douglas Kellner, “Film, Politics, and Ideology: Reflections on Hollywood Film in the Age of Reagan,” Velvet Light Trap 27 (Spring 1991): 9–24. I invoke the term “ideology” here in the same manner as Kellner, who argues that it is most useful to understand ideology in relation to “theories, ideas, texts, and representations that legitimate domination of women and people of color, and that serve the interests of the ruling gender and race as well as class powers.” (10) He suggests that while ideologically oppressive currents may be present in many mainstream films, these same productions are often beset with contradictions, and display multiple ideological viewpoints that may contradict their apparently conservative or liberal narratives. I find his broadening of Marxist terms of analysis very useful in understanding film culture of the 1980s.
2. Charlie Ahearn, Wild Style: The Sampler (Brooklyn: Powerhouse Books, 2007), 116–17, 154–61.
3. Ibid., 50–51
4. Stanley Meisler, “U.N. Holds Meeting on S. Africa: Jackson, Belafonte Assail US Conference Boycott,” Los Angeles Times, Jun. 17, 1986. During the United Nations conference, Belafonte directly accused President Reagan of racism and insensitivity to the plight of African children. Meisler writes that “Belafonte, the singer who has taken an active role in the movement for sanctions against South Africa, described President Reagan as ‘morally bankrupt, with racist attitudes.’ ‘Ronald Reagan will weep at the grave of Nazi fascists,’ Belafonte told reporters, recalling the President’s visit to the West German military grave at Bitburg last year, ‘but he has no compassion for the children killed in Soweto.’”
5. Abiola Sinclair, “Beat Street: Authentic Look at Bronx Breakers,” New York Amsterdam News, Jun. 9, 1984. The author notes that “Belafonte says the film is dedicated to the people of the South Bronx ‘without whom there would be nothing to make a film about.’”
6. Geoffrey Baker, “¡Hip Hop, Revolución! Nationalizing Rap in Cuba,” Ethnomusicology 49, no. 3 (Fall 2005): 19–20.
7. Doherty, 1988, 7–9. Doherty notes, “Together, these three elements—controversial content, bare-bones budgets, and demographic targeting—remain characteristic of any exploitation movie.”
8. Cannon Films was purchased by two Israeli businessmen, Menahem Golan and Yoram Globus, in the late 1970s. Under their leadership, the company has produced a slew of low-budget martial arts films, including Bloodsport (1988) and the entire American Ninja series (1986–1993), teen sex comedies, as well as more serious “quality” films including John Cassavetes’s Love Streams (1984) and The Assault (1986), which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. In 1990, Cannon once again ventured into the familiar territory of youth-oriented dance cinema with Lambada, a dance flick intended to capitalize on the brief Latin-inspired dance craze of the late 1980s. The film starred Breakin’s Adolfo Quinones and was directed by Joel Silberberg.
9. “Yearly Box Office: 1984 Domestic Grosses,” Box Office Mojo, http://www.boxofficemojo.com/yearly/chart/?yr=1984&p=.htm
10. Ibid.
11. Robert Sklar, Movie-Made America: A Cultural History of the American Movies, rev. ed. (New York: Vintage Books, 1994), 341. Many of the highest earners from this decade were big budget Hollywood spectacles that appealed to young audiences. These films were often serialized science fiction or fantasy-oriented special effects extravaganzas. Breakin’ certainly doesn’t fit this mold but it undoubtedly appealed to young cinemagoers, a feature that nearly always guaranteed success at this moment of rapid multiplex expansion facilitated by the proliferation of mall construction across the country.
12. Gene Siskel, “Break Dancin’,” New York Daily News, May 29, 1984.
13. Ibid.
14. Rick Altman, The American Film Musical (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1987), 12.
15. Ibid., 211–12.
16. Ibid., 200.
17. The only exception to this observation is Delivery Boys.
18. Altman, 208. Altman argues that the show musical’s finale is the ultimate testament to the genre’s conservative and “strikingly middle-class view of the process of producing and marketing a commodity.”
19. Ibid., 209.
20. Ibid., 209.
21. Ibid., 140–41. The author notes that as the influence of the Viennese tradition came to bear its weight upon early American cinema, the open sexuality of operetta was usually sublimated within the textual operations of the film musical, partly because the American audience was less familiar with such overt displays of sexual desire.
22. Ibid., 140.
23. Matthew Tinkcom, Working Like a Homosexual: Camp, Capital, Cinema (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 35–71. While I agree with Tinkcom’s reading, these codes were merely available to be read by particular spectators. In turn, such particular queer aesthetics were also just as likely to go unnoticed by most mainstream filmgoers, and the elaborate dream world of romantic play constructed in the films (enabled by their queer aesthetic) also made their conservative plot elements all the more attractive to the general viewing public.
24. Altman, 145.
25. Fredric Jameson, The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on the Postmodern, 1983–1998 (London: Verso, 1998), 5. Jameson argues that within the postmodern era, the use of older representational forms no longer contains a critical or ironic comment as one would find in parody. Instead, he suggests that postmodernism is distinguished by “pastiche.” While “pastiche” also utilizes and revisits previous styles and genres, Jameson notes that it “is the imitation of a peculiar or unique style, the wearing of a stylistic mask, speech in a dead language: but it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without parody’s ulterior motive, without the satirical impulse. … Pastiche is blank parody.” See also Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994).
26. Lawson and Reuben B. Johnson III, 268. According to Lawson and Johnson, the South Bronx was not under threat so much from gentrification as it was from “severe decay and abandonment.”
27. Lee Dembart, “Carter Takes ‘Sobering’ Trip to South Bronx; Carter Finds Hope Amid Blight on ‘Sobering’ Trip to Bronx,” New York Times, Oct. 6, 1977.
28. Ibid. See also Manny Fernandez, “In the Bronx, Blight Gave Way to Renewal,” New York Times, Oct. 5, 2007.
29. Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., “Has Carter Forgotten Black Needs?; Carter and Black Needs,” Washington Post, Aug. 14, 1977.
30. Ibid.
31. “Reagan, In South Bronx, Says Carter Broke Vow; Raises Voice Above Chants,” New York Times, Aug. 6, 1980.
32. Gerald M. Boyd, “Jackson Spends Night in South Bronx,” New York Times, Mar. 31, 1984.
33. “Don’t Save the South Bronx,” Washington Post, Feb. 17, 1979.
34. Lee Lescaze, “Bronx Renewal Project Declared Dead by Koch,” Washington Post, Feb. 8, 1979. See also Marshal Berman, “Introduction,” in New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, eds. Marshal Berman and Brian Berger (London: Reaktion Books, 2007), 14–15. Berman notes that New York City had been dealing with a rash of uncontrolled fires for many years before the devastation of the South Bronx made national headlines. He writes that “starting late in the ’60s, they burst out mainly in poor minority neighborhoods all over town but also in ethnically and economically mixed neighborhoods like my own Upper West Side. For years, midnight fires ate up not only buildings but whole blocks, often block after block. Then we found out that even while large sections of the city were burning down, most massively in the South Bronx, their firehouses were being closed and the size of their crews was being reduced—on the grounds that they were losing population.”
35. “Reagan, In South Bronx, Says Carter Broke Vow; Raises Voice Above Chants.” The author writes, “Standing in front of a building on which ‘Decay’ had been painted in bright orange, and across the street from another bearing the words ‘broken promises,’ the Republican Presidential candidate said he had not ‘seen anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz.’”
36. C. J. Sullivan, “There’s Hope for the South Bronx,” in Berman and Berger, 76.
37. Jeff Chang, Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip Hop Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2005), 11.
38. Ibid., 10. The Robert Moses Cross-Bronx Expressway project was initiated in 1953.
39. Marshall Berman, All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity (New York: Penguin Books, 1982), 292–93.
40. Ibid., 292. The Cross-Bronx Expressway construction displaced some 60,000 residents of the Bronx (mostly Jews and ethnic whites, but some blacks as well). See also C. J. Sullivan, 78. The author notes that white residents of the Bronx continued to flee the area in large numbers following the roadway’s initial destruction of primarily Jewish and white neighborhoods. Between 1970 and 1980, the population of white residents in the Bronx fell from over 1 million to just 550,000. By 2002, nearly half of the Bronx was Latino, one quarter of its residents were black, and just 14 percent were white.
41. Lawson and Johnson III, 210–11. The authors write that “a Rand Corporation study found that housing abandonment had increased sharply in New York City during the second half of the decade, with an average of 38,000 units per year being abandoned as compared with 15,000 between 1960 and 1964. Moreover, while the inventory of ‘sound’ housing had grown by 2 percent between 1960 and 1967, ‘dilapidated’ housing climbed by 44 percent, and ‘deteriorating’ housing by 37 percent.”
42. Ibid., 211.
43. Ibid., 209–10.
44. Ibid., 235–36.
45. Ibid.
46. Ibid., 240–42.
47. Ibid., 242.
48. Paula Massood, “Mapping the Hood: The Genealogy of City Space in Boyz N the Hood and Menace II Society,” Cinema Journal 35, no. 2 (Winter 1996): 85.
49. Ibid., 88.
50. Claude McKay, Home to Harlem (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987), 10. First published 1928 by Harper and Brothers.
51. Set in the inner city and oriented around violent male narratives, most of these films rely heavily on “gangsta rap,” with its references to identifiable urban locales reinforcing the authenticity and realism of the films. The soundtracks, thus, provide a second layer of legitimacy to the urban locations ostensibly utilized in the films. For a discussion of city space in “New Black Realism” and its relation to earlier forms of black culture, see Massood, 1996. The author suggests that a distinct emphasis on the naming and identification of “real” urban environments in “New Black Realism” functions to align this work with a tradition of black American literature, which had also brought the background space of the novel to the very forefront of the text as blacks began migrating to urban centers in the North.
52. Ida Peters, “Flicks: Beat Street,” Afro-American, Jun. 16, 1984.
53. Ibid.
54. Ahearn, 118.
55. William Robbins, “Amid New Spirit, Pittsburgh Opens Center,” New York Times, Feb. 13. 1981.
56. Laurence A. Glasco, ed., The WPA History of the Negro in Pittsburgh (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004), 24. The authors write, “What is known as ‘The Hill’ was populated slowly. In 1815 only thirteen of the towns 5,000 persons lived on Grant’s Hill, but a business directory in 1837 listed 413 people on all that land now referred to as the Hill. These were chiefly merchants and professionals who had built in the growing suburb.”
57. Ibid., 25.
58. Ibid.
59. Ibid.
60. Joel A. Tarr, “Infrastructure and City-Building,” in City at the Point: Essays on the Social History of Pittsburgh, ed. Samuel P. Hays (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1989), 250.
61. Interestingly, Lionel Ritchie also presented music and dance as a utopian panacea in his early contribution to music television programming, All Night Long. In this successful video, a street scene explodes into a raucous neighborhood party which features breaking, contemporary jazz dance, and representations of traditional African dance forms. Towards the end of the video, a police officer enters the scene, parting the crowd with his stern walk. However, he too succumbs to the infectious rhythm and instead of chastising the offending revelers the officer embarks on a dance routine in which he uses his nightstick as a baton.
62. Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and His World (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), 10. As the “unofficial” medieval carnivals discussed by Bakhtin elevated fools to the rank of kings, these symbolic inversions signified the suspension of social hierarchy and order on a broad scale. Rappin’ suggests that the inversions found in hip hop culture portend the same radical possibilities as Bakhtin’s medieval carnival days. Bakhtin writes that “as opposed to the official feast, one might say that carnival celebrated temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms, and prohibitions.”
63. Mike Hurewitz, “Jailhouse Rock for Break Dance Muggers,” New York Post, Oct. 4, 1984.
64. Ibid.
65. Lawson and Johnson III, 209–71.
66. M. G. Marshall and P. Arestis, “Reaganomics and Supply-Side Economics: A British View,” Journal of Economic Issues 23, no. 4 (Dec. 1989): 972. See also Robert R. Keller, “Supply-Side Economic Policies During the Coolidge-Mellon Era,” Journal of Economic Issues 16, no. 3 (Sept. 1982): 773–90.
67. For a critique of Reagan-era economic policies, see Lawrence Chimerie, “What Really Happened in the 1980s,” Challenge 39, no. 3 (May/Jun. 1996): 32. The author notes that “despite the seven-year expansion in the middle of the decade, average economic growth during the decade as a whole actually lagged behind growth in each of the three preceding decades, including the stagflation years of the 1970s. Moreover … the long expansion to a great extent simply represented a catch-up following back-to-back recessions in 1980 and 1982.”
68. I imply no value judgment here. Authenticity simply refers to the extent to which the film consulted and utilized the talent of actual hip hop practitioners.
69. Tim McKeough, “Vanilla Ice on His New Reality TV Series,” New York Times, Sept. 15, 2010. In a fitting addendum to Cool as Ice’s disconcerting engagement of race, performance, and geographical space, Vanilla Ice, following his brief rap career, has transformed himself into a real estate mogul and is the star of reality TV show The Vanilla Ice Project, which first aired on the DIY Network in 2009. The program, and attendant manual, are designed to help one “pimp out properties and get paid.” In essence, the program is a lesson on flipping properties for profit, a practice associated with gentrification—a major force of transition in urban areas that has had, and continues to have, a detrimental effect on communities of color.
70. See Jane Feuer, The Hollywood Musical, 2nd ed. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 123–38. See also Dave Kehr, “Cant Stop the Musicals,” American Film 9, no. 7 (May 1984): 33–37, J. P. Telotte, “The New Hollywood Musical: From Saturday Night Fever to Footloose,” in Genre and Contemporary Hollywood, ed. Steven Neale (London: BFI, 2002), 48–61, and James Hay, “Dancing and Deconstructing the American Dream,” Quarterly Review of Film Studies 10, no. 2 (Spring 1985): 97–117.
71. Feuer, 124.
72. Hay, 106–7.
73. Feuer, 123–38.
74. Ibid., 135.
75. Chris Jordan, “Gender and Class Mobility in Saturday Night Fever and Flashdance,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 24, no. 3 (Fall 1996): 120. Chris Jordan remarks that the film’s message of class mobility for women in American society is predicated upon a “commodified self-image, and patriarchal domination.”
76. Telotte, 49. What is different about these later musicals, notes the author, is that they “are pointedly about the role of music and dance in our lives” and “obviously treat these expressive elements … with a rather detached attitude.” He argues that within such films as Saturday Night Fever, Purple Rain, Footloose, and Dirty Dancing “the expressive is clearly demarcated from the main narrative, even while realistically arising from it.”
77. John Mueller, “Fred Astaire and the Integrated Musical,” Cinema Journal 24, no. 1 (Fall 1984): 28–30.
78. Richard Dyer, “Entertainment and Utopia,” in Hollywood Musicals: The Film Reader, ed. Steven Cohan (London: Routledge, 2002), 20. “Two of the taken-for-granted descriptions of entertainment, as ‘escape’ and as ‘wish-fulfillment,’ point to its central thrust, namely utopianism. Entertainment offers the image of ‘something better’ to escape into, or something we want deeply that our day-to-day lives don’t provide. Alternatives, hopes, wishes—these are the stuff of utopia, the sense that things could be better, that something other than what is can be imagined and realized.”
79. Telotte, 49.
80. Ibid., 50–51. Telotte writes of the postclassical musical that “instead of denying reality’s rule with song and dance, they construct a realistic frame around those expressive elements, becoming in the process proscenium-oriented. These films masquerade variously as social commentary, biography and documentary, but they share a common perspective, one which offers a more sober approach to the expressive role of music in the movies and in our lives.”
81. Ibid., 50–53. Telotte also notes of the postclassical musical film that “while they do admit that there is a ‘place’ for song and dance in our lives, by underscoring the limited potential of music, they also affirm that we can no longer withdraw from the real world to immerse ourselves in the expressive one.”
82. David Gonzalez, “Wild Style at 25: A Film that Envisioned the Future of Hip Hop,” New York Times, Nov. 12, 2008.
83. Ibid.
84. Kehr, 34.
85. Ibid., 35–36. The author writes that “the mandate of the musical has always been to enshrine the popular music of its era. It is pointless … to ask the musical to return to other eras and styles. Whether rock is musically superior to the Tin Pan Alley tunes of the thirties and forties is not the point.”
86. Ibid., 36. “For even at its best, rock poses a range of problems to narrative adaptation … there are few halftones in the music, which means that virtually every number must be a climax.”
87. Ibid.
88. Ibid.
89. Ibid., 37.
90. Richard Dyer, “The Colour of Entertainment,” in Musicals: Hollywood and Beyond, eds. Bill Marshall and Robynn Stilwell (Exeter: Intellect Books, 2000), 28.
91. Arthur Knight, Disintegrating the Musical: Black Performance and Musical Film (Durham: Duke University Press, 2002), 133. The author writes of Hearts in Dixie, Hallelujah!, and The Green Pastures that “like the vast majority of the Hollywood black-cast musicals, these early films focus on the ‘folk’—Southern, rural, and apparently timeless blacks going about what purports to be ‘a slice of life.’” See also Massood, 2003, 16. Massood argues that the use of the antebellum South as timeless idyll in the earliest Hollywood black-cast musicals functioned to “reconfirm ideology that removed African Americans, and all peoples of African decent, from a ‘civilized’ world that was urban and therefore modern.”
92. James Snead, White Screens, Black Images: Hollywood From the Dark Side (New York: Routledge, 1994), 48–56.
93. The classical-era jazz biopic, which will be discussed further in Chapter 4, is a notable exception to this assessment. These films, which include, for example, The Glenn Miller Story (1954), and The Benny Goodman Story (1955), operate with completely different racial boundaries regarding performance, desire, and sexual power.
94. Jim Sullivan, “Breakin’ Out of the Ghetto and Makin’ it Big at the Box Office,” Boston Globe, Jun. 17, 1984.
95. Ibid. Zito notes that his original script was significantly altered and scenes were cut. One sequence that was scrapped for the final film included Kelly, the film’s white middle-class female protagonist, convincing her parents of breakdancing’s worth by comparing it to jazz in general and the music of Charlie Parker in specific. In this scene, she was to have suggested that this earlier performance tradition “once considered disreputable—something done in the street,” which is now at the center of musical culture, bears a similarity to the future trajectory of breakdance. In protest, Zito used the pseudonym Charles Parker for his writing credit on the film.
96. S. Craig Watkins, Representing: Hip Hop Culture and the Production of Black Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998), 17–35.
97. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 121.
98. Ibid. The author writes that the map is a “totalizing stage on which elements of diverse origin are brought together to form the tableau of a ‘state’ of geographical knowledge.”
99. Harlan Jacobson, “Charles Ahearn interviewed by Harlan Jacobson,” Film Comment 19, no. 3 (May/Jun. 1983): 65.
100. Jim Welsh, “Beat Street,” Films in Review 35 (Aug./Sept. 1984): 435.
101. Jeff Millar, “Krush Groove Energetic,” Houston Chronicle, Oct. 26, 1985.
102. Ibid. Millar writes that the cast of Krush Groove is “extraordinarily kinetic.”
103. de Certeau, 97.
1. Vincent Canby, “Wild Style, Rapping and Painting Graffiti,” New York Times, Mar. 18, 1983. See also Jay Scott, “Right to the Source of Rap D.J.s, B-Boys, ‘Writers,’” Toronto Globe and Mail, Feb. 10, 1984. This reviewer writes of Wild Style that “there is no structure, or, rather, the structure that does exist is so antediluvian it should be ignored … graffiti artist George ‘Lee’ Quinones, Finds Himself and Gets the Girl. Simple. Dumb.”
2. “Removing the ‘Graffiti Disease,’” Afro-American, Aug. 26, 1972. See also Carolyn Fortier, “Let’s Stop Killing Our Communities,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 17, 1973, and Fortier, “Vandalism: Who are the Victims,” Chicago Defender, Feb. 24, 1973.
3. Fortier, Feb. 24, 1973.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. “From Subway to Fame,” Afro-American, Mar. 24, 1984. See also “Hip Hop Glossery [sic],” Afro-American, Jun. 16, 1984. The list also defined “piece” as “a graffiti artist’s ‘masterpiece.’”
7. “Clean Block Drive Ends,” Afro-American, Sept. 2, 1939.
8. Ibid.
9. “Clean Block Campaign Gets Underway Early,” Afro-American, May 31, 1941. Underscoring the link between cleanliness and civic duty was paramount during the months leading up the United States’ official entry into the Second World War: “Our president has declared that a state of emergency exists in the country. Every man, woman, and boy over 18 years of age will be needed in the defense industries. Many so-called minor activities must be left to the younger members of the family. Minor repairs must be made, the home must be kept clean, painting done, yards fixed up and made beautiful. Children must learn to keep healthy, to reduce fire hazards by seeing that no trash collects anywhere on the premises, and take a general interest in things about the home.”
10. “AFRO’s 50th Annual Clean Block Workshop and Luncheon,” Baltimore Afro-American, Mar. 31, 1984.
11. Raymond adopts the nom de plume of early twentieth century literary character Zorro, created by author Johnson McCulley in 1919. However, Raymond alters the spelling of the pulp fiction hero from Zorro to Zoro, fashioning a name that is both original and a facsimile. The initial Zorro was a clandestine figure who, like Raymond, maintained a secret identity, cleverly outwitting authority figures. Zorro was a masked nocturnal hero who crusaded for justice on behalf of the poor and working-class while, during the day, he lived as Don Diego Vega, a Spanish nobleman.
12. Both graffiti artists and Abstract Expressionists also used commonly available cheap commercial paint products.
13. Jacobson, 65.
14. See, for example, Dames (1934) and Gold Diggers of 1933 (1933).
15. Herbert Kohl and James Hinton, “Names, Graffiti, and Culture,” in Rappin’ and Stylin’ Out, ed. Thomas Kochman (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1972), 119–120. This article was originally published in 1969 in the journal Urban Review. The authors write that “recently a teacher was assaulted in a Manhattan junior high school because he refused to address several of his pupils by the names they considered their own. He insisted that the boys answer to their ‘legal’ names: that is, the names listed in his roll book. They laughed, and when he waved the roll book at them, they grabbed it and tore it up. … To the three boys the names Thomas Jackson, John Robinson, and Robert Lee were slave names, names that came to their families that identified them as descendants of slaves. … The boys once accepted a world without hope where they were resigned to being inferior. Now they have been converted to a new and different version of things. With it, they have assumed new identities that must be named and displayed to the world.”
16. “Taki 183 Spawns Pen Pals,” New York Times, Jul. 21, 1971.
17. Ibid.
18. Norman Mailer, The Faith of Graffiti (New York: Praeger, 1974), unpaginated. Interestingly, Mailer describes the emergence of graffiti in the late 1960s and early ’70s in New York in terms of an organic matter, or a biological eruption in which “a communion took place over the city in this plant growth of names until every institutional wall, fixed or moving … every standing billboard, every huckstering poster, and the halls of every high-rise low rent housing project which looked like a prison (and all did) were covered by a foliage of graffiti which grew seven or eight feet tall.”
19. This theme is taken up in the documentary Style Wars as well as the film Basquiat (1996), which chronicles the rise to fame of graffiti artist Jean-Michel Basquiat in the early 1980s.
20. Jean Fisher, “Wild Style,” Artforum International 22 (Apr. 1984): 84.
21. Sharon Sherman, 292. For a nuanced discussion of the relationship between “authentic” culture and commercial entities, see also Andrew Ross, No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture (New York: Routledge, 1989), 70. Ross writes that “it is often assumed … that commercialized music = whitened music, that the black performance of uncommercialized and therefore undiluted black music constitutes the only truly genuine form of protest or resistance against the white culture industry and its controlling interests, and that black music which submits to that industry automatically loses its autonomous power. To subscribe to this equation is to imagine a very mechanical process indeed, whereby a music, which is authentically black, constitutes an initial raw material which is then appropriated and reduced in cultural force and meaning by contact with a white industry. Accordingly, music is never ‘made,’ and only ever exploited, in this process of industrialization.”
22. Lesley Speed, “Moving On Up: Education in Black American Youth Films,” Journal of Popular Film and Television 29, no. 2 (2001): 84–85.
23. Altman, 273.
24. Ibid., 273–75.
25. Feuer, 13–15. In speaking of the appeal inherent in the “amateur” performer within the film musical, Feuer writes that “amateur entertainers can’t exploit us … because they are us.”
26. Ibid., 3.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., 28. The author writes of this filming technique that “it’s the intrusion of the internal audience between us and the performance which, paradoxically, gives the effect of a lived—and more significantly—a shared experience. … The subjectivity of the spectator stands in for that of the spectral audience, rendering the performance utterly theatrical. We are, as it were, lifted out of the audience we actually belong to (the cinema audience) and transported into another audience, one at once more alive and ghostly.”
29. Altman, 274. In discussing films of the mid-twentieth century, such as Meet Me in St. Louis, Oklahoma! (1955), and Carousel (1956), Altman writes that “the multi-generational family … becomes permanently fixed as a standard element of the folk musical.”
30. Andy Bennett, Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity, and Place (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2000), 134–36.
31. Robert Palmer, “The Pop Life; The Audience for Rappers Broadens,” New York Times, May, 23, 1984.
32. Bakhtin, 7. Diminishing the boundary between performer and spectator is a long-standing aspect of the democratization of performance culture. In his discussion of medieval popular festivities, Bakhtin famously noted that “carnival does not know footlights, in the sense that it does not acknowledge any distinction between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance. Carnival is not a spectacle seen by the people; they live it, and everyone participates because its very idea embraces all the people.”
33. Wendy James, “Reforming the Circle: Fragments of the Social History of a Vernacular African Dance Form,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 13, no. 1 (Jun. 2000): 143. The circle formation has a long history within African dance culture. It has been a constant feature of ritualized social life within Africa and throughout African communities of the diaspora. James writes that “the circular form has a robust and lasting quality, sometimes with mythical echoes, which must be linked to the way in which it defines a special, inward space of its own, a centre [sic] to which participants orient themselves and through which they relate to each other.”
34. Massood, 2003, 11–43.
35. In this context, I am using the term “integration” to denote musical numbers that do not take place in a theater, club, or other designated space of entertainment.
36. “Kurtis Blow: Rapping to the Top,” Baltimore Afro-American, Oct. 11, 1980.
37. Ibid.
38. “Record Cut to Honor King,” Baltimore Afro-American, Jan. 28, 1986. All proceeds from record sales were donated to the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta, Georgia.
39. Richard Harrington, “The King Holiday Rap,” Washington Post, Dec. 11, 1985.
40. Altman, 275.
41. Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), 217.
42. Melvin D. Williams, The Human Dilemma: A Decade Later in Belmar (rev. of On the Street Where I Lived) (Fort Worth: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich College Publishers, 1992), 28. On the Street Where I Lived was originally published in 1981, based on research performed in the 1970s. The author uses the terms “genuine” and “spurious” in relation to the extent that different segments of the black population have internalized the values of white mainstream culture.
43. “Reagan, In South Bronx, Says Carter Broke Vow; Raises Voice Above Chants.”
44. Kimmich, 18–19.
45. D. Lee Bawden and John L. Palmer, “Social Policy: Challenging the Welfare State,” in The Reagan Record: An Assessment of America’s Changing Domestic Priorities, eds. John L. Palmer and Isabel V. Sawhill (Cambridge Massachusetts: Ballinger Publishing Company, 1984), 201–208. During his time in office, Ronald Reagan instituted a reversal of civil rights protection for minorities and women. This included a reduction in government spending on programs such as the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission and the Office of Federal Contract Compliance Programs (the body that produced affirmative action guidelines regarding employment by government contractors). A direct result of these cuts was a reduction of legal action and disciplinary procedures brought against potential violations in the areas of employment, housing, and schooling.
46. Margaret C. Simms, The Economic Well-Being of Minorities During the Reagan Years (Washington, D.C.: The Urban Institute, Project Report, Oct. 1984), 9–10. For instance, the Food Stamp and Public Service Employment programs saw large reductions in federal funding.
47. Ibid., iv. Simms writes, “When Mr. Reagan ran for the presidency in 1980, he asked, ‘Are you better off today than you were four years ago?’ As others have noted, that question might appropriately be asked again—at the end of President Reagan’s first term in office. This question is particularly appropriate for minority groups because they have been more reliant on government assistance and protection than have nonminorities. If the question is phrased—‘Is the average minority family economically better off today than it was four years ago?’—the answer must be ‘No.’ While white families gained 4.1 percent in disposable income (income from all sources net taxes) after adjusting for inflation, black families had a decline in real disposable income of 2.1 percent and Hispanic families had an increase of only 1 percent.”
48. Manning Marable, “The Plight of the Single Black Mother,” Afro-American, Mar. 1, 1986. Along with Marable’s insightful review of the television program, this issue also printed a letter from Robert J. Smith, MD, of Murfreesboro, Tennessee who was similarly outraged by “The Vanishing Family—Crisis in Black America” and its failure to address the channels of repression that have led to the precarious position of black males in relation to dominant culture. Smith suggests that black male students are discouraged at an early age, jobs are systematically withheld from African American men, and that the mainstream media contributes to a narrow and damaging view of black masculinity. Interestingly, Smith begins his critique with representational spaces rather than lived experience. He writes that “it begins with CBS and its counterparts, who rarely ever show the black male in a positive role. He is usually depicted as a comedian or buffoon designed to tickle the funny bone of White America. He is also depicted as hoodlum characters such as those in ‘Miami Vice’ and other programs of that nature.”
49. Altman, 278–81.
50. Knight, 124–25. The author remarks that threatening forces in white-cast folk musicals tend to come from outside of the community so that such negative influences can be clearly expelled and separated from the folk collective at the end of the film. Black-cast folk musicals, by contrast, tend to absorb violence and dissonance within the black folk community. “Such violence” in these films, writes Knight, is “always a part of the constitution of both the black individual and group.”
51. Ellin Stein, “Wild Style,” American Film 9, no. 2 (Nov. 1983): 50. Although Ahearn somewhat dismisses the relationship between Wild Style and West Side Story, many thematic and stylistic connections are very apparent, particularly in this musical number. In this article, Ahearn remarks, “I didn’t want to make West Side Story, although I love that movie. This is more like On the Town, a populist musical.”
52. Craig Castleman, Getting Up: Subway Graffiti in New York (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1982): 90–95.
53. Ibid., 95–100. There were graffiti gangs prior to the Ex-Vandals but these organizations, such as the Vanguards and the Last Survivors, restricted membership to their home territory and often deliberately engaged in violent brawls with other gangs. The first writing-only gang, the Ex-Vandals, were a highly organized group who wore colors and sent out teams of writers to secure their safety in gang-controlled neighborhoods.
54. Toop, 57.
55. Ibid., 14–15. Toop also writes that “competition was at the heart of hip hop. Not only did it help displace violence and the refuge of destructive drugs like heroin, but it also fostered an attitude of creating from limited materials. Sneakers became high fashion; original music was created from turntables, a mixer and obscure (highly secret) records; entertainment was provided with the kind of showoff street rap that almost any kid was capable of turning on a rival.” See also Catherine Foster, “New Dance Craze Blends Acrobatics, Mime, and Inventiveness,” Christian Science Monitor, Oct. 14, 1983. The author writes that “break dancing may also be helping to stem gang violence. Last year, the leaders of the 4,000-member Zulu gang and of a 500-member rival gang made a peace treaty, vowing to ‘dance it out, rather than fight it out,’ Gypsy Lee says.” Gypsy Lee was the manager of some of the breakdancing talent in New York City in the early 1980s.
56. Sally Banes, “Breaking Changing,” Village Voice, Jun. 12, 1984, 82.
57. Cathleen McGuigan, Mark D. Uehling, Jennifer Smith, Sherry Keene-Osborn, Barbara Burgower, and Nadine Joseph, “‘Breaking Out,’ America Goes Dancing,” Newsweek, Jul. 2, 1984, 48. The article also states that “in San Francisco, 16-year-old Jarvis La Casse, whose street name or ‘tag’ is ‘Jay Rock,’ says, ‘If you told me a few years ago that I’d be dancing, I’d laugh. It’s like a thing: gangs getting ready to fight, but instead we dance.’”
58. Ethan Bronner, “The Power of Rap,” Boston Globe, Mar. 4, 1986.
59. Mandalit del Barco, “Hip Hop Hooray: Breaking into the Big Time,” ¡Mira! Magazine of the South Bronx Columbia School of Journalism (Spring 1984), http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/breakdancing/article.html.
60. Ibid.
61. Early hip hop culture had a great deal invested in the promise that music and dance performance could diffuse violence. While this utopian premise was explored in the hip hop musical of the 1980s, “New Black Realism” later put rap music and violence together on screen. The utopian thrust of early hip hop culture was transformed into a much darker and more pessimistic formulation with the birth of “New Black Realism” and “gangsta rap.” Where music and dance had once offered hope and prosperity to poor urban youth, the soundtrack to this new cinema overwhelmingly reinforced the negative and violent aspects of inner city life. Exemplary of this shift are the lyrics from Menace II Society’s “Niggaz Got No Heart” by Spice-1 and Ice Cube’s “How To Survive In South Central,” which is featured in Boyz in the Hood.
62. Timothy Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in American Cinema, 1981–1996, Ph.D. diss., University of Massachusetts, 1998, 199–208. In his comparison of dance-oriented films of the 1980s and 1990s, Shary notes that whereas white characters use dance as a form of contained rebellion against parents and other authority figures, young people of color are often connected to dance rituals as a means of survival and as a way to protect the welfare of the community.
63. The realistic spatial confines of the proscenium have been challenged in some musical films. For instance, Busby Berkeley extravaganzas from the 1930s, such as Gold Diggers of 1933 and Gold Diggers of 1935 (1935), defied the spatial boundaries of their ostensible venues. These numbers, which clearly begin in a confined theatrical setting, often extend outward into space to include apparently endless expanses of realistic urban topography, rapidly transforming fantasy settings, and an infinite multiplication of dancing girls whose proliferation eventually blatantly disregards the spatial limitations of the venue.
64. Don Rhodes and John Parris Springer, eds., Docufictions: Essays on the Intersection of Documentary and Fictional Filmmaking (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2006), 14–17. The editors note that there is a long history of convergence between fictional and documentary forms, which has intensified in recent decades. They suggest that the general term “docudrama” be employed for all films that are based on a mingling of the two, and that are about some actual event, group of people, etc., who exist or did exist in the real world.
65. George Stoney, documentary filmmaker, personal communication and lectures, Sept. 2003–May 2004.
66. Stein, 49. The author notes that “Quinones plays Zoro, a shy and retiring graffiti artist: Sandra ‘Pink’ Fabara plays ‘Lady Bug,’ his leading lady. … Quinones really is a painter, as are Fabara (one of the very few women graffiti artists) and Andrew ‘Zephyr’ Witten, who plays Zoro’s sidekick. Niva Kislac, who portrays a socialite collector of new art (and new artists) really is an art patron. Rapper Busy Bee, DJ Grand Master Flash, and the Rock Steady Crew appear as themselves. Fred Brathwaite … plays ‘Phade,’ a charming and articulate promoter who is the bridge between the raw talent of the ghetto and the money of the art establishment. Brathwaite is a graffiti artist whose work has appeared on canvas in European galleries as well as on New York subway cars. … Patti Astor, who plays a ditsy platinum-blonde journalist reporting on the hip hop scene, is in real life a veteran of the New York underground-film scene and a co-owner of Fun Gallery in New York’s East Village, where she exhibits the work of, among others, Fred Brathwaite.”
67. Dauphin, 203–4. The author writes, “Of the b-boy movies, Stan Lathan’s 1984 Beat Street is the most memorable. … Even though it was fronted by names from the margins of Hollywood like Rae Dawn Chong and Leon Grant, it made excellent use of New York’s hip hop talent. Real-life crews like Rock Steady and New York City Breakers populated the frame, luminaries Flip Rock and Prince Ken Swift giving onscreen seminars on their art while Kool Moe Dee and Melle Mel rapped and a then-unknown named Doug E. Fresh made an uncredited cameo.”
68. Ida Peters, Afro-American, Jun. 16, 1984.
69. Kevin Grubb, “‘Hip-Hoppin’ in the South Bronx: Lester Wilson’s Beat Street,” Dance Magazine, Apr. 1984, 76.
70. Ronald R. Hanna, “Breakin’ 2 Stars … as Lively Off Screen as On,” Baltimore Afro-American, Dec. 22, 1984.
71. Bill Barol and Jennifer Smith, “A Street Spinner’s Big Break,” Newsweek, Jul. 2, 1984, 50.
72. Robert Stam, Reflexivity in Film and Literature From Don Quixote to Jean-Luc Godard (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992), xiii. The author defines reflexivity as “the process by which texts, both literary and filmic, foreground their own production, their authorship, their intertextual influences, their reception, or their enunciation.”
73. Jean Luc Godard, the most radical filmmaker associated with so-called French New Wave Cinema, used various strategies of demystification to remind the audience that film is a constructed object. These included interrupting the narrative with animated words (Weekend, 1967), audible whispers by the director announcing the fact that the film’s main character is played by an actor with a different name (Two or Three Things I Know About Her, 1967), and the employment of non-naturalistic acting styles (Les Carabiniers, 1963).
74. Stam, 1992, 90.
75. Ibid., 94–95.
76. Mueller, 31–36. Mueller describes the ways in which the dance numbers of Fred Astaire, and partners Ginger Rogers and Cyd Charisse, express the sexual desire and tension that is otherwise left out of or only vaguely hinted at in the rest of the film narrative.
77. Ahearn, 155–56.
78. Ibid., 156.
79. Ibid. Zephyr states that “during that era, every writer worth his salt had a black book under his arm always—except when we’d circulate them amongst ourselves. When you had someone else’s book in your possession, you’d try to draw the best piece possible, attempting to ‘burn’ all the other pieces in the book.”
80. Jacobson, 64–66.
81. For a history of conceptual art, see Charles Harrison, Conceptual Art and Painting: Further Essays on Art and Language (Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press, 2001).
82. Castleman, 61–65.
83. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 282.
84. Ibid., 285.
85. Julian Stallabrass, Gargantua: Manufactured Mass Culture (London: Verso, 1996), 143.
86. Ibid., 144. Stallabrass goes to great lengths to insist upon the erasure of the performative aspect of graffiti as it is read by the public, yet he notes that “artists take considerable personal risks in dedicating their gifts to the public. Subway writers in New York and elsewhere risk not only electrocution and being hit by trains but also the violence of the police.”
87. Ibid., 139.
88. Ibid., 147.
89. Karen Jaehne, “Charles Ahearn: Wild Style,” Film Quarterly 37, no. 4 (Summer 1984): 4.
90. Jacobson, 66. Of the similarities between the visual style of Wild Style and the aesthetic strategies of hip hop, Ahearn remarks, “I think it’s a kind of kinetic cubism; it relates to a certain kind of style of cubism—cutting up and rearranging—like the way the records are heard in the background. Often you hear the same fifteen seconds—sometimes even five seconds—sometimes even two seconds of record being repeated and remanipulated. Sometimes the needle would only go that far on the record for the entire night. ‘Wild Style’ refers to pieces that are disjointed and then re-put together and added with a great deal of style. When the breakdancer comes off a dance he ends up like this, like that. If you look at the (graffiti) letters, they’re doing the exact same thing—it’s like a pose—I always hear graffiti artists going, ‘He makes those letters dance.’ That’s what it’s like—he gives them animation, life. The letters have a kind of like life. Graffiti puts kind of a muscular, aerobic power into the style of the letters, and I think that’s a big part of it.” Clearly, Ahearn is linking his practice as a filmmaker with those of the larger hip hop community. This was the only hip hop musical to conceive of the structure of the film in relation to the aesthetic sensibilities of hip hop.
91. Stam, 1992, 90–94.
92. Altman, 16–27. In describing the relationship between the plot and performance numbers in the Hollywood musical in general, Altman argues that “the plot … has little importance to begin with; the oppositions developed in the seemingly gratuitous song-and-dance number, however, are instrumental in establishing the structure and meaning of the film.” (27) Altman poses this argument predominantly in terms of problematic gender roles and identities. He suggests that the structure of the musical reconciles two mutually exclusive terms creating a “concordance of opposites” that revolves around the romantic partnering of the two leads. Thus, the major thematic aims of the film are expressed in the musical numbers rather than in the chronological progression of narrative events.
93. Jaehne, 3. Ahearn states, “I neither glorified nor dramatized these people. I tried just to create a situation where they could perform.”
94. Fisher, 85.
95. Quoted in Castleman, 12.
96. Some limited examples of the Hollywood musical do acknowledge social problems in their narrative while also transcending these social constraints through song and dance. This is particularly evident in a selection of film musicals from the 1930s, such as Gold Diggers of 1933, where we observe the poverty of Depression-era New York as well as the fantastic spectacle of song and dance in a series of Busby Berkeley production numbers. The Deanna Durbin film 100 Men and a Girl (1937) also explicitly forms its narrative trajectory around the effects of the Depression on trained orchestral musicians. It emphasizes the disparity between a group of indigent boarding house musicians and the opulent world of the orchestra’s wealthy sponsor. The predominant form of the classical Hollywood musical, however, usually veers as far as possible away from any kind of exposition on contemporary social ills.
97. Stein, 49–50. The author writes that “Ahearn readily admits … he soft-pedaled some negative aspects of life in the South Bronx. ‘I veered away from the violence,’ he says. Another all-pervasive feature of ghetto life missing from the movie is heroin, the neighborhood’s most self-prescribed form of escape.” See also Alfred W. McCoy, The Politics of Heroin: CIA Complicity in the Global Drug Trade (New York: Lawrence Hill Books, 1991), 436–92. Heroin and crack cocaine import into the U.S. increased dramatically during the 1980s, and the wide availability of these drugs wreaked the most havoc on poorer inner-city neighborhoods such as the South Bronx and South Central Los Angeles. The infamous covert CIA actions that allowed the production of opium sources for the manufacture of heroin in Pakistan are widely documented, as is the U.S. government’s role in allowing the Nicaraguan Contras to smuggle cocaine into America in order to support them in their fight against the leftist Sandinista government. Although it is uncertain whether the CIA willingly targeted black and Latino communities for drug distribution, it is incontrovertible that the CIA was well aware that their actions abroad facilitated the production and distribution of illegal drugs that would undoubtedly devastate the poorer neighborhoods of the United States.
98. Ibid., 50.
1. Timothy Shary, Teen Movies: American Youth Onscreen (London: Wallflower, 2005), 5–6.
2. Steve Neale, Genre and Hollywood (London: Routledge, 2000), 120.
3. Georganne Scheiner, Signifying Female Adolescence: Film Representations and Fans, 1920–1950 (Westport, Conn: Praeger, 2000), 6–12. Scheiner refreshingly looks closely at the impact of gender on public perceptions of teenage delinquency in the first half of the twentieth century. She notes that concerns about promiscuity and other forms of “sexual delinquency” in young girls were focused on working-class and immigrant populations. Her thoughtful introductory chapter provides significant evidence that large-scale changes such as urbanization and shifting patterns of immigration informed early medical and sociological perceptions of the American adolescent.
4. G. Stanley Hall, Adolescence: Its Psychology and its Relations to Physiology, Anthropology, Sociology, Sex, Crime, Religion and Education. 2 vols. (New York: D. Appleton and Company, 1904).
5. Doherty, 1988, 145–86.
6. Ibid., 34–53.
7. Schrum, 30–68. The author notes that appeals to teen girls as fashion consumers appear in high school yearbook pages and clothing catalogues from the 1920s and 1930s. See also Nash 174. Nash cites the efforts of market researcher Eugene Gilbert, who conducted polls to monitor and report the changing likes, dislikes, desires, and opinions of teenage consumers. See also Eugene Gilbert, Advertising and Marketing to Young People (Pleasantville, NY: Printers’ Ink Books, 1957).
8. Shary, 2005, 37–43. See also Nash 178. This trend towards more realistic and sober depictions of youth issues and sexuality, which emerged in the late 1950s with Peyton Place (1957), was significant, Ilana Nash argues, because it was the first time that such complicated and disturbing portrayals of teen life were given serious dramatic treatment in mainstream film culture.
9. Shary, Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2002), 6.
10. Thomas O’Connor, “John Hughes: His Movies Speak to Teen-Agers; Interview,” New York Times, Mar. 9, 1986. O’Connor writes, “Mr. Hughes, a tall, intense, chain-smoker who favors T-shirts, spattered jeans and hair worn shaggy-long in the back, said that he was ‘Mister Serious’ during his adolescence in the 1960s in the affluent North Shore suburbs of Chicago, where all his films have been set and where he still maintains a home.”
11. Eric Avila, Popular Culture in the Age of White Flight: Fear and Fantasy in Suburban Los Angeles (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 4–5.
12. Ibid., 4. In his introduction, “Chocolate Cities and Vanilla Suburbs: Race, Space, and the New “New Mass Culture,” Avila notes of postwar America that “suburbanization, a mode of urbanization in which cities extend outward rather than upward to accommodate the spatial appetites of homeowners, retailers, and industrialists, reached a pinnacle in the years between 1945 and 1970.” He goes on to write that “during the 1950s, for example, suburbs grew at a rate ten times faster than that of central cities, while the nation’s suburban population jumped from 35.1 to 75.6 million between 1950 and 1970.”
13. John R. Logan and Mark Schneider, “Racial Segregation and Racial Change in American Suburbs, 1970–1980,” American Journal of Sociology 89, no. 4 (Jan. 1984): 876.
14. Vernon Jordan, “Suburban Housing Discrimination Blues,” Afro-American, Oct. 31, 1981.
15. Ibid. See also Robert W. Lake, The New Suburbanites: Race and Housing in the Suburbs (Rutgers: Center for Urban Policy Research, Rutgers University), 1981.
16. Logan and Schneider, 887.
17. Shary, 2002, 6.
18. Elayne Rapping, “Hollywood’s Youth Cult Films,” Cineaste 16, no. 2 (1987/88): 14. Rapping refers to ”Ryan-built havens” in her article. Although she does not explain this term, it is most likely a reference to the large American corporation, Ryan Companies, which has been building malls throughout the United States for several decades. See also John Lewis, The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992). Lewis makes the case that consumption and commodification have always been the subject of youth films. He is rather negative in his appraisal of all youth films and teen culture, both mainstream and independent.
19. The corpus of films from the 1980s discussed in Rapping’s article include Porky’s (1981), Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982), Valley Girl (1983), Risky Business (1983), The Breakfast Club (1985), Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), River’s Edge (1986), At Close Range (1986), and Some Kind of Wonderful (1987).
20. Shary, 2002, 6–7.
21. Ibid., 11.
22. Some suburban teen films use the locale of the mall in a somewhat parodic way that may be understood as a critical comment on capitalist culture. This is especially apposite in relation to the phenomenon of the teen mall horror flick inaugurated by Dawn of the Dead (1978). These films, including Chopping Mall (1986) and a recent remake of Dawn of the Dead (2004), which feature flesh eating zombies and murdering robot-like security guards in mall settings, have been read as a critique of the values of standardization wrought by consumer capitalism.
23. David Riesman, The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), 20. Sociologists, economists, anthropologists, and historians have suggested that significant shifts in American postwar social life and economic structures produced a new class of citizens, frequently referred to as a new or emerging middle class. Riesman writes that “many of the economic factors associated with the recent growth of the ‘new’ middle class are well known. … There is a decline in the numbers and in the proportion of the working population engaged in production and extraction—agriculture, heavy industry, heavy transport—and an increase in the numbers and the proportion engaged in white-collar work and the service trades.”
24. Jerry Jacobs, The Mall: An Attempted Escape From Everyday Life (Prospect Heights, Illinois: Waveland Press, 1984), 2. The author writes that “the post–World War II boom period produced an abundance of automobiles, cheap gas, and a population of employed workers able and anxious to purchase them. This in conjunction with the expansion of suburban bedroom communities and an eager buying public, produced the beginnings of the ‘flight to suburbia’ by automobile. Following this mass exodus of people from the central city on their trek to suburbia went the reluctant merchants and department store owners formerly situated in the downtown areas. These located themselves along arterial roads forming the development of many a ‘Miracle Mall’ or ‘Strip.’”
25. Jacobs, 1. This information originally printed in Wall Street Journal, Apr. 21, 1982.
26. Riesman, lxiv.
27. Marshall McLuhan, “American Advertising,” in Mass Culture: The Popular Arts in America, eds. Bernard Rosenberg and David Manning White (New York: The Free Press, 1957), 435.
28. Paul F. Lazarsfeld and Robert K. Merton, “Mass Communication, Popular Taste and Organized Social Action,” in Rosenberg and White, 464. The danger of Lazarsfeld and Merton’s arguments is that they tend to demonize all mass culture save for certain aspects of “authentic” popular culture that may have originated in local and regional contexts. As such, they deny the complex exchange between the perceived creator of a cultural product and the ways in which a consumer may experience that product, tailoring it for his or her own particular enjoyment.
29. James J. Farrell, One Nation Under Goods: Malls and the Seductions of American Shopping (Washington: Smithsonian Books, 2003), 7.
30. Ibid., 19.
31. O’Connor.
32. Vincent Canby, “Film View; Putting Teenagers Under the Lens,” New York Times, Mar. 16, 1986.
33. Ibid. Canby astutely notes that the cloying ending of Pretty in Pink “seems to deny whatever little the film had going on before—that is, its comically grotesque portrayal of wealth’s spoiled playthings who treat the economically disadvantaged Andie so badly. Yet Mr. Hughes, I suspect, knows exactly what he’s doing. He puts Andie into terrible situations and then denies that they are terrible. Andie lives in a broken home that is happy and sunny. Her father is a shiftless slob and a boozer, but he’s always neat as a pin, never appears on screen drunk, has no hangovers and is cheerful in the morning. Blaine McDonough treats Andie badly but is a sweet guy anyway. Andie’s loyal suitor, Duckie Dales (who’s also economically disadvantaged), loves Andie dearly and deserves her, according to the tenets of such fiction. Yet when he hands her over to the affluent snobs, it’s seen as an act of noble renunciation.”
34. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 838. Mulvey’s influential essay argues that mainstream Hollywood cinema replicates and enforces the structure of the patriarchal social order through a gendered system of active male “looking” and passive female “specularization.” While men are the cinematic characters that enable narrative progression, women on screen, according to the author, arrest narrative movement, in order to allow their bodies and faces to be visually consumed by the male characters in the film, and in the audience. Mulvey writes that “according to the principles of the ruling ideology and the psychical structures that back it up, the male figure cannot bear the burden of sexual objectification. Man is reluctant to gaze at his exhibitionist like. Hence the split between spectacle and narrative support the man’s role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen.”
35. Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986), 216. Wood writes of ’80s teen films generally that both virgin and experienced male characters are given the power and pleasure over female characters through a depiction of scopic mastery. He notes that “with both figures, the innocent and the experienced, the basic pattern is the same: male as hunter, female as hunted, male as looker, female as looked-at.”
36. Timothy Shary, 2002, 194. Shary notes that “the protagonists in Weird Science do indeed gain self-worth through their crude experimentation, and their image as horny nerds is thereby transformed into that of confident, even arrogant young men—after all that Lisa has done for them, she remains a disposable commodity.”
37. Wood, 219. The author writes of this film that “as the women cease to be objects of the male gaze, their autonomous desire is used to express … a critique of male presumption.”
38. Dawn Michaelle Norfleet, “Hip-hop Culture” in New York City: The Role of Verbal Music Performance in Defining a Community (Ph.D. diss., Columbia University, 1997), 84.
39. Francis N. Njubi, “Rap, Race, and Representation,” in Images of Youth: Popular Culture as Educational Ideology, eds. Michael A. Oliker and Walter P. Krolikowski (New York: Peter Lang, 2001), 167. The author writes that early hip hop music groups “promoted the music by hiring youths to stand on street corners and in parks with a cassette player blaring out the music. For years, the mode of dissemination was the cassette tape and the block parties.”
40. W. Fitzhugh Brundage, “Working in the ‘Kingdom of Culture’: African Americans and American Popular Culture, 1890–1930,” in Beyond Blackface: African Americans and the Creation of American Popular Culture, 1890–1930, ed. Brundage (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011), 25.
41. Jean Baudrillard, The System of Objects (London: Verso, 1996), 194–95.
42. Ibid.
43. Anne Friedberg, Window Shopping: Cinema and the Postmodern (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 113.
44. “Moribund Mall Makeover: Sherman Oaks Galleria by Gensler,” ArchNewsNow, Oct. 9, 2002, www.archnewsnow.com.
45. Avila, 10. The author notes that “shopping malls, like theme parks, offered a more particularized notion of community that appealed to white suburban consumers.” Avila goes on to quote Lizabeth Cohen who suggests that the shopping center “sought perhaps to contradictorily legitimize itself as a true community center and to define that community in exclusionary socioeconomic and racial terms.”
46. Friedberg, 113.
47. Karl Marx, Capital: A Critique of Political Economy (New York: The Modern Library, 1906), 84–87. Marx writes that “the equalization of the most different kinds of labour [sic] can be the result only of an abstraction from their inequalities, or of reducing them to their common denominator, viz., expenditure of human labour power or human labour in the abstract. … The determination of the magnitude of value by labour-time is therefore a secret, hidden under the apparent fluctuations in the relative value of commodities.”
48. Randall Robinson, The Debt: What America Owes to Blacks (New York: Dutton, 2000). Robinson explores and justifies current demands by African Americans for decades of unpaid labor enforced through slavery. For a comprehensive analysis of race based wage discrimination in the steel industry, see John Hinshaw, Steel and Steelworkers: Race and Class Struggle in Twentieth-Century Pittsburgh (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002).
49. Rita Kempley, “‘Wild Style’: Populist Art,” Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1984.
50. Richard Harrington, “The Wild Style Breaks into Town; Spins and Splits at the Big Throwdown,” Washington Post, Jan. 27, 1984.
51. Stein, 50. “I want the film to involve the audience in a participatory way, like The Rock Horror Picture Show does. … My goal was to make a film that the community it documents would want to see.”
52. Clifford May, “On L.I Fights Follow a Film on Rap Music,” New York Times, Nov. 6, 1985.
53. Ibid.
54. Ibid.
55. Ibid.
56. Ibid.
57. Ibid. “Scott Lund, the teen-ager injured last weekend, said he thought ‘it was clear-cut that it was a racial thing.’ He said the movie-goers who attacked him and his girlfriend as they were entering the theatre to see Nightmare on Elm Street ‘seemed defensive and challenging, like they were I think,’ he said, ‘they were trying to live out the fantasy way of life they saw in the film.’” In an unbelievably regressive turn, the article also turns to supposed “experts” to assess the psychological impact of rap music: “The words of rap tend to be boastful, though not particularly suggestive of either sex or violence. But listening to and identifying with such music, according to Thomas Pettigrew, a social psychologist at the University of California at Santa Cruz, can inspire ‘a state of generalized arousal. It can whip people up.’”
58. “Sunrise Multiplex,” Cinema Treasures, http://cinematreasures.org/theater/9227/.
59. Ibid. The thread indicates more than one reference to arcade games situated in the lobby of the theater.
60. Ibid.
61. Ethan Bronner, “Rap’ Movie Patrons Blamed for Hub Damage,” Boston Globe, Nov. 10, 1985.
62. “Youth Gang Incidents Erupt in California and Nevada,” Christian Science Monitor, Jan. 14, 1986.
63. Ibid.
64. Bill Brownstein, “Theatre Posts Guard for Opening of Krush Groove,” Montreal Gazette, Jan. 10, 1986.
65. David J. Fox, “Not All Godfather III Violence is on the Screen: Movies: A Theater Patron is Killed as Gang Warfare Erupts in a Long Island Multiplex,” Los Angeles Times, Dec. 27, 1990.
66. Ibid.
67. Sarah Lyall, “Cinema is Battleground of Geography and Psychology,” New York Times, Mar. 29, 1991.
68. Ibid.
69. Ibid.
70. Ibid.
71. Ibid.
72. Ibid.
73. Ibid.
74. Ibid.
75. 1988 City Files, County and City Data Books, University of Virginia Library, www2.lib.virginia.edu/ccdb.
76. Larry Rother, “Restoring Hispanic Theater in Bronx,” New York Times, Jan. 12, 1986.
77. Ibid.
78. Ibid.
79. Ibid.
80. Sam Howe Verhovek, “Salsa and Heartthrobs: A Palace of Hispanic Life Returns,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1987. Historically, the Teatro Puerto Rico was one of the only places where Spanish-speaking families from all boroughs of New York could come together to experience their culture before the theater’s decline in the 1970s.
81. Rother.
82. Greg Wilson, “Espada Guilty in Grant Row,” New York Daily News, Jul. 6, 2001. In 1995 Sandra Love, who helmed the non-profit organization Information Networking and Community Assistance, secured a grant for the theater to defray operating costs. Instead, she allegedly funneled the majority of funds to the Soundview Health Center and a large part of the remainder to Bronx senator Pedro Espada’s political campaign.
83. Rapping, 16.
84. Sally C. Clarke, “Advance Report of Final Divorce Statistics, 1989 and 1990,” Monthly Vital Statistics Report 43, no. 9 (Mar. 22, 1995). Supplement, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention/National Health Statistics. See table 1. http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/mvsr/supp/mv43_09s.pdf. Between 1950 and 1976, the divorce rate in the United States had doubled.
85. “Breaking … Fresh and Exciting!” Baltimore/Washington Afro-American, May 4, 1984.
86. Ibid.
87. Doherty, 1988, 63. See also R. Serge Denisoff, Tarnished Gold: The Record Industry Revisited (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books, 1986), 14. In Blackboard Jungle, a group of teenage students demolish a high school teacher’s jazz record collection while the film’s title track plays over the images of delinquent destruction.
88. Peter Keer, “7 Youths Injured in Concert Fights,” New York Times, Dec. 28, 1985. Screenings of the film have not only been linked with violence but an associated music concert entitled The Krush Groove Christmas Party, in New York City, which featured performers from the film, was also followed with numerous violent incidents, including a shooting.
89. Kimmich, 9.
90. Pat Gill, “The Monstrous Years: Teens, Slasher Films, and the Family,” Journal of Film and Video 54, no. 4 (Winter 2002): 29. Of the slasher, Gill writes that “these films offer a sustained conservative critique of family life, mourning the middle class dream while mocking it. Parents refuse to commit to their children: their disinclination, work, pleasures, or addictions prevent them from taking their parental responsibilities seriously. None of the parents, even the most well-meaning and kind, ever succeeds in making the connections necessary to create a functioning family.”
91. Bronner, Nov. 10, 1985. The author writes of a Krush Groove screening in Boston that “more than 1,000 youths left the Sack Pi Alley Cinema on Washington Street at about 10 p.m.” He goes on to note that “half had seen the earlier show of the feature film and half had been turned away from the later screening after their efforts to get in resulted in damage to the theatre and cancellation.” See also “200 Teen-agers Fight Outside Theatre on L.I.” The article reports that “last weekend, two people were hurt in nearby Valley Stream when about 1,000 customers waiting to see Krush Groove stormed the Sunrise Multiplex Cinemas after they were told the theatre was overbooked.”
92. Stephen Holden, “A Young Company Guides Rap Music into the Mainstream,” New York Times, Aug. 11, 1987. Krush Groove reportedly cost $3 million to produce and returned an impressive $15 million at the box office.
93. Paul Attanasio, “Crude Krush Groove,” Washington Post, Nov. 1, 1985.
94. Michael Blowen, “Krush Groove More Like Krashing Bore,” Boston Globe, Nov. 9, 1985.
95. Lynn Van Matre, “Good Rap, Bad Rap: Music Tops Plot in Krush Groove,” Chicago Tribune, Oct. 25, 1985.
96. Charles Rogers, “Hip Hop Flick Krush Groove Doesn’t Have the Juice,” New York Amsterdam News, Nov. 16, 1985. See also Charles Rogers, “UTFO: From “Roxanne” to Riches?,” New York Amsterdam News, Jul. 20, 1985. Charles Rogers’s writings for the Amersterdam News display a paternalistic, if not hostile, attitude towards hip hop culture in general. He writes of the rap group UTFO that “interviewing UTFO, the Brooklyn based rappers of Roxanne, Roxanne” fame, it’s difficult to get a word in edgewise much less a question.” He goes on to state that “they’re too busy slapping each other high-fives, trading inside jokes, and clowning around among themselves to simply answer questions from me.” This authoritarian attitude sometimes found its way into publications that were generally sympathetic and supportive of hip hop culture. For instance, see Racine S. Winborne, “Teen Trend for the Eighties is ‘Rap’ and Scratch Music,” Baltimore Afro-American, Dec. 6. 1983. The article infers that established jazz vocalist Jean Carne finds rapping to be a simplistic and juvenile musical form: “She equates rapping with artist [sic] who simply don’t know how to sing.” Some positive descriptions of the music are given by DJs, but overall the tone of the article is somewhat disapproving and the author describes current rap as “madcapped” and “repetitive.”
97. Ronald Hanna, “Blair Underwood,” Baltimore Afro-American, Nov. 9, 1985.
98. Guerrero, 113–14. The author writes that “in the beginning of the 1980s and under the political impulse of Reaganism, blacks on screen, in front of and behind the camera, found themselves confronted with the ‘recuperation’ of many of the subordinations and inequalities they had struggled so hard to eradicate during the years of the civil rights movement and the emergence of Black Power consciousness that followed it … Concurrently, the 1980s saw a steady reduction of films with black narratives and leading roles as black actors found themselves increasingly pushed into the margins or background of the cinematic frame.”
99. Frederick I. Douglass, “Missing in Action is Missing in Acting,” Baltimore/ Washington Afro-American, Nov. 23, 1984.
100. Ibid.
101. Ibid.
102. “‘Breaking’ … Fresh and Exciting.”
103. Ida Peters, “Shrimp Taught Me to Backslide,” Afro-American, May 12, 1984.
104. Valerie Smith-Madden, “Blair Underwood … New Star on the Horizon,” Afro-American, Jun. 29, 1985.
105. Ibid.
1. AKC Leung, “Hazards of Break Dancing,” New York State Journal of Medicine 84, no. 12 (Dec. 1984): 592. See also G. R. Hansen, “Breaks and Other Bad News For Breakers,” Journal of American Medical Association 252, no. 14 (1985): 2047.
2. For instance, see S. L. McNeil and others, “Multiple Subdural Hematomas Associated with Breakdancing,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 16, no. 1 (Jan. 1987): 114–16, D. Q. McBride, L. P. Lehman, and J. R. Mangiardi, “Break-Dancing Neck,” New England Journal of Medicine 312, no. 3 (1985): 186, R. A. Norman and M. A. Grodin, “Injuries from Break Dancing,” American Family Physician 30, no. 2 (1984): 109–12, and P. J. Goscienski and L. Luevanos, “Injury Caused by Break Dancing,” Journal of the American Medical Association 252, vol. 24 (1984): 3367.
3. B. C. Joondeph, A. V. Spigelman, and J. S. Pulido, “Ocular Trauma From Break Dancing,” Archives of Ophthalmology 104, no. 2 (Feb. 1986): 176–77.
4. Lloyd Shearer, “Break-Dancing,” Parade Magazine, Mar. 13, 1985, 20.
5. Belinda Fu, “Injuries of Breakdancing,” Radiology 140, no. 3 (Dec. 2000), www.radiology.ucsf.edu/learning_ctr/breakdance.shtml.
6. M. R. Kassiver and N. Manon, “Head Bangers Whiplash,” Clinical Journal of Pain 9, no. 2, (Jun. 1993): 138.
7. Ibid., 139.
8. Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 5–6. Browning notes that beginning with the European colonial period, Western culture has often associated African derived forms of music and dance with metaphors of infection and contagion. Black music and dance, she argues, have been cloaked in a pseudo-medical discourse in which this cultural “Other” threatens to literally invade corporeal boundaries and infect whites with simultaneously exhilarating and dangerous rhythms. In reference to African culture, Browning writes that “the metaphor of contagion, even when invoked by Europeans, often takes seemingly benign forms (‘infectious rhythm’ as a dispersal of joy), but it can also often lead to hostile, even violent, reactions to cultural expressions.” The concept of the African beat as contagious and infectious, has, at particular historical moments, also been used to evoke metaphors of political contagion and “inflammation” as well. See “News Sent by Drums Keeps Africa Astir,” Baltimore Afro-American, Apr. 13, 1923. (originally from the Associated Press): “Agitation in a form resembling bolshevism has appeared in East Africa and sentiment favorable to the nationalist movement started by Marcus Garvey is rampant in Liberia, while the troubles in West Africa recently required military suppression. … Much of this agitation is said to be due to inflammatory reports spread among the tribes by drum talk.”
9. Hank Gallo, “Big Bucks Beckon the Best Breakdancer,” New York Daily News, Aug. 23, 1984. See also Stephen Koepp, “Breaking Through to Big Profits,” Time, Oct. 1, 1984, http://time.com/magazine/article/0,9171,954411,00.html.
10. Koepp.
11. Foster, 23–24.
12. del Barco. The author notes that “Crazy Legs, the 18-year-old president of Rock Steady, with six other members of the crew, have made four world tours so far, and are planning a fifth. … They’re a sensation in France, Italy, Japan and England. … The crew has also toured around the United States, breaking in the Jerry Lewis Muscular Dystrophy Telethon, and at the Kennedy Telethon last December in Brooklyn.”
13. Joan Scott, Gender and the Politics of History (New York: Columbia University Press, 1988), 15–50. My approach is partly informed by the work of Scott. Rather than simply compiling a history of women in breakdance, I have attempted to analyze how gender is mobilized as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power” within the representation of breakdance culture (42). Although this chapter begins with an “unearthing” of women in the archival record (an important first step in producing a feminist history), it works toward highlighting the ways that gender informed mainstream representations of cultural and racial crossings within both cinema and print.
14. J. Sullivan and L. Calicott, Break Dancing: Step-By-Step Instructions (New York: Beekman House, 1984).
15. Bonnie Nadell and John Small, Break Dance: Electric Boogie, Egyptian, Moonwalk … Do it (Philadelphia: Running Press, 1985).
16. Michael Holman, “Locking and Poping (Electric Boogie),” http://www.hiphopnetwork.com/articles/bboyarticles/popinelectricboogie2.asp.
This article reprinted from Michael Holman, Breaking and the New York City Breakers (New York: Freundlich Books, 1984).
17. Ibid.
18. Mr. Fresh and the Supreme Rockers, Breakdancing: Mr. Fresh and the Supreme Rockers Show You How to Do It! (New York: Avon Books, 1984), 44.
19. Ibid., 43.
20. Ibid., 21–26.
21. Holman.
22. Richard Majors and Janet Mancini Billson, Cool Pose: The Dilemmas of Black Manhood in America (New York: Lexington Books, 1992), 4.
23. Ibid., xii.
24. Ibid., 4–5.
25. Ibid., 2.
26. Gwendolyn D. Pough, Check it While I Wreck it: Black Womanhood, Hip-Hop Culture, and the Public Sphere (Boston: Northwestern University Press, 2004), 128. Pough, in describing female characters in ghetto-centric narratives of the 1990s, writes that “the ghetto girl is denied a fullness of womanhood, and societal influences, such as systemic and intersecting oppressions and the implications of these for her life, are not taken into consideration. Therefore, representations of the money-hungry and sexually promiscuous black woman living in a poor urban area are given as unproblematized truths or humorous stereotyped caricatures.”
27. Sinclair.
28. Katrina Hazzard-Donald, “Dance in Hop Hop Culture,” in Droppin’ Science: Critical Essays on Rap Music and Hip Hop Culture, ed. William Eric Perkins (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 225.
29. Ibid.
30. “Dancers ‘Break’ from Tradition,” The News Tribune, Woodbridge (N.J.), Feb. 24, 1984.
31. Ibid.
32. Shirley L. Larsen, “When my Daughter Moonwalks,” Christian Science Monitor, Sept. 11, 1984.
33. Sally Banes, “Unruly Dolls and Ritz Rockers,” Village Voice, Oct. 18, 1983, 118. Banes writes that “the Dynamic Rockers won the top prize with choreography that also moved the spins and other floorwork of breaking into the air, as they worked in pairs, one dancer acting as support while a second spun on his head or shoulders. They teamed up in formations to step in perfect synchrony, red costumes glittering, or formed a pyramid for more dancers to vault in flying leaps, looking somehow like a combination of astronauts and circus acrobats. Two young women in the crew took their turns as well. The crowd went wild.”
34. Clarissa Lopez, “Breakdancing with the Lady Rockers,” New York Daily News, Sept. 23, 1984.
35. Majors and Billson, 41–45.
36. Ibid., 44.
37. Ibid., 44. The only acknowledgment of critical appropriations of “cool pose” by black women occurs in one vague sentence in which the authors assert that “black women use cool behaviors to help counter the effects of racism and social oppression too.”
38. Peter Rosenwald, “Breaking Away 80’s Style,” Dance Magazine, Apr. 1984, 70-75.
39. Dan Cox, “Brooklyn’s Furious Rockers: Break Dance Roots in a Breakneck Neighborhood,” Dance Magazine, Apr. 1984, 79.
40. Michael Norman, “Frosty Freeze and Kid Smooth Break for Fame at Roxy Disco,” New York Times, Oct. 18, 1983.
41. Joyce Mollov, “Getting the Breaks,” Ballet News 6, no. 2 (Aug. 1984): 16.
42. Ibid., 19.
43. Mr. Fresh and the Supreme Rockers, 13. See also Nadell and Small, 62.
44. Holman.
45. Sherman, 287–88. The author cites a number of breakdance manuals, which indicate early breakdancing influences. James Brown’s accompanying dance to “Get On the Good Foot” and Michael Jackson’s Robot dance routine, developed in the mid-1970s when he was with the Jackson 5, are both mentioned in the article. See also Mollov, 18. Mollov notes that William Craft, the manager of Breakers Exchange International, also describes Brown as an early influence on breakdance. Basil only appeared in a few early performances, most notably on a segment of Saturday Night Live in 1975, but continued to influence the group by acting as their promoter and manager.
46. Margaret Pierpont, “Breaking in the Studio,” Dance Magazine, Apr. 1984, 82. McKeever notes that her clientele includes women as well as men. She states that “it’s important to do big movements, movements that follow momentum. We have housewives flinging their arms and saying, “We bad.”
47. Cathleen McGuigan and others, 49.
48. Ibid.
49. On February 29, 1984, Manhattan Cable Channel C aired the program Boogie Before Bedtime, which featured a bellydance routine, aerobics, and a segment with the Rockwell Break Dancers.
50. Pough, 49.
51. Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory I: Foundations and Outlooks, ed. Frances E. Olsen (New York: New York University Press, 1995), 466.
52. Pough, 41–73. See also bell hooks, Rock My Soul (New York: Atria Books, 2003), 1–17. In reference to the words of Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, hooks writes that “labeling black females ‘race traitors’ should have galvanized masses of black females and males to protest. Instead, there was widespread agreement on the part of black males and females who were socialized to accept patriarchal thinking without question that black male development would be furthered by the subordination of black women” (7). See also Michelle Wallace, Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman (London: Verso, 1990), 13. Wallace was one of the first African American feminist writers to publish a critique of the Black Power Movement of the 1960s. She writes in her opening chapter that “for perhaps the last fifty years there has been a growing distrust, even hatred, between black men and women. It has been nursed along not only by racism on the part of whites but also by an almost deliberate ignorance on the part of blacks about the sexual politics of their experience in this country. As the Civil Rights Movement progressed, little attention was devoted to an examination of the historical black male/female relationship, except for those aspects of it that reinforced the notion of the black man as the victim of ‘matriarchal’ tyranny. The result has been calamitous. The black woman has become a social and intellectual suicide; the black man, unintrospective and oppressive.”
53. Pough, 8. The author calls attention to the sexism of writers like Nelson George who claims, in his book Hip Hop America, that no female artists have been important to the development of rap music. Pough notes that early female rap artists like MC Lyte and Salt-n-Pepa used aggressive lyrics and performance styles to directly challenge the overt masculinity of conventional rap music.
54. Altman, 233.
55. Roger Ebert, “Flashdance,” rogerebert.com, http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/19830419/REVIEWS/304190301/. Among his other criticisms, Ebert finds Flashdance to be “so loaded down with artificial screenplay contrivances and flashy production numbers that it’s waterlogged.”
56. R. Serge Denisoff and George Plasketes, “Synergy in 1980s Film and Music: Formula for Success or Industry Mythology?” Film History 4, no. 3 (1990): 258–59. The authors write that “Flashdance was not originally designed for video use. … The most telling historical fact is that Michael Sembello’s ‘Maniac’ appeared on the MTV rotation as of 11 May, a month after the premiere of Flashdance.”
57. Vincent Canby, “Body Rock, A Loud Splice of Life,” New York Times, Sept. 28, 1984.
58. Rosenwald, 70. See also Foster, 23.
59. Ken Sandler, “Breakdancing! Spinning into the Big Time: From Street Thrills to Art Form,” Washington Post, Dec. 30, 1983.
60. George, 81–100.
61. Banes, Jun. 12, 1984, 82. Banes, a writer who has always been critical of the commercialization of hip hop culture, wryly notes that “the front cover of Vogue this month sports a beautiful (white) model in a graffiti-decked hat. Perhaps the same inner-city elementary school teacher who four years ago told me breaking and graffiti were equally criminal will be moved to buy just such a hat, or designer Terry McCoy’s graffiti shoes or chairs, or Willi Wear graffiti clothes. They must have seen Flashdance.”
62. Mollov, 15. The author writes that “three styles make up breakdancing. ‘Electric boogie,’ contributed by black and Spanish-speaking California youths … The ‘pop’ which moves through the body in darting discontinuities that suggest the fleeting blips … of a computer monitor … The Latin contribution is the third domain of breakdancing, ‘webbo,’ or ‘wavo,’ a special footwork that adds another dimension.”
63. I don’t wish to conflate or reify Puerto Rican and African American urban performance and experience. However, in terms of representation, many early expressions of hip hop, especially within cinema, attempted to evoke an urban performance style that unproblematically envisioned a pan-ethnic and multiracial street culture. This is evident in Wild Style, where African Americans, Puerto Ricans, and whites all live in relative racial harmony, and are all participants in hip hop culture. Beat Street, Delivery Boys, and Rappin’ also make a point of emphasizing the racial heterogeneity of the communities around which their stories revolve. This tendency is closely related to the utopian thrust of these films which is modeled in part on the structure of the folk musical, a form which privileges communal harmony and unity over discord and difference.
64. John Bodnar, Michael Weber, and Roger Simon, “Migration, Kinship, and Urban Adjustment: Blacks and Poles in Pittsburgh, 1900–30,” in The Making of Urban America, ed. Raymond A. Mohl (Delaware: Scholarly Resources, 1988), 170–86.
65. Ibid., 176.
66. Hinshaw, 92–95. The author remarks that large labor unions in the steel industry habitually failed to favorably resolve grievance issues for black workers. He also produces evidence suggesting that blacks themselves failed to take a sustained interest in union meetings and organizing in general. However, this data must be seen in relation to the notorious racism of the unions, and their lack of efficacy in terms of fighting the unjust treatment of black workers by the companies.
67. Ibid., 42.
68. Hinshaw, 200–29.
69. Roediger, 20–21. Although I emphasize here the specific history of racial conflict that arose with the formation of social networks within Pittsburgh’s steel industry, this particular local account must be seen in relation to the formation of racialized working-class identity in the United States more generally. As Roediger has pointed out, wage labor performed by European immigrants or their decedents in the North was sharply distinguished from slave labor performed in the South, so much so that whiteness became synonymous with “worker” as opposed to both Southern slave labor and racially constructed notions of inherent black laziness. He notes that the terms “white” and “worker” became fused in the nineteenth century and that they “became paired during a time in which the United States, whose citizens were taught by their revolutionary victory and republican ideology to expect both political and economic independence, became a nation in which, by 1860, roughly half the nonslave labor force was dependent on wage labor and subject to new forms of capitalist labor discipline.”
70. Ella Shohat and Robert Stam, Unthinking Eurocentrism: Multiculturalism and the Media (London: Routledge, 1994), 220–23.
71. Ibid., 23.
72. Clover, 157–59.
73. Ibid., 164.
74. Watkins, 188–95.
75. Elizabeth Traube, Dreaming Identities: Class, Gender, and Generation in 1980s Hollywood Movies (Boulder: Westview Press, 1992), 20. The strong feminist sentiment of the 1960s and ’70s was increasingly under attack by political and social leaders aligned with New Right dogma during the 1980s. According to Elizabeth Traube, at this moment “Hollywood joined the New Right leaders in directing socially rooted discontents against independent, upwardly mobile women. Movies as well as political discourse attacked uncontrolled, ambitious women as the cause of a moral crisis that, given its definition, called for a strong, authoritarian patriarch.”
76. Ibid., 67–96. In her insightful chapter, “Secrets of Success in Postmodern Society,” the author notes that a new concern with the individual and with “the cult of personality” became central to the conservative, business-oriented rhetoric of the 1980s. She argues that this tendency can be traced in several films (for instance, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off [1986] and Nothing in Common [1986]) from the middle of the decade.
77. Marshall Stearns and Jean Stearns, 3. The authors write that “Elvis Presley was not exactly doing the Twist, but as did the hula hoop craze, he helped light the fuse … his motions were a relatively tame version of the ancient Snake Hips of the Negro folk, popularized in Harlem by dancer Earl Tucker during the early twenties.”
78. Charlene Register, “The Construction of an Image and the Deconstruction of a Star—Josephine Baker Racialized, Sexualized, and Politicized in the African-American Press, the Mainstream Press, and the FBI Files,” Popular Music and Society 24, no. 1 (Spring, 2000): 45.
79. Snead, 1–27. Snead argues that the film used the giant ape monster Kong as a symbol of threatening and terrifying blackness, which brings destruction and chaos into civilization. According to the author, the film legitimated the specious and absurd fears stirred by The Birth of a Nation a generation earlier: that all black men are obsessed with white women and pose a direct threat to them. (In King Kong an enormous ape desires a young white woman.) Of course, the flip side of this reading also points to white male fantasies of a powerful black male sexuality that is uncontrollable and voracious—an aggressively virile phallic fantasy to counter fears of white male sexual lack.
80. Stam and Shohat, 1994, 137–40.
81. Krin Gabbard, Jammin’ at the Margins: Jazz and the American Cinema (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 138–59.
82. Ibid., 54. Gabbard also argues that phallic instruments associated with black jazz artists within classical Hollywood film, such as the trumpet and the clarinet, frequently represent the symbolic equivalent of sexual virility necessary for the white hero to succeed with his romantic endeavors.
83. Ibid., 83.
84. Lott, 22–29. Lott notes that minstrelsy and the adoption of a “black mask” by white Americans is related to earlier forms of European street festivals, carnivals, and traditional entertainment figures such as clowns and harlequins. Even before the minstrelsy tradition was established, blackface was a common “mask” worn by American immigrants during public events, riots, and festivals. Therefore, blackface was linked to transgressive social and political action several years prior to the establishment of minstrelsy as a popular form of entertainment.
85. Ibid., 25–26.
86. Leslie Fiedler, Love and Death in the American Novel (Cleveland: The World Publishing Company, 1960). Some of the earliest writings on this historical relation in American culture can be found in the work of Leslie Fiedler. He argues that the foundation of American literature, texts such as Moby-Dick; or, The Whale (1851) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), are, at their core, stories of “innocent” love between men, which continually negotiate white desire for racial “Otherness.” According to Fiedler, there is always a longing for “the dark skinned” other, and an obsessive fascination with his ability to abandon or live outside of the “civilized” ways of Western European culture in these works. For such familiar American heroes as Huck Finn, the dark-skinned friend—in this case, Jim—brings him closer to the instinctual, and a life outside of restrained European codes of polite behavior.
87. Gabbard, 54–56.
88. Rogin, 73–120.
89. Bogle, 10–17.
90. Ibid., 13–14. Of this film and the two “black buck” stereotypes found in this epic, Lynch and Gus, Donald Bogle writes that “the pure black bucks were always Griffith’s really great archetypal figures. Bucks are always big, baaddddd niggers, oversexed and savage, violent and frenzied as they lust for white flesh … Griffith played on the myth of the Negro’s high-powered sexuality, then articulated the great white fear that every black man longs for a white woman … Consequently, when Lillian Gish, the frailest, purest of all screen heroines, was attacked by the character Lynch—when he put his big black arms around this pale blonde beauty—audiences literally panicked.”
91. Chris Jordan, 121.
92. Kathryn Kalinak, “Flashdance: The Dead End Kid,” Jump Cut no. 29 (Feb. 1984): 3–5.
93. “Hot Dancing Sensation,” National Fitness Trade Magazine, Summer 1995, 5–8.
94. Ibid.
95. Ann Butler, “Renewing the Feeling: Flashdance Opening Doors for Marine Jahan,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Apr. 10, 1984. The article notes of Jahan that “for the second straight year she is appearing in department stores across the nation dancing to promote 9 West shoes. … At noon in Kauffmann’s junior shoes department, she went on before an audience of several hundred on a small makeshift stage. … She did three brief numbers, featuring three different pairs of shoes—the first, a secretarial mime to Donna Summer’s throbbing ‘She Works Hard for the Money,’ followed by an aerobic workout, and finally in black heels a flashdance to ‘What a Feeling’. … The crowd seemed to be mostly women shoppers, although there were some businessmen and youths. Afterwards, several dozen waited in line for autographed photos.”
96. Genevieve Buck, “Marine Jahan is the ‘Other’ Flashdancer,” Toledo Blade, Jan. 3, 1984.
97. Ebert. Ebert writes of the film that “Jennifer Beals plays Alex, an 18-year-old who is a welder by day, and a go-go dancer by night, and dreams of being a ballet star, and falls in love with the Porsche-driving boss of the construction company. These are a lot of ‘character details’ even if she didn’t also have a saintly old woman as a mentor, a big slobbering dog as a friend, a bicycle she rides all over Pittsburgh, a loft the size of a sweatshop, a sister who ice skates, a grumpy old pop, and the ability to take off her bra without removing her sweatshirt.”
98. Dyer, 2000, 25. Dyer writes that “except in the few all-black musicals, black performers in MGM-style musicals nearly always play characters who are nothing but entertainers. They may be, and often are, slaves, servants, waiters, or prostitutes, but all they ever do in those roles is entertain.”
99. Bruce Tyler, “Zoot-Suit Culture and the Black Press,” Journal of American and Comparative Cultures 17, no. 2 (Jun. 1994): 21–33. The author notes that the zoot suit became a symbol of black youth power during the 1940s, signaling resistance to both racist white culture and oppressive black middle-class mores. This style of dress was also closely associated with Latino youth cultures of the same era. During these early wartime years, racial tensions on the West Coast led to the infamous “zoot suit riots” in which hundreds of Latino youth were harassed, beaten, and arrested by American servicemen (from both the army and navy) and the local police force.
100. Kalinak. The author suggests that the most disturbing aspect of Flashdance is its presentation of women performing exhilarating and physically liberating dance sequences, while nevertheless embedding these moments of emancipation within a limited and “disappointing fantasy framework.”
101. Rosenwald, 74.
102. “The Tap Dance Kid Alfonso Ribeiro Boogies in the Footsteps of Idol Michael Jackson,” People, Jul. 16, 1984, http://www.people.com/people/archive/article/0,,20197121,00.html.
103. Ibid.
104. McGuigan and others, 47.
105. Foster, 24.
106. Ibid.
107. Paul Tharp, “Breakdancers Get Ballerinas into the Whirl,” New York Post, Jan. 17, 1984.
108. Mollov, 19.
109. Ibid.
110. Cobbett Steinberg, “Dancing Men,” Ballet Review 7, no. 1 (1978–79): 63.
111. Akiva Talmi, quoted in Sandler, 1983.
112. Cox, 80.
113. Richard Philip and Mary Whitney, Danseur: The Male in Ballet (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1977).
114. Steinberg, 1978–9.
115. Igor Youskevitch, “Masculinity in Dance,” Ballet Review (Fall 1981): 90–1.
116. Clover, 159. The author notes how Kelly was always at pains to emphasize the athleticism and overt masculinity of dance. Of Singin’ in the Rain, she writes that “the three Kelly/O’Connor dances … are muscular, apparently impromptu, unrestrained, exuberant, largely tap-based routines in which the interest lies to a considerable extent in the athletic feats of the (male) body: how fast the feet, sinuous the twists, high the jumps.” Clover argues that Kelly fully literalized his intentions when, during the television program, Dancing: A Man’s Game, Kelly attempted to show how dance mimicked the moves of the most athletic and therefore masculine sports.
117. Ramsay Burt, The Male Dancer: Bodies, Spectacle, Sexualities (London: Routledge, 1995), 103. The author notes that proponents of American modern dance such as Ted Shawn did not universally reject male ballet dancers but believed that the entire production system had gradually emasculated the artistic form.
118. Ibid., 107. Burt writes that modern dance choreographer “Shawn’s earliest solos such as Savage Dance and Dagger Dance, both of 1912, and Dance Slav (1913) were concerned with primitive or non-western warrior cultures, as were subsequent pieces like Invocation to the Thunderbird (1918), Spear Dance Japonaise (1919), and Pyrrhic Warriors (1918).” He goes on to note that “in these Shawn seems, like Edgar Rice Burroughs, to have been borrowing the outer appearances of primitive and non-western cultures in order to evoke a ‘natural’ masculinity with which these ‘Others’ were believed to be in touch.”
119. Burt, 4.
120. Steinberg, 65.
121. Philip and Whitney, 12.
122. Ibid.
123. Ibid., 17.
124. Ibid.
125. Sandler, 1983.
126. Robert Lindsey, “Dancing in the Streets With a Dream,” New York Times, Jan. 27, 1984.
127. Ramsay, 102. The author writes that “the American association of masculinity with toughness renders male dance problematic, dancing still being, in many people’s minds, a feminine realm.”
128. Rosenwald, 74.
129. Mollov, 19.
130. “Julie Arenals Choreographers Company Presents New York Express,” 1984.
131. Ibid. The wave refers to a popular electric boogie dance move that resembles a current of electricity moving through the body. The movement usually begins in one hand, travels up the arm to the head, and back down through the other arm.
132. Grubb, 78
133. Ibid.
134. Koepp. The Swatch Watch break dance competition held in 1984 offered a total of $25,000 in prizes.
135. In the summer of 2006, the Brooklyn Museum presented a show entitled Graffiti, which featured large-scale works from some pioneering artists including Sandra Fabara (Lady Pink), Futura, and Tracy (Tracy 168). That same year another Brooklyn art space, the Danny Simmons Corridor Gallery, put together Propaganda: The Dissemination of Ideas E, a group show featuring both graffiti writers and documentarians. At the opening of 2008, the Lott Gallery in Manhattan’s prestigious Chelsea gallery block featured graffiti artists in the show Writer’s Strike.
136. The Freshest Kids: A History of the B-Boy, DVD, directed by Israel (QD3 Entertainment, 2002). In an interview segment from this powerful documentary, Richard (Crazy Legs) Colon, who was an influential breaker and member of the Rock Steady Crew, discusses the aftermath of the break dance media frenzy. The experience was devastating for Colon who went from the street to stardom, and back again in a few short years. He notes that “one minute we were in the limelight, everything was straight … traveling all around the world … walk up to a club, hey come on in … a club you helped build as far as reputation you know … and the next thing you know it’s like go to the back of the line … Boom … how do you really nurture someone and prepare them for what can happen … especially someone coming from the ghetto when all you see is like money … from that to having loot in your pocket … and to next thing … just like having the rug pulled under you…I went through a ill identity crisis.” Michael Holman, breakdance promoter and manager of the New York City Breakers, is also interviewed in the same segment. He notes that the breakdance media hype didn’t survive because there simply wasn’t enough product to sell to keep it commercially viable. When mainstream media discovered rapping, producers and record labels seized the opportunity to further financially exploit hip hop culture through record sales and music video.
137. Some breakers still perform on New York street corners and subways for money, and a 1997 show at the Joffrey Ballet entitled Kali Ma included a breaker in the performance. Kali Ma tape obtained through personal communication with the Joffrey Ballet. See also Anna Kisselgoff, “Ballet Meets Break Dancing as the Feld Vision Evolves,” New York Times, Mar. 7, 1997. A performance entitled “Yo Shakespeare” by New York’s Ballet Tech used a combination of breaking and traditional ballet. However, it is suggested that all of the dancers were trained in the academy. No mention is made as to how breaking was actually learned by the troupe.
138. Richard Kendall, “Signs and Non-signs: Degas’ Changing Strategies of Representation,” in Dealing With Degas: Representations of Women and the Politics of Vision, eds. Richard Kendall and Griselda Pollock (London: Pandora Press, 1992), 192–93.
139. Ken Sandler, “Breakdancing Goes Legit,” New York Daily News, Jan. 3, 1984.
140. Ibid.
141. Sandler, 1983.
142. K. N. F., “Jazz’ Intoxicates Just Like Whiskey Says Physician: Music Said to Act as Drug to Release Stronger Animal Passions,” Afro-American, Apr. 20, 1923. This article warned of the explicit danger of jazz, arguing that “the quick and staccato tempo of jazz music, with the plaintive and pleading notes of the violin and the clarinet calling and the imploring tones of the saxaphone [sic]: the rhythmic beating of the drums, all these send a continuous whirl of impressionable stimulations to the brain, producing thoughts and imaginations which overpower the will.” The author goes on to argue that upon listening to jazz “reason and reflection are lost and the actions of the person are directed by the stronger animal passions.” Although the article does not explicitly state that jazz is problematic because it lacks structure, this is directly implied because the author suggests that this type of music overwhelms human reason, a turn that would ultimately be signaled by the assent of passion and chaos over order and measured reflection. See also Anne Shaw Faulkner, “Does Jazz Put the Sin in Syncopation,” Ladies Home Journal, Aug. 1921, 16, 34. Reprinted in Keeping Time: Readings in Jazz History, ed. Robert Walser (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 32–36.
143. Doherty, 1988, 65–82.
144. Guerrero, 127.
1. “Breakdancing Goes From Harlem Streets to the Croisette in Pics,” Variety, May 9, 1984, 287. See also J. Sullivan, “Breakin’ Out of the Ghetto and Makin’ it Big at the Box Office,” Boston Globe, Jun. 17, 1984. The author notes that Cannon Films, the production company responsible for Breakin’, began filming with the intention this film would be the very first Hollywood breakdancing release.
2. Janet Maslin, “Capturing the Hip-Hop Culture,” New York Times, Jun. 8, 1984.
3. Ibid.
4. Variety, 287. “Spokesmen for the films have been coy about heralding the breakdance aspects of their products too loudly. ‘Yes, it has break dancing in it,’ says Pamela Godfrey, international ad-pub veepee for Orion which produced Beat Street, ‘but it’s more of a musical.’”