"If you're a music lover of a certain age, you remember how exciting and polarizing the rise of Hip Hop in popular music was. From the amiable goofiness of The Sugarhill Gang's "Rapper's Delight" to the scratching pyrotechnics and audacious musical mashups of "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel" to cosmic funk of Afrika Bambaattaa's "Planet Rock" a whole world of exhilarating music emerged, even as a vast segment of the programming and critical population declared "That's not music.""
"It was multidisciplinary, encompassing fine art (Basquiat), television (alternative programming on public access cable), film, and more. Filmmaker Charlie Ahearn was making short films documenting urban martial artists (his first feature, from 1979, was titled "The Deadly Art of Survival") when he encountered the characters-graffiti artists and turntable maestros who ruled the block parties that were crucial to the uptown scene-with whom he would populate 1982's "Wild Style," a still-startling document of Hip Hop."
"The artists here, including Lee Quinones and Fab Five Freddy Braithwaite, play themselves, or versions of themselves, for the most part. But they're enacting a narrative about the purity of graffiti coming up against the commercial concerns of the predominantly white art world of lower Manhattan. From the NYC Transit Authority Yards, where spray-paint armed visual artists tag the sides of subway cars, to the white-walled galleries of Soho, just as it was becoming a monied art center, "Wild Style" is a fascinating ride."
Hip Hop's rise provoked excitement and polarization, with early hits like "Rapper's Delight," Grandmaster Flash's mixing, and Afrika Bambaataa's funk pushing musical boundaries. The movement quickly became multidisciplinary, influencing fine art, alternative television, and film while producing prominent visual artists and turntable DJs. Filmmaker Charlie Ahearn encountered graffiti writers and DJs and cast them in Wild Style (1982), blending performance and narrative. The film stages a tension between graffiti's claimed purity and the commercial concerns of Soho's predominantly white art market, moving from subway yards to white-walled galleries. Performances favor authenticity over polish, and the film remains a vivid record now reissued in a deluxe edition.
Read at Roger Ebert
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