Thoughts on Wild Style

"In some cases, when a people are freed from their past they are given an opportunity to start anew. Hip-hop, like its African American creators, is born of this newfound independence. It is our generation's opportunity to start from scratch."

- Saul Williams in The Dead Emcee Scrolls: The Lost Teachings of Hip hop

I saw Charlie Ahearn's Wild Style back-to-back with The Fire Next Door, the documentary noted on a previous post. Both are rich in footage of the old South Bronx, but those environs read very differently from one film to the next.  Fire Next Door documents the arson epidemic and the deadly mix of social/political problems of which fire was the most graphic symptom. The ruins as presented by Moyers call to mind the words scrawled on a project wall in Camilo Vergara's photo essay The New American Ghetto: "Help Me, Motherfucker."  

Those same ruins fill the frames of the proto-hip hop musical Wild Style, but they appear transfigured, charged with a strange power, outside of quotidian time and its imperatives.

Miles of burnt-out buildings and rubble heaps where kids played obliviously, '80 blocks' from midtown glitz--for sure, that was a failure of civilization, a failure specifically of American civilization to uphold its professed values, and people should know about it.

Nonetheless, the kids who actually lived that experience implicitly resisted the victim label that postwar liberalism stamped upon them. This was the constructive flipside of youth's conceit, and it informed the spirit of early hip hop culture.

Grandmaster Caz:

"Look past the garbage, over the trains,

under the ruins, through the remains,

around the crime and pollution,

and tell me, where I fit in,

South Bronx, New York,

that's where I dwell,

and to a lot of people its a living hell,

full of frustration and poverty,

but wait, that's not how it looks to me,

its a challenge, an opportunity,

to rise above the stink and debris,

you gotta start with nothing and then you build..."

- "South Bronx Subway Rap," Wild Style soundtrack

Wild Style condenses that youthful energy like a great poem, and re-presents the South Bronx as an enchanted place, however fraught with danger.  Look past, over, under, through, around...

***

To parallel the material disinvestment that occurred the South Bronx in the sixties came a disinvestment--for the middle classes at least--of meanings, memories, and the emotional attachments that make buildings more than just brick and mortar.  To outsiders and emigres, the South Bronx became a hieroglyph, a tabula of forms without any certain function, a grid-map of places without names.

The wasteland that remained presented itself as an invitation to creatively-minded kids--to  inscribe new meanings onto the artifacts of a vanished civilization; to re-arrange, re-mix, or break them.  This was the context of hip hop's development, "a challenge, an opportunity" to re-claim the uniquely human power to name, the lack of which normally renders the poor invisible. Seizing this power,  the progenitors of hip hop opened a site of revolutionary possibilities, and created art from within that void at the very center of civilization.

A.O. Scott writes that Wild Style "captures the utopian glimmerings of an era that is generally remembered as the darkest in the modern history of New York."  Indeed, the beauty of the movement that the film represents was its ability not to efface but to deflect that darkness, to relate to it as the mud in which creative genius seeded.