riffs on Paris graff : 7

From boom boxes to money rolls, many of the props in Wild Style, Charlie Ahearn’s 1982 dramatization of the burgeoning New York street scene of wholecarring and rapoffs; breakdancing and basketball; art market opportunism and fly, designer kicks have been reprised on a mile-long wall at Marcadet-Poissoniers run by TPK, The Psychopath Killer. Overlooking the rail lines and switches braiding out of Gare du Nord below, the wall is fringed with coils of barbed wire, as if the security apparatus were quoting the movie, too. But there’s a moment toward the end of the film that pierces the contrived scenarios of the preceding seventy minutes, no less than its nostalgic representations thirty years later a continent away, with a history that cannot but shatter and reorganize the utopian fantasy the film indulges. It’s so hectic and haptic and curt you could easily miss it. Phade, or Fab Five Freddy in real life, and another club owner having decided to throw a crosstown jam in an abandoned amphitheatre near the East River, it falls to Raymond, a.k.a. “Zoro,” played by “Lee” George Quinones, to get the place painted. Initially he draws a godsize pair of hands in stereo, which he tells his girlfriend Rose, played by Sandra “Pink” Fabara, are meant to represent the city’s social and financial pressures menacing a solo artist at the center. Calculating that this is Ray’s self-portrait, she tells him the vision is as selfish as it is bleak, that he needs to keep the event, the venue in mind. Because rappers will be the stars that night, he throws a gigantic star up onto the backdrop of the bandshell. Lightning raging from the Old Testament hands charges the arena with electricity, empowerment, the thrill, thrall, and community of rocking a mike. The place is packed, and all the musicians who’ve been profiled earlier, in rapid succession, from the Rock Steady Crew to Grand Master Flash, show up to participate in the cathartic curtain call. “Party people, I want everyone do me a favor,” The Chief Rocker Busy Bee calls out, “throw both hands in the air like this, both hands in the air like this.” The crowd’s hands thrust upward to meet the lowered hands of God, with the camera toggling between them to suggest their symbiosis, Busy Bee asks everyone to look at their hands—and suddenly, the immortality promised by the divine is rescinded by facts on the ground.

“Pretend your hand is that man,” the rapper goes on, “who killed all those little children in Atlanta, and I want y’all to smack the hell out of it, like this.” The entire scaffolding of the film falls away at that moment, its fiction ripped wide open by the reality of cold blood. (Among the musicians who offered concerts during the period 1979-1981 to honor the victims and support their families were Frank Sinatra, Sammy Davis Jr., The Jacksons, and Gladys Knight & The Pips.) The feelgood narrative sews itself back together quickly enough, as Busy Bee modulates his theme to sex, a surefire crowd pleaser, and the film will bow out to the tune of Chic’s “Good Times” (eventually reprised on several occasions by the French electro duo Daft Punk, as well as by a hundred other artists). Yet the trace of what’s just been said lingers in the wannabe Dillinger getup—white zoot suits, tommy guns—affected by Double Trouble and casts a sinister backlight, as well, on the earlier scene where a pair of hoodlums had pulled a sawed-off shotgun on the bleach-blond reporter played by Patti Astor. Despite what’s meant to pass as palpable racial tension, that episode could’ve struck no fear in the hearts of viewers, so gawky is the acting and so insulting the portrayal of the two black men, but it’s freighted after the fact with meaning—indeed, with the weight of mourning—by the reference to twenty-three African-American children and six adults murdered 800 miles down the coast by yet another psychopath killer. (Wayne Bertram Williams was tried and convicted of killing two adult men and sentenced to life in Hancock State Prison in Sparta. He was never formally indicted in the death of the children, and there has been speculation regarding KKK involvement. James Baldwin asserted in The Evidence of Things Not Seen that the Williams case was never proven.) On one hand, the film is implicitly positing a racial safety zone in the metro northeast, which Busy Bee’s allusion to the Atlanta child murders serves to reinforce, if regretfully. On the other, what happened in Atlanta had erased any figment of border, and I can’t help rewriting the movie retroactively, according to a geographical flip, or fluidity: the journalist Virginia is renamed Georgia, the Union Crew is instead dubbed the Confederates, and the tag on Phade’s club doesn’t say PIXIE, it says DIXIE.