Can't Stop Won't Stop (22 page)

On the other hand, there was an overwhelming sense of release on many of these early records, especially the ones captured on Bobby Robinson's aptly named Enjoy label, the sound of rappers exuberantly pouring rhymes they had honed for years in front of skeptical Bronx crowds onto wax for the world and eternity. Robinson's nephew Spoonie Gee spun a story of fast girls and cheap sex on “Love Rap,” backed only by a steaming, phased break by Pumpkin, the legendary drummer behind so many early hip-hop records. “So let's rock y'all! To the beat y'all!” he rapped in a heart-racing adrenaline rush, the tinge of echo making him seem ten-feet tall. On the Treacherous Three and Spoonie Gee's “New Rap Language,” Kool Moe Dee, L.A. Sunshine, Special K, and Spoonie demonstrated their mastery of the Furious Five's group dynamics, and added quicksilver-tongued, metaphor-drunk skills. The crew turned its gaze “to the south, the west, to the east, to the north,” brimming with the child's-eye self-importance that hip-hop music would need to jump out of the boroughs and go worldwide.

Record execs realized there were potentially many more millions of fans out there for the music. The number of rap crews exploded, living-room fantasies fueled by platinum dreams. For the next decade and a half, hip-hop music moved away from the parks and the community centers and the clubs and into the lab. Indie labels invested in researching and developing how to make hip-hop music,
specifically rap, fit the standards of the music industry, how to rationalize and exploit the new product—how to find, capture, package, and sell its essence like a bottle of lightning. Six-man crews would drop to two. Fifteen-minute party-rocking raps would become three-minute ready-for-radio singles. Hip-Hop was refined like sugar.

The tension between culture and commerce would become one of the main storylines of the hip-hop generation.

The other was the relationship between youth and authority. If rap presented an opportunity for hip-hop culture to be commodified, graffiti presented an opportunity for it to be demonized. The graffiti movement had been the effect of benign neglect, mass media, and youth rebellion. It would not be long before the most extreme demonstration of the generation's revolutionary new aesthetic provoked the most extreme backlash.

From the first surfacing of TAKI 183 in the
New York Times
in 1971, graffiti moved from being a neighborhood teenage curiosity to a municipal issue with national political implications. And that's where it would stay. In the summer of 1972, with his presidential campaign on the ropes, Mayor John Lindsay launched the first “War on Graffiti” with the exasperated cry: “For heaven's sake, New Yorkers, come to the aid of your great city—defend it, support and protect it!”
²
He called the graffiti writers “insecure cowards” and suggested they all had mental health problems. The mayor's anti-graffiti program called not only for restriction of markers and aerosol paints, increased security measures and use of chemicals, solvents and paints to deter graf, but the deployment of psychological measures.

To Lindsay, graffiti was the most infuriating crime. It had a “demoralizing visual impact,” and he declared, “It's a dirty shame that we must spend money for this purpose in a time of austerity.”
³
But the war would go on. Politicians had found a way to agree with their constituents that the city was going to hell, while doing little else to get it off that track. The War on Graffiti covered over municipal government's inability to deal with multiple real crises—of which bankruptcy was the most urgent. So-called “quality of life” campaigns were symbolic, and often expensive, appeasement to malaise-weary voters.

In 1976, as the city hurtled toward bankruptcy, it found $20 million to establish “the buff,” a chemical washing of graffitied trains, to add to the usual $25 million in annual expenditures to wage its war. The buff not only left the cars an aesthetically dull color, it was harmful; hundreds of workers became sick and one man died of long-term exposure.
⁴

The same year, the Transit Authority established a four-man Anti-Graffiti Squad, which quickly issued a misleading “Profile of a Common Offender”:

Sex
—Male

Race
—Black, Puerto Rican, other (in that order)

Age
—Variable, predominantly 13 to 16 years

Dress
—Carries package or paper bag, long coat in cold weather

Occupation
—Student (lower social economic background). . .
⁵

It is easy to scoff now at the profile's obvious inaccuracies, just as it is easy to dismiss the transit police efforts as largely bumbling and ineffective. But police also made thousands of arrests and stepped up intelligence of youths of color—monitoring their crews, confiscating writer's black books, interrogating graffiti perps and raiding writer's homes. These surveillance-and-sweep techniques generated their own kind of ideology. The profile became its own kind of sick truth, with bloody consequences.

In 1979, an astonishingly disingenuous
Public Interest
article by neoconservative Nathan Glazer provided justification—
theory
is all too strong a word—for increasingly hysterical policing and punishment efforts directed against youths of color. The central premise of the piece rested not on well-tested empirical data but, as Glazer himself admitted, raw fear of the Other. Musing on the graffiti problem, he wrote, “(W)hile I do not find myself consciously making the connection between the graffiti-makers and the criminals who occasionally rob, rape, assault, and murder passengers, the sense that all are a part of one world of uncontrollable predators seems inescapable.”
⁶

Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson would further develop this incoherent argument into what would come to be called “the broken windows” theory. If one broken window was allowed to go unfixed, the “theory” said, a neighborhood's violent plunge into Fort Apache would soon follow. Broken windows
theory paved the way for the brutal zero tolerance “quality of life” campaigns of surveillance, harassment and propaganda that a new generation of mayors perfected by the 1990s. Again, despite scant empirical evidence, the City Hall sound bite that graffiti was a gateway to violent crime necrotized into unimpeachable truth.

Glazer and Wilson had simply repackaged the same old there-goes-the-neighborhood racism that had driven the white flight of the ‘60s, albeit in a way that seemed prophetic. Two decades later, Malcolm Gladwell's influential book,
The Tipping Point,
would still be celebrating “broken windows” as a bleeding-edge idea, less proving the “theory” ‘s viability than showing the complete success these ideologues had in transforming urban policy. Glazer's and Wilson's articles, in fact, represented a different kind of tipping point: once named, the neocon reaction to graffiti would become one of the hinges on which the politics of abandonment would turn toward a politics of containment. Both these politics would profoundly shape the hip-hop generation.

In the media, racial profiling and the War on Graffiti converged. The subway epitomized New York's anarchic ruin, a city that had been given over to the rule of criminally undisciplined dark-skinned youths. In 1984, self-styled “subway vigilante” Bernhard Hugo Goetz shot four Black teenagers on a train at close range, paralyzing one, and became a national hero overnight. It was a climax that SKEME, a frustrated Black teenager with talent to burn, had foreseen a few years earlier, telling subway riders in a window-down burner: “All
you
see is . . . CRIME IN THE CITY.”

By the end of 1979, rap and graffiti were being thoroughly transformed by capital and authority. As Flash had said, it was time to survive and change or get left behind, the turning of another five-year cycle of style.

But then there were the pre-teens, the ones who once could not wait to grow up so they could have their own battles and block parties, rock their own styles, make their own names. The stylistic explosions of the mid-'70s were over, and time, money, and power seemed to be conspiring to steal their chance to shine. If these youth movements were to survive with their traditions intact, they needed nostalgic shorties who remembered how it used to be back in the day.

Two years after the Crotona Avenue jam, Crazy Legs was living in far uptown Manhattan on 207th Street, near the Ghost Yard. He and his cousin Lenny had battled two leaders of the original Rock Steady Crew from Echo Park, Jimmy Dee and Jimmy Lee, and lost. Still they had shown much heart and now they were members. But it wasn't like it was. The legends had drifted away from the dance and the crews dissipated. Even worse, he says, “There weren't too many crews out there when I moved into Manhattan. Very few people were doing the dance.” He was being cheated of his chance to prove himself. He was all of thirteen years old, and he ached for the past.

So Crazy Legs embarked on a mission. Like a character in one of the Times Square kung-fu flicks he loved, he traveled through the city to find and challenge every remaining b-boy. “I went and met this guy named Lil' Man, who eventually became Lil' Crazy Legs. I met Take One, this kid named Quiquito, we used to call him Little Kicks, and I battled them. When I would come across b-boys, I would start hanging out with them and one person would tell me, ‘Yo, I know a b-boy from this area down here.' He might be fifty blocks away or whatever. I'd be like, ‘Come on let's go there.' My little kung-fu flick mission continued. And eventually I recruited all of them,” he says.

Down in the Upper West Side, Wayne “Frosty Freeze” Frost was part of a group formed by Zulu Kings called the Rock City Rockers. Jeffrey “DOZE” Green and Ken “Swift” Gabbert had a crew called the Young City Boys. There were others, too, like Buck 4 and Kuriaki. Crazy Legs met and battled them all. Then Jimmy Dee gave him the Rock Steady Crew name. He says, “Jimmy Dee had seen that I had so many people down and I kept it going and a lot of the other b-boys weren't still as active. It was a humble stance he took. He reduced his own rank and gave me everything and never got in my way of doing things, but was still there to give me guidance at being a crew leader.” The new Rock Steady Crew became a magnet for isolated Bronx-styling youths across the city, a second-generation supergroup, the last b-boys standing.

DOZE says, “Every Saturday, me, Legs, Frosty and Kenny spent all day in the movies in Times Square. Three dollars for ten movies, some crazy shit! Just watch Shaw Brothers movies and just bug out. And so we started incorporating those moves into the dance. That's how we started getting our own style.” When they practiced their moves in the park at 84th and Amsterdam, they may have made
an odd sight, a lost school of b-boy monks. They had inherited the dance, and they took that legacy seriously.

DOZE had first seen the dance in the North Bronx in the early ‘70s, in the Edenwald Projects where the outlaws danced with radios on their shoulders. He and Ken honed in on the gangsters' up-rock and made that the core of their style. “The dance is actually very long. It's like a fifteen-minute dance. It has a lot of steps. It goes from a format of standing up and being still and kinda like out doing with the hand gestures, then it goes to a strut, like a skip, then to a strut, then a backwards step and then it goes into a forward step, and then it's like a hesitate, and then you drop. We took that part, the ending. We saw that, and said, ‘That's the shit.' The thrust forward and drop—that's like the most powerful part of the dance, that's like the breakdown. Me and Kenny learned from the last folks, we learned a fraction of it, but what we did with that dance is took it to a whole ‘nother level.”

Frosty Freeze came up with new freezes, like the Suicide—where he did a flip and landed on his back. Crazy Legs and Ken Swift did the same for spins, injecting into the dance stunning new body mechanics, physics, and speed. Soon Rock Steady members had gone beyond the backspin and headspin into windmills and handspins. Crazy Legs says, “All these moves that we came about doing were by accident. I didn't set out to evolve the backspin. I was practicing a chair freeze and I over-rotated and I spun fast. And then I over-rotated again on another time, and went into a continuous backspin and kept on doing it.”

Rock Steady Crew began rolling into skating rinks and parks and dances to shock teens with their style. Crews that tried to battle them found them unstoppable. DOZE says, “Frosty and I were like the goofs of the crew, we used to just mimic people and act like a clown and do like Drunken Monkey style, like fall all over the place and come out—Boom! It was like, ‘Yo send DOZE in, clown him!' I would clown him. ‘Alright now send in Buck and Kuri.' They were the secret weapons, boom baaaat! It was like
5 Deadly Venoms
.”

They won audiences over, and their ranks swelled. They expanded their membership to include kids interested in any of the old Bronx arts. “SHY 147 was down with us. DONDI was down with us. We had people that were roller-skaters down with Rock Steady. We had girls, people that were Webo dancers. We had people that was just fly girls, people that just supported and hung out
with us. We had a multifaceted crew,” says Crazy Legs. “Rock Steady back then was at least five hundred deep.”

Then one by one, members headed off to form their own crews. The Rock Steady members who remained derisively called them “expansion teams.” But some of them, like the New York City Breakers and the Dynamic Rockers, would become Rock Steady's fiercest competitors.

By then Rock Steady had already done its job. They didn't know it then, but their vision of the Bronx old-school would indelibly shape the hip-hop generation. They had revived the dance, canonized old moves and invented bold new ones. Throbbing with uptempo post-
búgalu
Afro-Latin rhythms and good vibes, songs like Booker T & The MG's “Melting Pot,” Herman Kelley and Life's “Let's Dance to the Drummer's Beat,” and Lonnie Liston Smith's “Expansions” captured their optimism. One of their theme-songs said it all: “It's Just Begun.”