Can't Stop Won't Stop (15 page)

In the loop, there is the alpha, the omega and the turning points in between. The seam disappears, slips into endless motion and reveals a new logic—the circumference of a worldview.

Fanga alafia ashé ashé

[Welcome, peace be unto you]

—Yoruban children's rhyme

 

 

DMC (right) and Run (center) rocking at record mogul Charles Koppelman's daughter's Sweet Sixteen party.
Photo © Josh Cheuse/WFN

Afrika Bambaataa flying his cut sleeves downtown.
Photo © Lisa Haun/Michael Ochs
Archive.com

 

 

I was born out of time.

—Napoleon Wilson,
Assault on Precinct 13

Afrika Bambaataa was a teenager with a big rep. “When he walked through the projects,” recalls Jayson “Jazzy Jay” Byas, “he was like The Godfather walking through Little Italy.” Jay had moved into the Bronx River Houses in 1971 after his family's Harlem tenement was consumed by a fire. Like hundreds of other youths at Bronx River, Jay started following Bambaataa.

“Bam used to put his speakers out the window and play music all day. He used to live right outside what you'd call the Center. The center of Bronx River was like a big oval. The community center was right in the middle and Bam used to live to the left of it. He used to play his music, and I would ride my bike around all day popping wheelies, you know?” Jay says. “He was like the Pied Piper.”

As the gang days were receding, Bambaataa saw the future before anyone else. Each of the housing projects had its own gangs, sometimes turning the two-block distance between them into a no-man's land. But he was ready to take people across borders that they didn't know they could cross, into projects they weren't sure they could be in. Bambaataa—he told them his name was Zulu for “affectionate leader”—would lead them where they didn't know they were ready to go.

Still astonished at the thought of it three decades later, Jay recalls, “Bam used to say, ‘Hey, they throwing a block party in Bronxdale,' and he has his box and a bagful of tapes with all the music. He grabs the box and when he starts walking to Bronxdale, he'd have like forty people walking behind him.

“Bam was the leader. You'd roll up in—Bronx River is represented. We up in Bronxdale, we up in Soundview, we in Castle Hill—wherever they was throwing a block party, we was there. Here comes Bam, here comes the entourage, here comes
the army
. Wherever Bam was going, that's where some shit was gon' be, that's where you need to be. If you wasn't there even for the march up, you know the word got back real quick. ‘Yo! Bam and them
moving
, there's a party going on over there.' ”

Of the three kings, the trinity of hip-hop music—DJ Kool Herc, Grandmaster Flash and Afrika Bambaataa—the most enigmatic is Bambaataa Kahim Aasim.

It is not because he is reclusive. In fact, unlike Herc and Flash, he has never retreated far from the public eye. Through his prolific recording career and his ongoing stewardship of the Universal Zulu Nation organization, Bambaataa has lived a very generous life. He regularly crisscrosses the world, graciously giving of himself to fans, journalists, Zulu members and hip-hop heads everywhere. And yet he also remains essentially a mystery. There are things that everyone seems to know about Bambaataa, and things that no one seems to know. The philosopher Claude Levi-Strauss might have called Bambaataa someone who lives twice simultaneously—once as a man in history, and separately as a myth above temporality.

His story seems well documented. He was the Black Spade warlord who became the Master of Records. The shaman who had hundreds of hard-rocks dancing to his global musical mash-up of Kraftwerk, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti, the “Pink Panther” theme, the Rolling Stones and the Magic Disco Machine. The founder of the Universal Zulu Nation, the first hip-hop institution, an organization that tried to raise consciousness like it raised the roof. The preacher of the gospel of the “four elements”—DJing, MCing, b-boying and Graffiti Writing. The missionary who took the hip-hop message to the four corners of the globe, and then beyond Planet Rock.

When hip-hop lost its way, he added a fifth element—”knowledge.” Zulus, he explains, are about having “right knowledge, right wisdom, right ‘overstanding' and right sound reasoning, meaning that we want our people to deal with factuality versus beliefs, factology versus beliefs.” But some facts about his own life are slippery like quicksilver.

It is known, for example, that Bambaataa was born in Manhattan to parents of Jamaican and Barbadian descent. But he refuses to disclose when or under what name. Many biographies have incorrectly listed his birth name as Kevin Donovan, another man who happened to be the leader of record-label owner Paul Winley's house band, the Harlem Underground Band.
¹
Perhaps he was in perpetual reinvention as a youth. He had multiple graffiti tags, including BAMBAATAA, BAM 117 and BOM 117—the latter an acronym he once told German interviewers stood for Bambaataa Osisa Mubulu.
²

Bios often list Bambaataa's birthdate as April 10, 1960. Other biographers have listed his birthdate as June 17, 1957. The month of April seems correct. Kool Herc, born in mid-April, has thrown joint birthday parties with Bam. But if Bambaataa was actually born in 1960, he would have joined the Black Spades at the age of nine, been a warlord before the age of ten, and started The Organization, the precursor to the Zulu Nation, at the age of thirteen. Most likely, Bambaataa was born in April of 1957. He won't say. “We
never
,” he pointedly admonishes interviewers dumb enough to ask, “speak on my age.”

He has good reasons for not revealing such personal information. Earlier in his career, revealing his true age might have hurt his credibility with young fans. And he has always been suspicious of surveillance from hostile authorities that have periodically—and wrongly—attacked the Universal Zulu Nation as a violent gang syndicate. So it seems as if Bambaataa is who he is because he's
always
been. He appears as a man outside of time and age.

For his part, Bambaataa conjures himself with good humor. The Zulu Nation's Infinity Lesson #2 explains that the original Bambaataa was a late-nineteenth-century Zululand leader who led an anti-tax revolt against the British colonial authority in South Africa. This Bambaataa was not above using mystical means to inspire his people. After calling on them to abandon the signs and objects of European culture—except for their guns—he told them a resurrected witch doctor had given him a potion that made him bulletproof. He drank it, then stood before a firing squad and commanded them to shoot. “But when the smoke cleared there stood Bambaataa, smiling and unhurt,” the Infinity Lesson reads. “The explanation? Blank cartridges.” Sometimes factualities and factologies matter less than the myths we want to believe. “Stopping bullets with two turntables isn't about sociology,” Gary Jardim wrote in a famous 1984
Village Voice
profile on Bambaataa, “it's about finding the spirit in the music and learning how to flash
it.”
³
No one ever debated whether Bambaataa could stop the bullets. He made you
believe
he did.

So Bambaataa is the generative figure, the Promethean firestarter of the hiphop generation. He transformed his environment in sonic and social structure, and in doing so, he called forth the ideas that would shape generational rebellion. So many of the archetypes of the hip-hop generation seem to rise from the body of facts and myths that represent Bambaataa Aasim's life—godfather, yes, but also original gangster, post–civil rights peacemaker, Black riot rocker, breakbeat archaeologist, interplanetary mystic, conspiracy theorist, Afrofuturist, hip-hop activist, twenty-first-century griot.

But two dates help to place the man back into his time and place. In 1971, the year of the Bronx gang truce, a young Bambaataa was first bused to Stevenson High School at the eastern, white edge of Soundview as part of a court-ordered desegregation order. Within weeks the appearance of Black students, some of whom were Black Spades, caused white gang members to organize and a racial war broke out across the borough's borderlands. School grounds became stomping grounds, integration's bloody frontline, with the gangs as the shock troops.

But by 1981 Bambaataa was in the middle of a very different kind of desegregation, a wholly voluntary one. He was taking the music and culture of the Black and brown Bronx into the white art-crowd and punk-rock clubs of lower Manhattan. The iron doors of segregation that the previous generation had started to unlock were battered down by the pioneers of the hip-hop generation. Soon hip-hop was not merely all-city, it was global—a Planet Rock.

Most old school hip-hoppers look back on those heady days—the ‘70s turning into the ‘80s—with a sense of wonder that something they had been involved in as wide-eyed youths could have become so big, so powerful. Never Bambaataa. To him, it was always supposed to be this way. “Each step was a stepping stone, the gang era and all that, that helped to bring about this formation,” he says, as if he had already been to the mountaintop long ago.

Afrika Bambaataa grew up on the ground floor of one of the fifteen-story towers of the Bronx River Projects, a complex of a dozen buildings in the vicinity of two
other postwar superdevelopments, the Bronxdale Houses and the James Monroe Houses.

Bambaataa was raised by his mother, a nurse from a family immersed in international Black cultural and liberation movements. As he came of age during the turbulent late ‘60s, he experienced the fierce ideological debates over the Black freedom struggle—integration or separation, the ballot or the bullet—as close as the dinner table or the living room. His uncle, Bambaataa Bunchinji, was a prominent Black nationalist. Many in his family were devoted Black Muslims.

He seemed born with a sense of destiny. David Hershkovits, a journalist who came to know Bambaataa during the early ‘80s in the downtown club scene, says, “At some point early on, people had kind of spotted him as somebody to educate and talk to about what's going on in the rest of the world outside of the Bronx. I think he was somehow chosen.”

The late ‘60s were a period of irreconcilable forces locked in struggle with each other. In the community, political positions on integration, violence, and revolution could harden into matters of life and death. But through his mother's record collection—an eclectic shelf that included Miriam Makeba, Mighty Sparrow, Joe Cuba, and Aretha Franklin—Bambaataa developed a different kind of perspective. In the rhythmic pull of James Brown's “I'll get it myself” black-power turn or Sly Stone's “everyday people” integrationist dance, these positions lost all their rigidity. James Brown could sing Black pride to all-white audiences. Sly Stone could get down with the Black Panthers. Music made ideologies shed their armature, move together, find a common point of release, a powerful unity.

Bambaataa was coming of age in an accelerated popular culture, a quantum explosion in sounds and images. He began imposing his own order on the chaos of representations. As a youth he became fascinated with the 1964 movie
Zulu
, a Michael Caine vehicle recounting the 1879 siege of Rorke's Drift in Natal, South Africa. The battle remains a celebrated moment in the military history of the British Empire, an unlikely triumph of a hundred redcoats defending a lonely colonial outpost against an overwhelming onslaught of four thousand Zulus. Indeed, Rorke's Drift is remembered as something like the Queen's Fort Apache, an Alamo where the whites actually won.

Zulu
is told exclusively from their point of the view. There are hundreds of
African extras, but not a single Black role of any consequence. In the climactic scene, the red-suited soldiers stand with their bayonets arrayed silently before a pile of Black bodies, a dark tide stopped at the very lip of their boots. Had the movie been released two decades later, after civil rights and Black power, activists might have boycotted it.