3/18/2024 0 Comments Best wildstyle graffiti artist![]() Someone would get arrested, or killed, or at least shot. Dreams would be dashed, plans would be thwarted, friendships would be betrayed, romances shattered. Any other movie would stretch these various subplots out, mining them for narrative tension and moral messaging. Ray’s brother, briefly back home from the army, criticizes his fondness for graffiti, but there’s precious little mention of the city’s ongoing war against subway writers that this is a valid art form is mostly accepted as fact by the film. None of these various subplots results in any escalating drama: Ray and Rose get back together pretty quickly, and the Union is never heard from again Ray’s sojourn into the cocktail party world winds up with his host (art collector Niva Kislac, basically playing herself) seducing him, and not much more the rap convention goes off pretty much without a hitch Phade seems at times like an oily opportunist, but he ultimately does right by everybody. Meanwhile, Phade hires Ray to do a big mural for a rap convention he’s organizing in an abandoned Lower East Side amphitheater. ![]() Taking Phade and Ray to an upscale Upper East Side cocktail party, she introduces them to some snooty art-world types in the film’s sole detour into social satire. With the encouragement of local impresario Phade (played with buckets of charm by Brathwaite himself), Ray is approached by a journalist for the Village Voice (actress and gallerist Patti Astor, looking like a dead ringer for Debbie Harry, whom the filmmakers originally tried to cast) working on a big feature about graffiti. Our protagonist Ray (played by Lee Quiñones, himself one of the city’s most legendary subway artists and, along with Ahearn and Brathwaite, one of the key conspirators behind conceptualizing the film), a talented graffiti writer who covers entire train cars under the mysterious name of “Zoro,” pines for his ex-girlfriend Rose (Sandra “Lady Pink” Fabara), a beautiful fellow artist who has started working with a slightly more legit group calling themselves the Union. (As many have noted, you could cut about 15 or 20 minutes out of it and you’d be left with a literal documentary.) The story feels at times like a series of familiar setups without much follow-through. And so, Wild Style drifts from a rap-battle-cum-pickup-basketball-game to an impromptu performance by the legendary dancers of the Rock Steady Crew to a performance by old school rap legend Busy Bee to a record-scratching clinic by Grandmaster Flash, often with the slenderest of narrative motivations.Īll that is probably why Wild Style often feels more like a documentary than a fictional drama. “I wanted to show that for a culture to be complete, it should combine music, dance, and a visual art,” he said in Complex’s 2013 oral history of the film. Brathwaite (who helped conceive the story, co-produced, co-starred, and oversaw the music) saw hip-hop as belonging alongside those other 1970s New York subcultures, punk and new wave, which represented a lot more than music and seemed to have emerged from the very geography of the city. Made for very little money, it embodies the DIY aesthetic of its milieu, an anything-goes world where vibrant murals coexist with seemingly bombed out buildings. Wild Style was shot on location in and around the Bronx, starring real-life graffiti writers, breakdancers, and rappers, many of them playing either variations of themselves or, simply, themselves. Fab 5 Freddy (later to become the first host of Yo! MTV Raps), and they started to dream up 1982’s Wild Style, a love song to the city’s graffiti artists and one of the earliest, most momentous portraits of hip-hop culture committed to film. It was at the Times Square Show that Ahearn met budding artist Fred Brathwaite, a.k.a. The young No Wave filmmaker Charlie Ahearn was there, too, screening his homemade super-8mm kung-fu feature The Deadly Art of Survival, which he had made with a group of young Black and Puerto Rican martial artists on the Lower East Side. An informal, grassroots exhibit bringing together more than 100 artists - some of whom, like Jean-Michel Basquiat and Keith Haring, would go on to become major cultural figures - it was a raucous, inclusive affair, featuring everything from painting to video art to fashion to music to performance, much of it created by relative unknowns. Held in an abandoned massage parlor on 41st Street, the Times Square Show of 1980 represented a pivotal moment in the rise of several New York subcultures. For more on rap’s best “process” documentaries, head here. ![]() In honor of hip-hop’s 50th anniversary, we’re republishing our 2020 review of Wild Style. Photo-Illustration: Vulture and Submarine Entertainment Charlie Ahearn and Fab 5 Freddy’s documentary-like film became an international cult favorite in the early 1980s. ![]()
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