Hip Hop Files

ZEB.ROC.SKI

is a collection of some of the earliest images of Hip Hop Culture as it emerged in the 80s on the streets of New York City.

MARTHA COOPER has the reputation of being

“Like a New York City subway ride back to the early 1980s. This is Hip Hop culture

the first and foremost photographer of emerging

at its all time best. A monumental photographic achievement for the world.

Hip Hop culture in New York City.

It doesn't get any better than this!” FAB 5 FREDDY

Hip Hop Files—Photographs 1979-1984 makes a significant part of her extensive and unique

“Marty Cooper was the first Hip Hop photographer and she remains the best.”

archive accessible for the first time.

STEVEN HAGER, author of Hip Hop: The Illustrated History of Break Dancing, Rap Music, and Graffiti

The photos include Hip Hop legends

“Forget the limos and the bling-bling and take a ride back to the real deal.

DONDI, LEE, FAB 5 FREDDY, BLADE, SEEN,

This book is destined to become the Bible for the Hip Hop Nation—don't miss the

the ROCK STEADY CREW, DEZ aka DJ KAY

train!” PATTI ASTOR, founder FUN Gallery

SLAY, GRANDMASTER CAZ, DURO, LADY PINK, RUN DMC, RAMMELLZEE, and FUTURA 2000.

From 1999 to 2003, Akim Walta aka ZEB.ROC.SKI,

“Martha has done it again. Her latest book is way beyond Hip Hop. It captures New York, as well as creation, desperation, and exhilaration.

Hot buttered popcorn!” BOBBITO, author of Where'd You Get Those?, columnist for Vibe Magazine

well-known German Hip Hop head and founder of

“Gripping, broadly documented cultural record of Hip Hop's audacious,

MZEE Records, searched out the subjects in the

street-smart, and hyper-creative early years. Cooper’s photographs brim over with

photos and conducted numerous interviews,

energy, passion, and a raw stylishness. Hip Hop Files is a richly celebratory

obtaining insightful quotes and statements by over

tribute.”

70 Hip Hop icons to accompany the shots.

GEORGE PITTS, director of photography of Vibe Magazine

The book includes a thoughtful introduction by ZEPHYR as well as essays by CHARLIE AHEARN, PATTI ASTOR,

“Young'uns who think that Hip Hop is what they see on MTV need to pick up Martha Cooper's Hip Hop Files today. Her beautifully-composed photos put you right in the thick of the action, New York City-stylee, 1979–1984.” BILL ADLER,

and POPMASTER FABEL,

author of Tougher than Leather: the Rise of Run-DMC, owner of Eyejammie Fine Arts Gallery

participants in the early Hip Hop scene.

“This book is the most definitive schematic look into the origins of a global cultural voice.” LEE “The best of New York street art of the past twenty-five years has been kept alive

N TO W N AF FI TI M AR ED T IA ST YL E GR

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DO W

DJ s

BO YS

B-

W

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by the brilliant photographs of Martha Cooper.” JEFFREY DEITCH, Deitch Projects

www.fromheretofame.com

1

BLACKBOOK SESSION

0017

DAZE: On the previous page, you see the famous shot of DONDI’s bedroom—LOVIN 2, SLAVE, MR. JAY, and GLI 167 hanging out. Basically, after I met DONDI and started to go out to Brooklyn, this is all we used to do—smoke cheeba in his bedroom, do outlines, look at photos, listen to music, and just kind of chill before we would walk over to the 2 yard. On any given day, it could be these guys or it could be me or DURO, KIST, KID 56, KEL, MARE, or any of the CIA crew. I went with DONDI to the 2 yard on maybe six or seven occasions. Any time was good for him—middle of the day, nighttime, whenever.

He just went there. It was like his backyard.

DURO: Before we went to the yard, we planned everything out to the T because the yard was for painting. We planned everything from the outline to the colors we wanted to use to what line is the safest to the time of day or night to hit and so on.

PUGIZM: Blackbooks are your layer ground.

That’s your blueprint. Some writers would rip the pages out and copy the piece right onto a train.

1

MARTHA COOPER: What really drew me in

DURO: To me, the colors are as important as

was seeing DONDI and his friends hanging out for hours drawing pieces, making lists of the colors they needed, getting the paint, going to the yards, and painting the piece on the train.

I thought this was totally amazing because I had assumed that it was just random. Suddenly, it was like a foreign language becoming clear to me. Then I was completely hooked.

the style of the letters. Writers always talk about style, but style to me is more than just letters.

It’s about the arrows, colors, designs, the flow of the letters, the 3-D, and shadow. It’s like if you’re a dancer and you have a broken leg, you‘re not able to dance good. To battle, if you want to come out the winner, you got to burn the line.

BLACKBOOK SESSION / BROOKLYN / JANUARY / 1980

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DURO: Damn! This might be the only photo in history that shows writers sleeping in the yard.

How the hell could these guys sleep there?

KIST and I had been up for three days. We had bombed the A yard, the J yard, and this was the second time in three days that we had been in the 2 yard. This shot was taken shortly after we had smoked our last joint and eaten up all of our munchies.

I think we left for the yard at 11 p.m. and we did not get out of there till 8 o’clock in the morning.

After the whole car was done, it was all about admiring the car, opening all the doors, looking at all the corners and all the windows to see if there were any drips or if there were any blends that needed to be done again. We walked up and down on top of the train. We were there for hours and we just admired it.

MARTHA COOPER: I went to the yards five times with writers and that was enough. I got to see what I wanted to see. It was fascinating to witness how pieces were painted because I didn’t have a good idea until I went. It was impressive to see the relationship between the train and the person when the person was standing next to it, to see how huge the surface was.

It was amazing that the writers could paint the whole train in one night and lay out the pieces so perfectly. They had a complete sense of where the letters would fall in relation to the windows and doors. They couldn’t ever step away to see their work because the trains were parked so close to each other. They just had to know how it would work in their head. That was very instructive for me.

DURO: We had gotten an hour or two of rest. By then, DONDI had finished the whole car. He had paint left over and asked me if I wanted to do a piece. I said, “No, thanks,” because all I wanted to do was to get home. I hadn’t been home in three days and I wanted to get it over with and face my mom. Finally, however, KIST and I ended up doing some panel pieces. When I was painting, everything around me was just blocked out of my mind. I mean, by the look of this shot, anybody could have just walked up to us and grabbed one of us. I was so into my piece that the rest of the world was just going by me and I didn’t stop to see what was going on. That’s how peaceful Martha made it seem.

025 0025

A L L

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MARTHA COOPER: I credit DONDI with getting me really interested in graffiti. He defined the language for me and explained all the different nuances of crews, style, etc. That really got me hooked. DONDI told me which lines to go to and which pieces were running on them. I began to spend whole days standing in vacant lots just waiting for graffiti cars to pass by. I needed more time to do it, so I actually left my comfortable and well-paying job on the staff of the New York Post in order to pursue this.

TRACY 168: Back when you could still paint the trains, the subway cars were moving canvases.

Millions and millions of people were looking at canvases that were brought to them instead of them having to go somewhere. People don’t have time to go to no museum. We were actually more famous than Van Gogh and them sons of bitches! We ran shit! For the first time, it was art for the people by the people. We ran this thing!

LEE: The CRIME DON’T PAY whole car was part of a series of cars that were produced during the intensive painting campaign in the very late-’70s on IRT 5 trains.

MARTHA COOPER: The first week I went out, I was very lucky. I caught two of my best pieces.

One was that gorgeous BLADE piece with the swinging letters. The other was the LEE piece with the brick background and the epitaph to graffiti. Both were in perfect condition. Those were really two of the best pieces I ever saw in my life. That week, I also took this picture of the CRIME DON’T PAY piece between two trains, the one that was on the STYLE WARS video cover. All of those trains were running at the same time.

After that, I don’t think I ever got so many wonderful pieces in such a short time.

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ART vs. TRANSIT

029 0029

“My name rocking through the sky! I would actually dream of letters floating in the sky. My girlfriend Dolores would keep my sketch paper on the dining room table so when I woke up from a dream in the middle of the night, I would run to the other room and actually sketch my dream.” BLADE

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MARTHA COOPER: I was living in Washing-

WICKED GARY: I graduated junior high school

ton Heights and I saw that there were still early tags around the neighborhood so I decided to record them. At that time, and even today, people always tried to make a distinction between large graffiti pieces, which are art, and tags, which are closer to vandalism. I saw the tagging as a kind of calligraphy. I began to see that there were certain conventions in tagging and that you couldn’t separate the tags from the pieces. They were part of the same continuum.

The tags were a kind of logo and they were as carefully thought out as any logo designed by a professional designer for a corporation. The writers designed their own tags and repeated them over and over so you could easily recognize a particular name from a distance. I began to hunt for early tags, especially ones with some color, 3-D effect, or unusual style. I was very interested in all the different little symbols—the crowns, the smoking joints, the stars, the halos, and the street numbers.

in 1969. We formed the EX VANDALS in high school. We were all writers—it was something everyone did. One day DINO (NOD), the original leader of the EX VANDALS said, “Can you imagine all of us writing the same name instead of writing our individual names?” We were like, “That’s awesome! If we all write the same name, this place will be completely inundated!” We were always told to go and be productive members of society, but we didn’t have a lot of options so we created an identity through our alter-egos and we went out and asserted that identity. We started getting recognition for what we did. We didn’t have jobs, we didn’t have money to do what we wanted to do. The only thing we had was an attitude that we needed to be something and we created that something with graf. We just took it and ran with it and it doesn’t seem like graf has stopped running yet. We made an assertive aggressive effort to hit the city. The way we did what we did was the reason the city took notice and then the rest of the world took notice.

Millions of dollars were spent to get rid of the so-called plague, but it’s still alive.

GETTING UP

045 0045

“I must say, I don’t remember a time when I didn’t get high to go bombing!” DURO

MIN: By the time they finished the car, the work bums came out. Sometimes on Sunday mornings, they would come out to clean the back of the yard. Now there were about 15 work bums, big old black guys, and SHY picks up a big work bum stick and he’s yelling at them, “Yo, bro!

Don’t come any closer! We’re finishing this car!

All we’re doing is outlining the character and

then we’re leaving!” And they’re looking at SHY like he’s a maniac and they were like, “OK, we don’t want no problems with you guys.” I guess they realized SHY was crazy and must have thought, “Why risk stopping this guy from painting the train and he’s gonna hit three or four of us in the head with the work bum stick and split our heads open? We’re not getting paid for that.”

So they left and they didn’t even call the cops on us. But then DURO or SHY left a can with a little bit of green spray paint by the whole car and the work bums scribbled all over the piece before it pulled out because they were mad at us after we were like, “Yo, go get the whole police! We’re finishing this piece, no matter what!”

MIN: Martha took some really good pictures that night. The picture of DURO is great. Look at how colorful that is. That’s when DURO starts the fill in.

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“We’re not fighting—we’re just dancing!” HIGH TIMES CREW MARTHA COOPER: The night of January 21, 1980, I was on the staff of the New York Post and the photo editor sent me up to Washington Heights because they heard on the police radio that there was a riot. When I got there, about 25 little boys, all very young, were sitting inside the police station in the subway. The police had confiscated weapons, markers, and other stuff. It turned out there wasn’t really a riot so the cops let them go. They said, “Why don’t you explain to the lady what you were doing?”

One kid described a kind of dance where they spun on their backs and their heads and said that they battled each other for their T-shirts.

After the cops released the kids, I asked for a demonstration and they showed me different moves right outside the police station. I thought this was a great story, so I called the Post editors and said, “They weren’t having a riot, they were having a dance contest.” But the Post didn’t like the idea. No riot, no story.

MARTHA COOPER: When I first arrived at the police station, the kids who had been arrested were sitting in rows on benches looking downcast. Some of them were quite young—maybe 10 or 11-years-old. The scene would have made a wonderful photo but, because they were minors, the cops wouldn’t let me take pictures. Since I was on assignment for the New York Post, and it was my job to get the photo no matter what, I managed to squeeze off this frame without looking through the viewfinder.

“Susan Welchman was no longer the Post editor when I photographed the breakers.

If she had been, I’m sure the photos would have made the paper.” MARTHA COOPER

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FIRST CONTACT WITH BREAKING / MANHATTAN / JANUARY 21 / 1980

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ROCK STEADY CREW

LADY PINK: CRASH did the first show at Fashion Moda and he asked me to be part of it. They wanted me in there because I was a female, to make it a little more diverse. I was very excited because it was the first time I painted graffiti on canvas. LEE encouraged and guided me and he got me to take it seriously. First at the Fashion Moda then at the museums, we were there as a collective group.

FUTURA: After Fashion Moda and the New Museum in Manhattan, a place in Queens, P.S.1, did a big retrospective called “New York / New Wave”. This was in February 1981. That brought regular artists and graffiti writers together in a big show. They featured probably 200 artists.

After that, many galleries began opening in the East Village. That’s when we had the art gallery scene.

FAB 5 FREDDY: In April 1981, “Beyond Words” took place, a big exhibit at the Mudd Club that FUTURA and I had curated. We had a lot of graffiti artists and people like Jean-Michel Basquiat in this show. I also had a lot of music to perform.

I had the COLD CRUSH BROTHERS, BAMBAATAA, and THE FANTASTIC ROMANTIC FREAKS. They all came down.

FUTURA: The SOUL ARTISTS ran till ’81 because then it all kind of exploded. When articles like the Village Voice Christmas issue appeared, the one with the subway cars on the cover, it started the awareness of the movement coming aboveground. Before that, we did not get a lot of exposure in terms of press and if something did appear, it was negative.

FREEDOM: With the shows came ever-expansive media coverage. It was not long before Mel Neulander and Joyce Tobin tracked down CRASH and signed him to a contract as they developed their gallery downtown. Mel was supposed to take on all commercial possibilities including everything from T-shirts to coffee mugs. Joyce encouraged the fine art aspect and was responsible for a number of shows. GPI (Graphiti Productions Inc.) as it was quickly known, boasted a stable that included CRASH, DAZE, LADY PINK, CAINE 1, TRACY 168, IZ, ERNI, MITCH 77, WASP 1, CEY, NOC 167, me, and others.

5

FROM TRAINS TO CANVAS

Flyer for the “Beyond Words” show.

DAZE: There was the whole Graffiti Above Ground gallery on West 14th Street that happened, then the Fun Gallery and 51X gallery. It seemed that every month, every week, there was a new series of events.

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ROCK STEADY CREW vs. DYNAMIC ROCKERS up-rock battle in the roller rink United Skates of America.

KEN SWIFT

6

HENRY CHALFANT: The money-raising

FROSTY FREEZE: This was the first shoot for

part was a very difficult thing and took a long time. The truth is that it changed the film. In the beginning, the film was going to be much more about breaking and it probably would have been a story about ROCK STEADY but, because it took so long to raise money, ROCK STEADY had moved on.

STYLE WARS. We met in the upper part of Manhattan where CRAZY LEGS was from. The shoot went from 6 till 11 in the morning. We were havin’ fun, buggin’ out, doin’ our thing. That’s when we were preparing to battle DYNAMIC ROCKERS out in Queens.

STYLE WARS –FIRST SHOOT / JUNE / 1981

“Who won the rocking contest?”

FROSTY FREEZE: After we went to eat, Henry drove us to the USA roller rink and we shot for another five, six hours. The club stayed open from the time we got there till about 11 p.m. or so. It was a midnight shooting session and that gave the place major exposure. People came out to their skating rink and then they started doing the Hip Hop jam. We battled DYNAMIC ROCKERS on their own turf.

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DOZE: I don’t remember much of the STYLE WARS battle. I was pretty zooted. We went out to Queens with Henry, Martha, and Tony Silver.

Yeah, it was a crazy battle. They were biting our moves and getting the crowd on their side.

It turned into a freefall at the end. Everybody jumped in, like this guy with a fucking dashiki.

I thought he was from the ballet school. That’s when it turned fairly flying. This guy was doing

STYLE WARS BATTLE / QUEENS / JUNE / 1981

ballet in the middle of the circle. He got crazy.

Girls got in, little babies. Moms and grandmas started pop-locking. At the end, it got a little bit hectic when we had to get out of there. We all went to the subway; the whole park went. Those were 30-40 people because we needed backup.

You never know. You had to roll deep with your crew.

173 00173

PATTI ASTOR: Filmed entirely on location in the South Bronx, WILD STYLE is a time capsule of the true origins of the old school and the amazing breakout of the Hip Hop culture. The year 1982 was a unique time in New York City and director Charlie Ahearn was there to document it. A creative explosion was taking place both in the uptown Hip Hop scene and the lively downtown art scene.

CHARLIE AHEARN: In the late-’70s, I got interested in making underground ghetto movies. In 1978, I made a kung fu movie called The Deadly Art of Survival, which was filmed on the Lower East Side where LEE was living and where his murals were. I was really impressed by LEE as an artist and I would ask all the kids, “Who made these murals?” Everybody was like, “LEE! You don’t know LEE?” He was super-famous among the little kids and he had a legendary reputation as a subway graffiti painter, but he was very elusive as a character. He would come around when we were shooting this kung fu scene and I’d say, “I would like to work with you. Why don’t you come in and be part of the movie?” and he’d say, “Yeah, OK.” So I’d ask him, “Well, how can I get in touch with you?” Then he’d answer, “I’ll be around,” and he’d disappear. Later on, I used to take my kung fu movie up to the Bronx, like to Fashion Moda in 1979. I would take it to housing projects and show it in the community center. In June of 1980, I was showing it in the “Times Square Show” and FAB 5 FREDDY came to one of those screenings. He told me that he had been trying to find me and that he wanted to work with me on a film.

FAB 5 FREDDY: At that time, this rapping, breaking, and graffiti scene was not really connected as one thing. My idea was that this whole thing was one culture and that it should be shown as that. I felt that making a film about it would be a great way to show everybody that this was one thing. The “Times Square Show” including Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat was a big art show. Diego Cortez, who was a curator on the scene and who had invited me to that show, introduced me to Charlie Ahearn.

I explained my idea of making a film about this culture and he liked it.

6

CHARLIE AHEARN: We talked about LEE and I said I’d really like to work with him. FAB 5 FREDDY said he was a friend of LEE’s and that he could bring him to meet me the following day.

If I would pay for the spray cans, they would do a mural. The next day FRED showed up with LEE and they painted this mural on the side of the “Times Square Show”. I said, “Let’s make this movie together!” From that point on, I would go up to the Bronx with FAB 5 FREDDY. We’d go out to jams and we got to meet all the people that were involved in Hip Hop. LADY PINK: Charlie Ahearn was in a club and he had seen the romance between LEE and me.

There was so much love going on and he had seen that and wanted to write a story about it—a movie that blossomed in his head. The story is based on LEE’s character. It was pretty much written about the things that Charlie Ahearn saw around him.

CHARLIE AHEARN: When I was preparing WILD STYLE, I wanted to make something that would be like a pop movie, not a documentary.

I wanted to document things, but I also wanted to make a movie that would be shown at movie theaters. So this conflict between the two styles created the kind of movie it is. It is not really a commercial movie and it is not really a documentary. My main ambition was that I wanted to see it on 42nd Street where the kids from all the boroughs went to see kung fu movies! WILD STYLE cost about $200,000 and I got money from the German television station, ZDF, and from UK television channel 4. That helped pay for the actual shooting of the film. The rest of the money I sort of borrowed from my family and it took a long time to pay it back.

FAB 5 FREDDY: Charlie put together a whole package of stuff. We had the music, the art, and outline of the story. He had heard that German TV channel ZDF had a guy who might be interested.

I was going to Italy to do a show of paintings and he asked me to fly over to Germany to meet this person. I went over and met him and he loved it.

That was enough to show some people we were

WILD STYLE / NEW YORK / 1981-1983

KAZ KAZUI: We wanted to bring WILD STYLE to Japan so we started talking to Charlie and he liked the idea. To distribute the movie, we needed some promotion. We asked Charlie and FAB 5 FREDDY about the ROCK STEADY CREW, breaking, subway graffiti, and rap music and they said, “OK, we’ll arrange that.” I found a sponsor from Japan so we brought these kids from the South Bronx to Japan. There was a problem because they had never left New York before and none of them had a passport. So we had to arrange all that for this tour throughout Tokyo, Kyoto, and Osaka.

serious about this. Then, channel 4 in London was the same kind of story. A new station was coming up and they gave us some money. Those were the seed moneys that got us going. What they gave us the money for was their right to show the film on TV in those countries. So the film actually aired on TV in Germany and in London before it was released here in the States. It was the beginning of the culture, as represented by the movie, spreading out.

FRAN KAZUI: Let me add something: They did not have passports, but they also did not have birth certificates. It did not occur to them. Therefore, Kaz went to all the hospitals where they were born and he got the birth certificates so that he could then go down and get them passports. This was really a labor of love. It came from the heart.

CHARLIE AHEARN: The preparation of the movie started in June 1980. In September of 1981, the shooting began and took about six weeks.

The cutting of the film was a total disaster. We had no idea how to make a film out of the footage we shot. We worked on it for a year and it seemed like a catastrophe, but when we finished it, I thought, “This is gonna play on 42nd Street!”

It was a real struggle and it took me over a year before I was able to get any distribution for the film. In the beginning the movie was very slow at getting attention.

Then it played on 47th Street in Times Square and it became a huge hit there. It played for five weeks and it broke all records. When it played, the theater was mobbed. It was sold-out every time it played. There was a riot at the theater and they broke the windows out in the front to take the posters. There had never been an independent movie like this that brought high school kids to the cinema. They were coming in crowds to see this movie. At that point, the media picked up on it and wrote stories about it. This was the end of 1983, three years after we had started, and we were still distributing it to other cities in 1984 because we only had a few prints.

The first time WILD STYLE was shown in 16 mm was in the fall of 1982 and the first time it was shown theatrically was in Japan in 1983. That was the first place to show the film publicly and we went with 30 people from the movie to Japan.

The people in Japan found out about us through Fran and Kaz Kazui, the people who made the movie Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

KAZ KAZUI: At that time, the Japanese kids did not know what Hip Hop was, so I wrote a book about the Hip Hop culture. I went to Martha and Charlie to find pictures and I used a lot for the book. I immediately started to talk to a Japanese publisher and, when we brought the ROCK STEADY CREW to Japan, the book was released. It was the first book in Japan about Hip Hop and it became a classic.

CHARLIE AHEARN: Everybody went to Japan and we had a huge riot. We were there for weeks and it was a big deal. It was before the film came to America. On April 7, 1983, WILD STYLE was shown on German television.

In November, it was played at the movie theaters. I was in Berlin when it was shown in the cinema and there were all these Turkish kids who showed up with little outfits on and they were breaking when it was shown at the movie theater.

PATTI ASTOR: This picture and part of the sequence that became the WILD STYLE poster and logo sums up Martha Cooper. Marty was not just a photographer, but also part of the crew as evidenced by this incredibly warm photo. Everyone just had so much trust in M.C. that we gave her all we had. One of the prettiest pictures I’ve ever seen of LADY PINK, director Charlie Ahearn, relaxed for once, punky Patti A., and, of course, FAB 5 FREDDY embracing us all.

“What’s great about Marty is that she was always there but never obtrusive. I can picture her now in her jeans and sneakers, all loaded down with cameras and film, always smiling, always ready to go.” PATTI ASTOR

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First Japanese Hip Hop00179 book.

DMC: We represent the time when all elements of Hip Hop were united. The music of Hip Hop, which is rap; the dance of Hip Hop, which is breaking; and the art of Hip Hop, which is graffiti. Those things all were like three-in-one, hand-in-hand. Once rap became a money-dominated entity, the other parts fell off.

MICHAEL HOLMAN: GRAFFITI ROCK is not really what I dreamed of, but that’s OK. I was busy doing so much, like I had the breakers in Europe promoting BEAT STREET or I was promoting my book, Breaking and The New York City Breakers (Freundlich Books). I did not really have enough time to devote to this.

It was only the first show, but it got on air.

We ran the pilot and we took it to Las Vegas to this TV sales show set up by the NATPE (National Association of Television Program Executives). You go there, you have a booth with pretty girls, and you try to sell your show.

The people buying it are station managers from all across the country. Eventually, you need enough of them to get the show going.

One of the big reasons why GRAFFITI ROCK was not being purchased was that a lot of the station managers said, “Well, that rap thing is a fad. It’s not gonna last.” I was like, “No, it’s gonna be huge!” So it did not sell the first year and it did not sell the second year. I was like, “Shit. I’m not gonna waste my time with this.” Then I went to film school and started directing Hip Hop videos.

MICHAEL HOLMAN: Where breaking was exciting to watch and easy for the American public to accept, the other elements of the Hip Hop subculture like rappers, scratching DJs with their b-beat music, and graffiti art were too foreign to the rest of the general public and would take much more time and exposure to be accepted. That’s why the idea of GRAFFITI ROCK was way ahead of its time.

6

SPECIAL K: Being a part of THE TREACHEROUS 3 was definitely a hot commodity. Michael Holman and I talked and initially, it was planned that the whole group would be involved. But LA SUNSHINE could not make it. MOE DEE and me did the hosting thing. After we got RUN DMC as part of the show, the wheels began turning. We were like, “OK, let’s do this little battling scene,” because that was part of Hip Hop at that time.

GRAFFITI ROCK / TV SHOW / MANHATTAN / JUNE / 1984

“When RUN DMC came out,

they really took Hip Hop back to its bare essence: beats, rhymes, some Adidas, a hat, and just turned that into a whole phenomenon.” GRANDMASTER CAZ NEW YORK CITY BREAKERS

203 00203

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SUBWAY ART

00205

DURO: This guy used to write RP3. He was going out with MADONNA before she was famous, before she did the song “Like a Virgin.”

MADONNA hung out with us a few times back in those days.

KANO’s sister Marisol with graffiti jacket by DONDI.

KANO: I loved the b-boy style: Kangols, Cazals, Playboys, Adidas, and Pumas with fat shoelaces. Just all that kind of stuff. We made our own proper money and bought whatever, but sometimes we went to the store and took off the old shoes, put ’em in a box, put on the new ones, and walked out.

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GRAF STYLES

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BOBBITO: This shit fucking reminds me of 1979, 1980. That’s the first year I remember the big boombox really taking over the streets.

It’s interesting because before the boombox, people used to take speakers and point them outside the window in an attempt to share their music. It went from speakers in people’s personal windows to speakers attached to people’s bodies walking around. I think Walkmans were invented, like, the next year, but it took years for the Walkman to become popular. For many years, the boombox was the shit. WKTU was the biggest station that year and they were playing SUGARHILL GANG’s “Rapper’s Delight.” I remember being in 8th grade in the spring of 1980 and hearing “Rapper’s Delight” blasting out a motherfucker’s box at Holy Name of Jesus School on 97th Street and Amsterdam Avenue. At that moment, you were fucking amped because you could get to hear good fucking music.

DASH: It was me, my cousin, and two other people and we were chilling and going to the park with the boombox. Then one of us was racking candy from a grocery store and the old man came out and started chasing us. We had fat laces and sneakers too loose with no socks and my man had the boombox and we couldn’t really run. It was crazy.

KIELY JENKINS: I was looking out the window of my studio on the Lower East Side when I saw A-ONE carrying a tremendous boombox bigger than he was down the street. Deciding to go into a store, he set the box down in the middle of the intersection, still on full blast, cars speeding by in four directions, leaving his hands free for shopping! After making it up to me with the beer and lighting up a fatty, I asked him, “Why did you just leave your box out in the street?” A-ONE replied, “I wanted to hear my music, man.”

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