I have a half formed memory of watching a documentary about hip hop and graffiti culture around the year 1984 in the basement rec room of one of my church youth group cadre's. We had one of those "get to the kids by reaching out to their youth culture" type leaders and I guess it made an impression on me. Hip hop was a divisive and defining subculture. In the whitey-white suburbs, it caused fist fights at parties when someone slapped a 12 inch of "Beat Street Breakdown" on the turntable. Some kids would start hesitantly bouncing their heads to the beat, someone would start breaking out whatever moves they had picked up from MTV and then some music critic type would charge over to the stereo and start ranting while they ripped the needle off the record. "This isn't real music! RUSH is real music!!! At least they play their own instruments!!!" 2112 ain't bad, but you can't bob your head to it.
Fast forward to Tuesday and Netflix delivered my copy of "Style Wars". I sat there mildly enjoying the contrast between pre-gansta b-boy dialect and tweedy white guy voice over interspersed with classic footage of former mayor of NYC Ed Koch and the odd outraged average citizen when they cut to a gallery opening for a group of graffiti bombers. Suddenly it all came back in a flood, the plaid couch, the youth minister freezing the tape in the vcr to show us some point he wanted to make. An nice Upper West Side art collector's wife described an art critic asking one of the artists what they would do if he painted over his work and to watch her try to impersonate an 18 year old bomber saying "I'd keell you mon." was a defining moment.
Makes a great double feature with "Beat Street" which is kind of an awesome film if you can get past the Filmmaking 101 acting and editing.
Visit this link to donate to the Smithsonian's Hip Hop collection.
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