Lat 70's, buildings in the Bronx burned almost continuously from an estimated forty
fires a day that destroyed 80% of area housing stock and displaced a
quarter-million residents. This phenomenon was the direct
consequence of Operation Bootstrap in the late 1940s, the racist redlining and
urban renewal policies of the 1960s, and New York City’s massive budget cuts of
the 1970s. New York needed the South Bronx to become a “ghetto” in order to
instigate its “urban renewal,” a long process of demolishing low-income housing
to make way for Lincoln Center, Columbia University housing, and parts of NYU.
More than 100,000 people lost their homes and were forced into the South
Bronx’s already weak pre-war buildings. So that the rich could become even richer,
the area then had to burn and eventually become the dumping ground for the
city’s garbage. One of NYC’s most diverse regions was over time reduced to a
site of crime and destruction, a transformation facilitated by racist
corporations and classist government policies. landlords would pay impoverished
young boys and girls to burn down old buildings, so that they could then claim
thousands of dollars in insurance. In contrast to the official story that the
people of the South Bronx burned down their own neighborhoods, the film
stresses that it is only because of their grassroots organizing that the area
continues to thrive. “There [were] no fire engines,” one resident says. “We
[were] the fire engines.”
“We were in a place where we just needed an outlet, where we
just needed something to make a day normal.” That’s how Melle Mel—legendary MC,
founding member of the Furious Five, lead vocalist on the history-making
hip-hop classic “The Message”—describes growing up in the Bronx in the 1970s.
New York City was bankrupt. And across broad swaths of the South Bronx,
landlords were paying arsonists to torch their buildings for insurance money as
the city—advised by the RAND Corporation to close fire stations and let its
poorest areas burn—let it happen.
But if those fires, and the larger urban decline they signaled, defined the ’70s in the Bronx, so, too, were those years marked by the “outlet” that Melle Mel describes. That outlet was hip-hop: a complex of culture comprised of music (rapping, DJ’ing), dance (breaking) and art (graffiti) that remains a vital lingua franca of youth culture, around the globe, four decades later. The urban scholar Jonathan Tarleton, collating data from the census bureau, worked with our cartographer Molly Roy to craft a stark tableau of urban destruction: an image of a borough where in some areas of the South Bronx—the dark red areas on the map—upwards of 90% of housing units were lost between 1970 and 1980. And behold: the places where these things happened are the same ones that, during the Bronx’s awful decade of fires, were most harmed. It was from the ashes the fires left—the vacant lots and rubble and parties thrown with equipment won during riots and blackouts—that hip-hop’s phoenix rose.
Berman, a great urbanist who was also a native son and
lifelong devotee of the Bronx, described hearing “The Message” for the first
time, banging out of a West Harlem record shop in 1982. Its young makers had
come of age in the city’s worst period—they’d grown up on the precipice of ruin
(“Don’t push me / ‘cause I’m close to the edge…”). But they’d survived, with
imaginations intact, to create a masterpiece of urban realism, as Berman called
that record, “that looked the negative in the face and lived with it, and still
dreamt of coming through.” Hip-hop was the sound of a city surviving. Hearing
“The Message” was what convinced Berman that the city would be alright. When he
knew, as the people of New York’s toughest borough learned long ago, that you
can’t burn imagination.
There was still life left in the city, after all — even in
the Bronx. As gang activity soared in the Bronx and street warfare became a way
of life, many looked for a refuge from violence around them in dance parties
around the Bronx, fueled by a whole new sound: Hip-Hop. Bronx residents sought
refuge in parties to musically experiment and avoid the growing gang culture
outside. Hip-Hop was rooted in avoiding urban pitfalls, and telling it like it
is. For author and journalist Marcus Reeves, that beautiful art form growing
from the muck was vital. Some chose gang life. Some decided to become Guardian
Angels. Others chose Hip-Hop. "It was very important to see that this
music come to the forefront because it allowed this voice of the poor and the
working class back into the mainstream."
So, around 1970-71 the center of graffiti culture shifted from Philadelphia to New York City, especially around Washington Heights, where suspects such as TAKI 183 and Tracy 168 started to gain notoriety for their frequent vandalism. Using a naming convention in which they would add their street number to their nickname, they "bombed" a train with their work, letting the subway take it throughout the city. Bubble lettering was popular among perpetrators from the Bronx, but was replaced with a new "wildstyle", a term coined by Tracy 168 and a legendary original Graffiti crew with over 500 members. Graffiti was growing competitive and artists desired to see their names across the city. Around 1974 suspects like Tracy 168, CLIFF 159 and BLADE ONE started to create works with more than just their names: they added illustrations, full of scenery and cartoon characters, to their tags, laying the groundwork for the mural-car. The standards from the early 1970s continue to evolve, and the late 1970s and early 1980s saw new styles and ideas. As graffiti spread beyond Washington Heights and the Bronx, a graffiti crime wave was born. Fab 5 Freddy (Friendly Freddie, Fred Brathwaite) was one of the most notorious graffiti figures of that era. He notes how differences in spray technique and letters between Upper Manhattan and Brooklyn began to merge in the late 1970s: "out of that came 'Wild Style'." Fab 5 Freddy is often credited with helping to spread the influence of graffiti and rap music beyond its early foundations in the Bronx, and making links in the mostly white downtown art and music scenes. It was around this time that the established art world started becoming receptive to the graffiti culture for the first time since Hugo Martinez's Razor Gallery in the early 1970s.
Many graffiti artists, however, chose to see the new problems as a challenge rather than a reason to quit. A downside to these challenges was that the artists became very territorial of good writing spots, and strength and unity in numbers (gangs) became increasingly important. This was stated to be the end for the casual subway graffiti artists. By mid-1986 the Metropolitan Transportation Authority (MTA) and the NYCTA were winning their "war on graffiti," with the last graffitied train removed from service in 1989. As the population of artists lowered so did the violence associated with graffiti crews and "bombing." However, teenagers from inner London and other European cities with family and other links to New York City had by this time taken up some of the traditions of subway Graffiti and exported them home, although New York City writers like Brim, Bio, and Futura had themselves played a significant role in establishing such links when they visited London in the early-to-mid-80s and "put up pieces" on or near the western ends of the Metropolitan line, outside London.
Almost as significantly, just when subway graffiti was on
the decline in New York City, some British teenagers who had spent time with
family in Queens and the Bronx returned to London with a "mission" to
americanize the London Underground Limited (LUL) through painting New York
City-style graffiti on trains. These small groups of London "train
writers" (LUL writers) adopted many of the styles and lifestyles of their
New York City forebears, painting graffiti train pieces and in general
'bombing' the system, but favoring only a few selected underground lines seen
as most suitable for train graffiti. Although on a substantially smaller scale
than what had existed in New York City, graffiti on LUL rolling stock became
seen as enough of a problem by the mid-1980s to provoke the British Transport
Police to establish its own graffiti squad modeled directly on and in
consultation with that of the MTA. At the same time, graffiti art on LUL trains
generated some interest in the media and arts, leading to several art galleries
putting on exhibitions of some of the art work (on canvass) of a few LUL
writers as well as TV documentaries on London hip-hop culture like the BBC's
'Bad Meaning Good', which included a section featuring interviews with LUL
writers and a few examples of their pieces.
With subway trains being increasingly inaccessible, other
property became the targets of graffiti. Rooftops became the new billboards for
some 80s-era writers. The current era in graffiti is characterized by a
majority of graffiti artists moving from subway or train cars to "street
galleries."[citation needed] Prior to the Clean Train Movement, the streets
were largely left untouched not only in New York City, but in other major
American cities as well.[citation needed] After the transit company began
diligently cleaning their trains, graffiti burst onto the streets of America to
an unexpecting and unappreciative public.
Graffiti art as we know it today started in Philadelphia and the Bronx and became a worldwide culture when the media and art world featured graffiti and its artists in newspapers, books and movies. He noted later that tagging provided disadvantaged urban teens "the only significant vehicle to represent their existence." He described the thrill of tagging subway cars as "impact expressionalism".
Hip hop music was not officially recorded for play on radio
or television until 1979, largely due to poverty during the genre's birth and
lack of acceptance outside ghetto neighborhoods. Old school hip hop was the
first mainstream wave of the genre, marked by its disco influence and
party-oriented lyrics. The 1980s marked the diversification of hip hop as the
genre developed more complex styles and spread around the world. New school hip
hop was the genre's second wave, marked by its electro sound, and led into
Golden age hip hop, an innovative period between the mid-1980s and mid-1990s
that also developed hip hop's own album era.
Hip hop's early pioneers were influenced by a mix of music
from their cultures and the cultures they were exposed to as a result of the
diversity of U.S. cities. New York City experienced a heavy Jamaican hip
hop influence during the 1990s. This influence was brought on by cultural
shifts particularly because of the heightened immigration of Jamaicans to New
York City and the American-born Jamaican youth who were coming of age during
the 1990s.
Art Assignment: Exploration with tagging, acrylic paint, play and self expression
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