KEEPING IT REAL
Wild Style captured and cranked up hip-hop culture
Charlie Ahearn moved to New York in the early 1970s. He liked to roam the streets with a Bolex, shooting the local kids breakdancing and practising amateur kung-fu. It was in ’77, while he was putting together a martial-arts movie on Super 8 with some neighbourhood boys, that he first encountered Lee Quinones, whose graffiti murals were sprawled along old subway cars and handball courts across the Lower East Side. Quinones was running at the time with Fab 5 Freddy, a colleague of the spray can who aspired to bring the medium into the mainstream. In 1980, at a screening of Ahearn’s long-awaited Deadly Art of Survival at the Times Square Show exhibit, Freddy and Quinones approached the director with an idea. Street art, breakdancing, rap music: this was an epoch. The cultural moment needed a chronicle. Hip hop needed a film.
That film was Wild Style, which screens June 19, at the TIFF Bell Lightbox in Toronto. Written, directed, and produced by Ahearn, and starring Freddy and Quinones as exaggerated (though essentially true-to-life) versions of themselves, Wild Style emerged in 1983 as a first, definitive glimpse of a subculture that had until then been relegated to the margins. The blemishes are hard to miss: it was a conspicuously low-budget production, mounted without the luxuries of a studio product, and the inexperience of the cast and crew, many of whom
The first, definitive glimpse of a marginalized subculture
were non-professionals, plainly shows. But the film’s crude style is true to what you might call the do-it-yourself spirit of its subject. The art of graffiti, the hero of Wild Style says early on, isn’t just about spraying walls with paint. It’s about taking risks: the real graffiti artist, the renegade of the street, is an outlaw. The barriers to entry that keep the underprivileged out of galleries are demolished on the street. That was always the appeal of street art, like breakdancing and rap: you don’t need money, or institutional backing, or the approval of any high guard to make it work. Anyone audacious enough to do it can.
It used to be said that rap was a genre while hip hop was a way of life. That’s the sense in which Wild Style is a hiphop movie: rap figures prominently into its action but is only one cultural artifact among many. In fact, the story often halts to linger on a sort of showcase: the Cold Crush Brothers and the Fantastic Freaks might parlay an a-cappella rap battle into a basketball game on a streetside court, for instance, while elsewhere, Grandmaster Flash, in a flourish of turntable virtuosity, spins and scratches an exquisite beat as teenagers breakdance outside. The film features enough stand-alone performances — rapping, dancing, spinning, and, of course, spraying — that one could make the case for Wild Style as a full-blown musical.
(That would in any case account for the emphasis on music over, say, character development or storytelling.) Wild Style has even been defined as a documentary: so clear and true is its cultural portraiture, and so thin is the artifice draped transparently over it, that it hardly seems right to call it fiction.
A year after Wild Style introduced the world to hip hop arrived another report from the scene’s front lines: Beat Street, by Stan Lathan, which screens next month at TIFF as part of the same pro- gram. The pairing is common and instructive. Like Wild Style, Beat Street concerns a few young, working-class New Yorkers immersed in the world of breakdancing, street art, and rap, each activity as irresistible as it is apparently dangerous. (There’s a moralistic note here that Wild Style doesn’t have, as the hedonism of graffiti leads to a tragic death by errant subway car.) In a lot of ways, Beat Street plays like a Hollywood remake of Wild Style, even if their differences in budget and scale aren’t quite so pronounced. Beat Street is a slicker, more accomplished film than its endearingly shoddy predecessor; it feels less like a docu- ment of a cultural moment than a conventional picture the ornaments of a movement happen to have been channelled into. The world of hip hop seems vaguely compromised: its elaborate nightclub scenes are staged, the graffiti variously glimpsed is faked. Not uncommon shortcuts for a movie to take, certainly. But Wild Style didn’t take them — and as a result, it’s the stronger portrait.
Still, Beat Street earns its recognition: it gave hip hop a galvanic, much-deserved push into the spotlight, making a summer blockbuster of a cultural niche. And it still does feature rapping, and breakdancing, and DJ-ing, all of some distinction, even if the action is pitched at a rather fanciful level. Every film is, by its very nature, a documentary of something real — in the sense Thom Andersen means when he extols us, in Los Angeles Plays Itself, to “appreciate fiction films for their documentary revelations.” Beat Street faked much but couldn’t fake that it was there, in and among the people, sopping up the style and music that furnished an epoch. That still shines through the movie with brilliance. Hip hop needed a film and got one, in Wild Style. Beat Street was the one we might think it didn’t need. But a chronicle can never be too exhaustive: there’s always more to learn about the truth.