Help the Missguided Youth

Written by Phatriff on Sat, 03/05/2008 - 11:57pm in Articles history us

Distinctions of Urban Culture The following piece was written by Get Lowe of Vivid Imagery who is one of Kasha's producers. It describes in quite some detail about where hip hop culture comes from. Hip Hop as an artform today has moved on greatly from the origins back in the 70's with influences from many forms of music and appeal to much larger audiences across the world. However for some artists the use of hip hop as medium to spread a message of positivity still remains and it still can be a refuge for the miss guided youth. In the early 1980s the urban environment received great media attention as newspaper articles were published and documentaries were broadcast to the world which received its first real insight into the phenomenon that had taken over New York City. The urban landscape was physically transformed by graffiti artists who invented a new visual language to express both their individuality, and the voice of their community. New York’s rundown subway system was their public playground, battleground, and extravagant artistic canvas, whilst street corners staged breakdance battles which turned into performance art. The brightly coloured, elaborate pieces of graffiti, which traveled from borough to borough on the sides of trains, along with the energetic and athletic performances of the breakdancers, aided in visually representing the birth of a new culture. The hip-hop culture. Hip-hop was originally an inner city concept. It evolved from the rap music created in Brooklyn and Harlem in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Donald Clarke, a music historian, has written that rap music was a reaction to the disco music of the period. Disco was centered in the rich, elitist clubs of Manhattan and rap emerged on street corners as an alternative. Consequently, a new dance form was born to the hip hop music as a way to express feelings about inner-city life. Forms of dance that originated on the street such as breakdancing have a direct relationship to the cultural community. Breakdancing’s initiation from the street provides the dance form with a metaphorical and ethnographic symbology as a response to the life of a people. As in all forms of dance, breakdancing is symbolic of culture because it inscribes social values on the body, emphasising class, ethnicity, and gender. Like a code written on the body, dance is an essay, epic, novel, or poem about culture articulated through the vehicle of the body. This urban rooted performance has the potential to portray attitudes and emotions amongst the lower working class communities that inhabit the inner cities. The more wealthy upper classes had the theatre and cinema to publicise their own artistic performances, whereas those living in the city ghettos felt isolated, as though they had no real establishment for a visual identity. So the street corner or the local basketball court became their stage or performance space to give birth to a unique visual art form, which would draw attention to their society through their original creativity.  Breakdancing, also known as breaking and b-boying by its practitioners and followers, is a dynamic style of dance that evolved as part of the hip-hop movement in the South Bronx of New York City during the late 20th century. Breakdancing is one of the four original elements of hip-hop culture, the others being rapping, DJing, and graffiti (breakdancing and graffiti are the visual components of this urban culture). In its early form, breakdancing was divided into three distinct forms, breaking, dancing, and popping. Breakdance is commonly associated with, but distinct from, popping which is one element of the funk styles that evolved independently in California during the late 20th century. Other styles of dance associated with the funk styles include Locking, Tutting, Krumping, Boogaloo, and Liquid Dancing. These styles are sometimes more contortionist than athletic, although they are often incorporated by breakdancers who wish to widen their expressive, performance range. All such styles factor heavily into the breaker’s movements while standing, called toprock. As opposed to toprock, footwork or downrock is performed with the body in contact with the floor. Many of the most recognisable breakdancing moves are part of downrock. Breakers usually begin by toprocking, and then continue down to the floor, often into some variation of the ‘6-step’. The ‘6-step’ can be combined with or transitioned into certain power moves. After performing the techniques, the breakdancer will often end the dance on his feet or contorted into a ‘freeze’. Actors use a similar technique called ‘tableaux’ or ‘freeze-frame’ in theatre. As in other dance forms, for example ballet, breakdancing has different styles and techniques. There is a divide in breakdancing due to the give-and-take between style and technique (or power). Devotees of each aspect are commonly known as styleheads and powerheads. Styleheads focus on the dancing side of breakdance. They may look down on powerheads as hack gymnasts who have eschewed the fundamental dance aspect for flashy acrobatics. Powerheads would respond that styleheads are little different than dancers from other styles because they neglect the difficult athletic moves that make breakdancing so radically different and unique to it’s urban culture. Others argue that style and technique are two equally important facets of a single unified art. For some b-boys / crews, there is no such thing as a ‘power set’ or a ‘style set’, as the two are freely intermixed. Much of being a successful breakdancer is about having style. The constant debate between b-boys is a debate over who has the most style. Since, in theory, anyone can learn the basics of breakdance, the performers must deviate from the set dances to use their own style. In this way they can show-up other breakdancers during performance battles. Breakdancing battles are competitions in which dancers ‘fight’ against each other on the dance floor in a stylistic sense. Like ‘theatre-in-the-round’ the audience forms a circle, in which the performers take turns trying to show each other up through either better style or more complex moves and combinations. The way in which the performers act, in trying to provoke certain reactions from the audience and in creating comedy through undermining the opponents dance, resembles that of actors in a pantomime. Audience interaction and participation are crucial elements in a dancer’s performance because the audience judges who wins and so the performer must impress and win over the hearts of the spectators. Battles can pit individuals against one another, but often take place between two opposing breakdancing teams or crews. Examples of major crews are the Zulu Nation, Rock Steady Crew, Style Elements, Furious Five, and the Dynamic Rockers. These crews dressed in a certain way, like actors in costume, to represent their team and their status. For the breakdancer, fashion is an important aspect of their identity and it is also important in aiding the construction of their extremely visual, hip-hop culture. Many breakdancers dressed wearing Adidas shoes with thick laces. Some b-boys that are extremely serious match their hat, shirt, and shoes. This costume is to show uniform, and is supposedly a threat to the opposing performer. Dancers would also wear nylon jumpsuits which were functional as well as fashionable. The slick surface allowed the breakdancer to slide on the floor much easier than if he or she had been wearing a cotton shirt. Today major breakdance battles are usually held at organised b-boy events and are held in arenas where large audiences watch. The battles are normally part of a tournament-style competition with cash prizes, or they are featured showcase battles, where each crew is paid to dance. It is not uncommon that spontaneous battles will happen at events as well, when rival crews show up with a lot of members. These large performances are called ‘jams’ and generally consist of several hours of ‘cyphering’ (open circles), followed by the main battle event. There is some academic attention drawn to whether or not breakdancing can be classified as folk dance. In particular, street dances are living and evolving dance forms, while folk dances are to an important degree bound by tradition. Breakdance was, preliminary, a social dance but, in the later years, due mainly to media and television, its goal has become more of a performance dance. Similar to breakdancing, graffiti is a performance that visually represents the urban, hip-hop culture. When discussing the subject of graffiti in the context of performance it is important to note that the act of doing the graffiti is just as important as the product left in the aftermath. In the 1982 documentary Style Wars the New York graffiti artist Seen is shown directing a piece of graffiti art. The film highlights his creative imagination because, before the graffiti has even began to be sprayed on to a wall, he already has the layout, structure and colour coordination of the piece set out in his mind. Just as a director for a theatre performance would carefully appoint specific lights and effects to be used at specific times, the graffiti artist will pre-plan the performance by selecting the appropriate colours of paint and rehearsing the style of the piece on paper. Rehearsing and controlling performance technique is vital in producing the desired tone and atmosphere of the piece. The performer’s movement is extremely important. The graffiti artist has to adopt a special posture in order to hold the can in a unique way so that the paint is applied to the wall in an effective way. The artist’s movement has to be swift but smooth so that the paint does not drip and so that a certain style is produced. This movement is very important when the artist wants to merge colours because prolonged action can ruin the subtle blend that many graffiti artists attempt to produce in their pieces. The quick speed at which a piece is painted was primarily adopted due to the illegal activity of doing graffiti on someone else’s property. The artist will want to carry the act out as fast as possible to escape the scene without being spotted by the law and, consequently, arrested. It is interesting to note that the rapid speed of this art form mirrors the rapid growth and expansion of the city, as well as the hustle and bustle of the urban environment. The fact that this performance is often illegal on the streets is also a metaphor for the crime infested communities that live within the ghettos and slums of the city. It is as if graffiti is a visual message to the government and the rest of the world to stop ignoring the conditions of these neighborhoods. A message which tells others of a world of crime, through crime. However, even though many graffiti artists used and still use graffiti as a means of political and social protest, others simply used it as a way of reaching some level of fame within their community and as a means of building a reputation.     The graffiti culture has been associated with street gangs and violence due to its adoption of warlike language, for example, graffiti artists refer to their performance as ‘bombing’ or ‘hitting’. This reflects the public attitudes being produced against graffiti artists and often shows some irony and self-humor in the way crews name them-selves by selecting derogatory expressions, thus mocking society. It is this mockery of society which has captured much of the media limelight with a growing interest and support in the works of such artists as Banksy who protests, through graffiti, against certain political affairs and the growth of cooperate businesses. It is the urban environment that has allowed his work to be acknowledged at such a huge level due to the large population of people who pass by his street art every day, whether they are inhabitants, commuters or tourists. In encountering some of the graffiti art and sculpture of Banksy in London, I was struck by the importance of where his pieces were located. Banksy’s work is site specific as location itself is a large part of the message, a key component of the resulting metaphor. Whether he’s hanging a fake rock pictogram of early man pushing a shopping cart in the British Museum, or installing an amalgam of the Statue of Liberty and Statue of Justice dressed as a prostitute at the site of his last arrest, the environment is usually part of the message. Although born in New York City, graffiti is now world-wide and a country which has now overtaken America and dominated the graffiti, urban culture is Brazil. The Brazilians have been resourceful and adaptive. The Brazilian poet Oswald de Andrade termed this peculiarly Brazilian quality antropofagia (cannibalism). According to Andrade’s 1928 manifesto, since some of Brazil’s indigenous inhabitants had practised cannibalism, the trait was still present in the national character, just like the bloodlines of the cannibal race. Andrade’s antropofagia meant the gobbling up of the cultures of the world – if you see something you fancy, eat what you like and leave the carcass. The spread of the hip-hop movement is a fine case in point, with Brazilian young people picking at a culture that had sprung from New York’s leftover spaces and materials. In Western Europe, as well as Japan and Australia, young people had the resources to import hip-hop culture with few, if any, modifications from what they saw in movies such as Style Wars and Wild Style. Young breakdancers in these First-World nations wore adidas, DJs used Technics 1200 turntables, and graffiti writers spray-painted on trains. Brazilian hip-hoppers, on the other hand, tended to adapt rather than adopt. Breakdancers retrofitted their backspins into the endemic dance and martial art of capoeira. DJs did their best with what they had in the way of records and record players, but also incorporated samba beats. And graffiti artists generally ignored trains and concentrated on developing a mixed-media approach to painting prominent street spots, alternating between affordable latex paint and more expensive aerosols. Once banished to the alleys and subways of the city, graffiti is now considered by many to be the next movement in contemporary art. The art form is more often associated with teenagers, bags rattling with spray cans, trespassing into train yards after dark, but at the same time it has caught the eye of the UK’s art aficionados, and is becoming an increasingly dominant visual force in the business world. Brands such as Nike, Coca-Cola, Lee Jeans, and the BBC are seeking out the creativity of graffiti artists to reinforce their identity. London is now one of the leading centres for the genre, which has its roots on the streets of New York. But not everybody welcomes graffiti’s new acceptability and its place on the UK’s art scene. For some, graffiti is an eyesore and a blight on society. Many are concerned that publicising the art form, and making graffiti artists, such as the controversial Banksy, into media celebrities, will encourage young people to break the law. However, others view it as an expression of urban, youth culture, a revolutionary and legitimate art form, and a means of visual protest for those that are not being heard.