Post-Disco: Uptown Meets Downtown — Hip Hop, Punk, and the Art World
Whenever the connection between hip hop and punk is mentioned, the assumption is that we’re talking music. This may be true in some cases, especially when you think of punk-rap acts like Rage Against the Machine, Korn, Limp Bizkit, Kid Rock, and Linkin Park. But the link between hip hop and punk goes back farther than the late ‘90s/early 2000s, and it is a link that was based mostly on the mixed club scene that both music scenes, hip hop/rap and punk, combined to make in early ‘80s New York. Still, the connection between hip hop and punk is not what some commentators have made it out to be. Rather than being a musical connection or exchange of political ideas, the connection was simply a comingling party-scene connection in the early ‘80s. And the link basically rested on Malcolm McLauren’s (famed manager of the Sex Pistols) and Michael Holman’s, Fab 5 Freddy’s, and Riza Blue’s (English club promoter) role in helping to bring hip hop from Uptown to Downtown club culture.
In New York City in the early ‘80s, Riza Blue, aka Kool Lady Blue, partnered with Michael Holman, creator of the short-lived rap show “Graffiti Rock” and first journalist to write “hip hop” in print, to promote hip hop parties at Negril, a club situated in Manhattan’s The Village neighborhood. Holman knew the pioneering hip hop personalities of the time and he booked DJs like Afrika Bambaataa and Jazzy Jeff (it was Holman who actually put the shows on, not Riza). And it was at Negril where b-boys, graffiti artists, and others from the Uptown hip hop scene mingled with punks and other partygoers from the downtown scene. A year after Holman and Blue’s hip hop parties took off at Negril, Riza Blue started the “Wheels of Steel” night at the Roxy. The Roxy, located in the Chelsea section of Manhattan, was a tremendously popular New York City nightclub, famous for its mix of clientele, which included b-boys and other members of hip hop’s scene alongside punks, artists, and every manner of Downtown Manhattanites. The Roxy featured an eclectic mix of music, everything from electro to soul to rhythm & blues, to dub, to post-punk, and it foreshadowed the power and influence of hip hop on dance club culture.
But before The Roxy, before Holman and Blue’s hip hop night at Negril, there was Fab 5 Freddy. Fab 5 Freddy was crucial to linking the Uptown and Downtown scenes, and he did it mainly through his efforts to gain respect for graffiti among New York’s Downtown art world. Brewster and Broughton have documented Fab 5 Freddy’s role best:
“Fab 5 Freddy was another important link between uptown and down. His motivation for bringing the two together was to gain art world respect for graffiti – which had evolved alongside rap music and breakdancing – and thereby further his own career as a graffiti artist. By the early eighties, Bronx spray-can Picassos were painting startling subway-train-sized masterpieces, and with the patronage of Andy Warhol, serious critical respect was being accorded to Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, who had both started as graffiti artists. The galleries were jumping on this ‘street art’ fairly quickly, and as he ventured deeper into the art world, meeting people like Glenn O’Brien, editor of Warhol’s Interview, and Blondie’s Chris Stein and Debbie Harry, Freddy soon found himself the Bronx’s unofficial cultural ambassador. This role led him to put together Wildstyle with novice director Charlie Ahearn, a film aimed at documenting the nascent world of hip hop. ‘I was serious about trying to be a painter, and I wanted this graffiti movement to be seen as a serious movement like Futurism or Dada. I didn’t want us to be looked on as folk artists. ‘I wanted to let people know that this was a complete culture, which I had read somewhere included dance, painting and music. So I wanted this film to be made to demonstrate that this graffiti thing, which was the focus, was a complete culture: that it was related to a form of music and related to a form of dance. Prior to that, nobody had seen these things as being connected.’ He also arranged for DJs to spin at gallery events. Thanks to Freddy, Bambaataa had actually been playing for the downtown art trendies since 1980, considerably before Holman and Blue’s Negril and Roxy nights. Of the Bronx DJs, Bam had the closest connections to the downtown club world (as well as being in many of the record pools, his playlist was published in several dance music newsletters) and Freddy brought him down to play in Club 57 on St Mark’s Place, the Fun Gallery and the Mudd Club, the after-dark home of post-punk weirdness.”[1]
Notes:
1: Bill Brewster and Frank Broughton, Last Night A DJ Saved My Life: The History of the DJ, 273-74 (emphasis mine).
