Can't Stop Won't Stop (32 page)

The trial began almost two years after Stewart's death and riveted New York City. Prosecutors mustered dozens of witnesses before the all-white jury—students from a nearby dorm who had witnessed the beating at Union Square,
nurses and doctors from Bellevue, even Dr. Gross. On the stand, Gross agreed that the injuries contradicted the transit cops' testimony that Stewart had not been beaten. But he now had no official opinion on what had caused Stewart's death.

After three months of testimony, the defense rested without calling a single witness. “You quit while you're ahead,” a defense attorney told the press. “As far as we're concerned, there is reasonable doubt in this case.”
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His hunch was solid. On November 24, 1985, the six officers were acquitted of all charges.

“What we have witnessed has been a farce,” Jones said. “And all the players happened to be white. The six defendants, the six defense lawyers, the two prosecutors, the twelve jurors, the judge, and even every court officer in the well of the courtroom was white. The only Black person there was the victim, and he was unable to testify.”
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The Stewart case—in which truth and justice both proved elusive—pointed toward the division to come.

Less than three months after Michael Stewart wrote his fatal tag, the renowned Sidney Janis Gallery opened its “Post-Graffiti” show. Janis had vaulted Pop Art into notoriety two decades before. Now, as the art market grew comfortable in its long boom, it was placing a big bet on graffiti. Could graffiti be rescued from the subway? The curator, Dolores Neumann, an idealistic art-lover who had married into one of the world's most famous art-collecting families, thought that it could.

For months, Neumann had opened her home to the writers and closely advised them on how to make their work presentable to the gallery crowd. In the introduction to the catalogue, she wrote: “In many ways the Post-Graffiti artist depicts tragedy and joy at the very source. Springing from a youthful conscience, its optimism addresses itself to a hope for future mankind.”
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Voice
critic and subway art advocate Richard Goldstein wasn't sure this I-believe-that-children-are-the-future thing was going to work. But he did his part, writing, “The work is beginning to live up to its hype.”
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That work included thirty-six entries from art-gallery favorites Jean-Michel Basquiat, Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring, as well as subway painters Lee
Quiñones, FUTURA, CRASH, DAZE, BEAR, KOOR, TOXIC, RAMMELLZEE and A-ONE. Marc Brasz, who said he was influenced by the “South Bronx Graffiti tradition” which expressed “a cartoonization of everyday life,” did an acrylic of a Latino waiting for a subway train, wincing as if there were a fly on his nose. LADY PINK went aerosol O'Keefe with a full-bloomed rose. Her artist statement read, “My paintings are usually about the dying culture of the underground teenage art movement.”
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On the chic stretch of West 57th Street, fur-coated and business-suited patrons rubbed elbows with the artists they referred to as “the kids.” LADY PINK and CRASH smiled and shook hands with the patrons. Upper Manhattanites and lowdown taggers stood shoulder to shoulder, waiting for something to happen. The scheduled b-boying and rapping demonstration got started late because the kids were quarrelling, so old Sidney himself got up to break the ice, doing the fox trot to a warm round of applause.
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When the reviews came in during the following weeks, some might have wondered what drugs were in the punch bowl.
New York Times
critic Grace Glueck declared graffiti “a scourge,” and the “Post-Graffiti” show a condescending gesture at best. “Apart from its illegality, the very idea of enshrining graffiti—an art of the streets impulsive and spontaneous by nature—in the traditional, time-honored medium of canvas, is ridiculous,” she wrote. “By and large, their products are as much an eyesore on canvas as they are on the trains.”
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The Janis Gallery show was the beginning of the end of the graffiti writers one-sided affair with the rich and famous. Sidney Janis himself would later dis-avow the writers, saying, “They were young, unreliable, and always broke no matter how much money they made.”
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Elizabeth Hess, who had been to the Fashion Moda's “Graffiti Art For Success” show at the beginning and was there at the end, summed up the era:

It appeared at graffiti's high tide, that the art world was integrated for the first time. . . . But this was illusory. In retrospect, many artists think that they were used. “We provided the atmosphere,” says Futura, “and that's it.”
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The romance was over. The locks were changed.

Several years later, Hess found Quiñones repairing wheelchairs and FUTURA delivering messages by bike. Done with the subways, sustained only by the occasional patronage of European collectors and American universities, art for them had become a more solitary process than it had ever been. Meanwhile, their friends Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring had become stars.

Crown-happy Basquiat seemed to be on a mission to king himself in the art-world. Inside, he spiraled.

On canvas, he displayed a Bambaataa-sized appetite for signifiers, harnessing and redeploying them in Twombly-meets-PINK assaults of texture, repetition and color, and negating them like Lee “Scratch” Perry in the last days of the Black Ark.
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He constantly toyed with names and classifications, exploring how science defined and ranked difference, how capital affixed weight and value. But his life was a high-wire act. As the biggest Black visual artist of the twentieth century, he spent his career in the minefield between white and Black expectations.

The white art world treated him as an exotic, a cipher onto whom they could project their fantasies. Basquiat had fun with the idea—posing alongside the pale aging Warhol as a hungry young boxer, mocking his patrons' God complex with paintings like the “Undiscovered Genius of the Mississippi Delta” series. Even his dark, laughing figures seemed to be having a grand time with the white art-world's perennial “return of representation” crisis.

Yet Basquiat also felt alienated from “Tartown,” his own name—part nostalgic, part dismissive—for the African-American, Haitian and Puerto Rican Brooklyn neighborhoods of his childhood. Like FAB 5 FREDDY, he had been liberated by the graffiti movement and hip-hop culture, and looked to the careers of the be-bop pioneers—Max Roach, Charlie Parker, Miles Davis—as metaphor and roadmap.

Basquiat's only attempt at a record—called “Beat Bop,” featuring rappers RAMMELLZEE and K-Rob, with music by Al Diaz, released on his Tartown label—was, in the words of music critic Jeff Mao, “the grand-daddy opus of hiphop experimentalism.” Indeed, these ten minutes of funk brought the aesthetic tensions of graffiti into rap: representation versus abstraction, roots-rocking versus avant-vanguardism. The same dialectics had played out between “The Message”
and “Planet Rock,” and would continue with Chuck D and Rakim, Marley Marl and the Bomb Squad, NWA and De La Soul, Mary J. Blige and Erykah Badu, and in Outkast, Black Star and Quannum.

The tensions were real. FAB 5 FREDDY had brought Basquiat, RAMMELLZEE and K-Rob together in an “interrogation,” RAMMELLZEE shared many writers' opinions that because Basquiat had never hit a train, he was a fake. Mao writes:

During the course of the ‘interrogation,' a battle of one-upsmanship developed between Rammel and Jean-Michel that eventually extended from challenges within one discipline of hip hop culture, graffiti, to another—rhyming. Initially, “Beat Bop” was to be Basquiat's attempt to prove that he could conquer the art of emceeing. But after he submitted his lyrics to Rammel and his Bronx cohort K-Rob at the recording session, Rammel discarded them brusquely . . . Basquiat was never allowed to rhyme on the record. Rammellzee doesn't credit Basquiat with actually producing the song either—only putting up the money to finish it.
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The fraught exchange would lead to one of Basquiat's most pointed works, “Hollywood Africans,” painted during a wild trip they later took to Los Angeles, name-checking “Zee” and graf writer TOXIC near the center of the canvas. While he was between art dealers, Basquiat exhibited at Patti Astor's Fun Gallery and kept RAMMELLZEE and other train writers in his party circle. But Basquiat dumped them as he moved closer to Warhol and the powerful art dealers Bruno Bischofberger and Mary Boone. RAMMELLZEE would later say, “Jean-Michel is the one they told, ‘You must draw it this way and call it Black man folk art,' when it was really white man folk art that he was doing.”
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Yet even as Basquiat's career soared, his demons would not rest. Suzanne Mallouk, one of Basquiat's lovers, noted that while on cocaine binges Basquiat became paranoid. “He thought the CIA was going to kill him because he was a famous Black man,” she says.
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When Michael Stewart was killed, he was inconsolable, repeating to Mallouk over and over, “It could have been me, it could have been me.”
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His heroin addiction could no longer cynically be dismissed as an homage to Bird and Diz; it was serious.

Haring grew up in Kutztown, Pennsylvania, the opposite of Tartown, and had come to New York to seek his artistic destiny. He made his reputation as a chalk artist in the subways, with an idiosyncratic visual vocabulary—the barking dog, the glowing pyramid, the radiant child rising from the two-dimensional wasteland of the Radiant City. He surged on the graffiti wave into art-stardom. Soon he opened the Pop Shop to mass-market his art-as-product, and branded his radiant children across consumer goods, billboards, theaters, nightclubs, public and corporate sponsored murals, and high fashion and design.

At the same time, Haring maintained a highly visible profile as an activist. In an anguished 1985 painting entitled “Michael Stewart—USA For Africa,” he pictured Stewart's death as a symbol of racial violence that linked New York City with Johannesburg, literally drowning the world in blood. The sick green hand of big money loomed behind, ready to squeeze the corpse dry once the killing was done.

When Basquiat suffered a fatal heroin overdose in 1988 and Haring succumbed to AIDS complications in 1990, these two artists—for whom innocence and encounter, desire and celebrity, cartoon and property, childhood and commodity had been obsessive themes—vaulted into lasting art-world respectability. Shortly after their deaths, the values of their paintings escalated into the hundreds of thousands of dollars.
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Haring's 1988 tribute to Basquiat seemed prophetic: one black crown alone sits precariously atop a pyramid-shaped heap of tossed and overturned crowns, a graveyard of kings.

By then something had changed. On a cold December day in 1985 in a crowded subway car, Bernhard Goetz shot four Black boys—two in the back—after one had asked him for five dollars. Then he disappeared into the downtown station, a face in the crowd. When he emerged two weeks later he was welcomed as a hero, the silent majority's avenger. Thousands of dollars poured in for his bail and defense. Without a trace of irony and perhaps more than a little delight, Harvard criminologist James Q. Wilson said, “In New York City there are no liberals anymore on the crime and the law-and-order issues. All the liberals have been mugged.”

To a hip-hop head, recent history looked a lot different. Neglect had become seduction had turned to fear. Rescuing graffiti artists from the subway
was the folly of rich liberals, an act of temporary insanity. But when the subway was rescued from graffiti, it was celebrated as an all-American victory.

On May 12, 1989, the MTA declared that it had achieved the ultimate buff, the final solution—a graffiti-free subway system. 6,200 clean cars were a powerful symbol. “When you're sitting in a graffiti-covered car, you don't feel safe. There was a sense that the system was out of control,” said David L. Gunn, the Transit Authority president echoing the logic of Nathan Glazer and Bernhard Goetz.
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Pundits greeted the MTA announcement as if it were a Martin Luther King Jr.–sized achievement. “Free at last!” read one editorial headline.
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Lee Quiñones had a different opinion. “I think if you buff history,” he said, “you get violence.”
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After
Beat Street
, every kid across the country wanted to breakdance and every city council and shopping mall official wanted to ban it. But the only thing that put a stop to the dance was its marketing overkill. Within a year, the Bronx Rock had gone the way of Pet Rocks.

Rap continued to explode, but its center had forever shifted away from up-town. By 1984, the biggest rap crew was a trio from Queens. When Run DMC were getting started, they had to take long trips to perform in the Bronx and Manhattan. Managed by an energetic ex-Seven Immortals gangbanger named Russell Simmons, they dressed like Busy Bee and rapped like the Furious Five. But as they became more confident, their look and sound became a reaction to the old school. Using booming drum machines, their echoing raps contrasted sharply with the house-band disco rhythms that had fueled most of the early records and the crisp electro polyrhythms that replaced it. Their plaid suits gave way to a black-on-black presentation. Everything about them was stripped down, as if all the color of the old school was reduced back to its basic elements.

Run DMC had signed to a single deal with Profile Records for two thousand dollars. That single, “It's Like That”/“Sucker MCs,” sold 250,000 copies. The subsequent albums established the crew as rap's hardest, and through the tag-team genius of Simmons and a Jewish NYU student from Long Island named
Rick Rubin, they would become the most successful. Simmons and Rubin went on to start their own label, Def Jam. The pair had their eye on the big crossover, and in a short period of time, they signed a million-dollar deal with Columbia, the first time a rap indie had gone major. They signed a cocky teen idol from Queens named LL Cool J and a trio of privileged young white ex-punkers who embraced the downtown hip-hop clubs as religion and called themselves the Beastie Boys.