Transcript
Into America
Street Disciples: Broken Glass Everywhere
Trymaine Lee: Hip-hop started as party music, an amalgamation of the livest parts of funk and soul breakbeats. The sounds were upbeat, something to dance to whether you were on the block, in the club or in the crib.
Hip-hop was a celebration, an exercise in escapism and aspiration. It was enthusiastic and electric, elevating the ordinary to extraordinary. But in those early days, the music wasn't truly reflecting the wholeness of life as it was being lived by most of the people who are creating it, and certainly not the life of those who are listening to it.
Not in a place like the greedy, hungry South Bronx where hip-hop was born. And as the decade that birthed hip-hop came to a close, those contradictions between blissful burgeoning hip-hop and blistering reality were growing more stark.
Archival Recording: It was parts of the Bronx where literally it was four-square blocks, and if you didn't know better, if you didn't know what was going on, you would think that it was a warzone. You would think that you were in Ukraine or something, like it literally looked like somebody dropped a bomb in certain areas in the Bronx.
Archival Recording: Gang activity all over the place. Drugs all over the place.
Archival Recording: Homeless people heating themselves with, you know, fire bins and just no city lights, I mean it's astonishing what was allowed to happen.
Archival Recording: It was no real nurturing from outside entities to kind of fix us. Every once in a while, somebody came there to take a picture. You know, I remember when Reagan came to the Bronx, but these were photo-ops, right.
Archival Recording: One job for my vote. Reagan, Reagan.
Archival Recording: What are you going to do for us?
Ronald Reagan: I'm trying to tell you.
Archival Recording: I'll tell you.
T. Lee: By the time California's right-wing governor, Ronald Reagan came to the South Bronx on a presidential campaign stop in 1980, using the backdrop of rubble as a dig at the incumbent Democratic President Jimmy Carter. The desperate pleas of the people there rung loud and clear.
Archival Recording: We asking you for help now because you're here. But help us.
Reagan: But I can't do it.
Archival Recording: Help us, not by yourself, but you're going to put a word in for us.
Reagan: All right (ph).
Archival Recording: Push. Why don't you push? I'm not going to hit him. Are you crazy?
T. Lee: After decades of white flight, disinvestment, fires and abject neglect, the South Bronx was at a breaking point.
Then in 1982, one song took the realities of life broken by the system and put it to music.
T. Lee: It started with a new sound. The beat is slowed down but still kind of funky. Still electric but pulsating. Something you got to bop to. And that song was The Message by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five.
The Message, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five: Broken glass everywhere. People pissing on the stairs, you know they just don't care. I can't take the smell, can't take the noise --
T. Lee: And the lyrics of the song make the pain of ghetto life simple and plain.
Archival Recording: I will never forget the first time I heard The Message.
Archival Recording: It just felt like it was doing something different.
Archival Recording: For somebody like me it's like, this is the reality that we was dealing with.
Archival Recording: Rats in the front room, roaches in the back, junkies in the alley with a baseball bat, all of that is true. All that is what we went through.
The Message, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five: Rats in the front room, roaches in the back. Junkies in the alley with a baseball bat. I tried to get away, but I couldn't get far 'cause the man with the tow-truck repossessed my car.
Melle Mel: You know, we partying. We having a good time. You know, they was trying to escape it, mentally. And after we did The Message, that's when the dynamics and the paradigm of what hip-hop is basically shifted.
T. Lee: This is the man behind some of those iconic lyrics, Mr. Melle Mill.
Mel: I'm the one and only King of Hip-hop himself, the legend king, Grandmaster Melle Mel, AKA, Muscle Simmons.
T. Lee: Melle is a legend indeed. Four decades after The Message and he's still fly as ever. He pulled up to our interview draped in a black and gold tracksuit with two gold chains to match and a literal feather in cap. After all these years, you can't tell him he's still not the man.
Mel: And I just want to make one thing clear, I'm Melle Mel and, whoever is looking at this, you are not.
(LAUGHTER)
T. Lee: Got to make it clear from jump.
Mel: Yeah, you got it. You got it. Some people don't understand the standards and status.
T. Lee: Mel joined Grandmaster Flash's Furious Five when he was just 18. Born and raised in the Bronx, Mel came of age with hip-hop.
By 1982, the group had put out a couple big songs and had signed with Sugar Hill Records, the label behind Rapper's Delight. At that time, The Furious Five was making the same party music that defined the genre, until Sugar Hill founder Sylvia Robinson came to them with a new idea.
Mel: Nobody wanted to do the record. And Ms. Sylvia Robinson, may she rest in peace, she was so fixated on doing this particular record. It was something that she (ph) wanted to do, this was the record that you had to be a part of this record.
T. Lee: Why were you so skeptical though?
Mel: Because it was a totally different song.
T. Lee: Uh-hmm.
Mel: You know, we going from rock, rock, Planet Rock and rock and don't stop. We goin' (ph) rock it (ph), don't stop to broken glass everywhere People pissin' on the stairs, you know they just don't care. You see what I'm saying? So it's totally different.
T. Lee: Sylvia got the idea from one of her producers, Ed Fletcher, AKA Duke Bootee. He had come up with a beat and a chorus.
Mel: So he was the guy that actually wrote the main, you know, don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge, you know, the verses whatever. And Ms. Sylvia Robinson, may she rest in peace, she kept Duke Bootee's voice on the record.
The Message, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five: I can't walk through the park, 'cause it's crazy after the dark. Keep my hand on the gun, 'cause they got me on the run. I feel like an outlaw, broke my last glass jar. Hear them say, you want some more? Livin' on a see-saw. Don't push me.
T. Lee: Rappers, you know, have been known to use a little hyperbole. But I wonder how that song, The Message, reflected a lot of the realities that were going on in the Bronx and across New York City at the time.
Mel: The Message was an actual depiction of what was going on. Like, if you never been to the ghetto and you listen to the first half of The Message, you don’t have to listen to the whole song. Just listen to the first half and you'll have a decent understanding of what growing up in the hood or in the ghetto was like.
T. Lee: One of the most famous lines in the song comes in the last verse, it's an indictment of the society that discards its children before they even have a chance to grow up. It starts, "A child is born with no state of mind."
The Message, Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five: A child is born, with no state of mind. Blind to the ways of mankind. God is smilin' on you, but he's frownin' too, because only God knows, what you'll go through.
Mel: The whole concept is, it would be my rendition of Living for the City: a boy is born in hard time Mississippi, surrounded by; a child is born, with no state of mind. Blind to the ways of mankind.
See, I did it like that. So that's basically like the hip-hop version. Even when the record came out, they compared the message with Living for the City.
Living for the City, Stevie Wonder: A boy is born in hard time Mississippi, surrounded by four walls that ain't so pretty. His parents give him love and affection, to keep him strong, moving in the right direction. Living just enough, just enough for the city.
T. Lee: What's interesting is, he's talking about the Great Migration from the South up to New York --
Mel: Right.
T. Lee: You got (ph) yourself in the space (ph) and then it's like you all next generation talking about what life has been here.
Mel: Absolutely.
T. Lee: Uh-hmm.
Mel: So that was how that came about.
T. Lee: That was intentional, you were thinking like that.
Mel: Yeah. Yeah, to write a different type of rhyme. And it worked.
T. Lee: It definitely worked. Beyond the Bronx, the song took America and the world by storm. The Message peaked at number four on the Billboard R&B Charts and Rolling Stone eventually named it one of the 500 greatest songs of all time.
Mel: And when people actually heard the record, and it was people that didn't like rap at all, but they like that record because it was more, you know, it had a subject to it. You know, don't push me 'cause I'm close to the edge, I'm trying not to lose my head. That could be anybody.
That could be somebody in the Ukraine right now. That could have been, you know, New Orleans, that could be them. It could be anybody. So I guess that's what resonated and that was the beginning of conscious hip-hop.
T. Lee: It was the beginning of a new movement in hip-hop culture.
Archival Recording: This was affirmation and it also reminded us that, man, we could tell a story like that. We could let people know where we're from and talk about what was happening.
Archival Recording: When The Message came out, now it was the first time you could be certain that this genre could be the most profound articulation of political social vision, like, ever produced.
T. Lee: But hip-hop has never been just about the music.
Archival Recording: Whether it's graffiti, whether it's dance or whether it's, you know, music, hip-hop is the thing that we all have in common. It was really that you just wanted people to know that you're here and you exist.
T. Lee: And the seismic shift caused by The Message and its framework to speak unflinchingly to reality in America, and to make change came just in time, because at the dawn of the '80s, the Black community was about to come under siege.
Reagan: Today, there's a new epidemic. Smokable cocaine, otherwise known as crack. It is an explosively destructive and often lethal substance which is crushing its users.
Archival Recording: The president set a very deeply ambitious goal, nothing less than a national crusade against drug abuse. Drawing a comparison to World War II, the president --
Archival Recording: I mean, the entire generation is criminalized artistically, socially, politically, and aesthetically. So you look like you're from the hood, then you are part of a hip-hop gang, right? And they get collapsed together as an easy bucket to criminalize Black youth as a whole.
T. Lee: I'm Trymaine Lee and this is Into America.
Through the '80s, as hip-hop is becoming more conscious with its lyrics, young artists are expanding the art form to include dance, fashion and graffiti. This visual expression of self is met with a police crackdown. And as drugs sweep through Black communities, the government's response is devastating. But hip-hop is there to fight back.
Here is part two of Street Disciples: Broken Glass Everywhere.
From the rubble of segregation and disinvestment, hip-hop was evolving. Melting and blending everything that came before it to create something new.
In fundamental ways, the innovators of art took scraps and made miracles. But in order for hip-hop, the music to become hip-hop, the culture, singular distinct art forms growing simultaneously had to meld.
Just as The Message reflected a kind of bleak reality of urban life in lyrics, other forms of artistry would stretch and twist and reimagine the boundaries of that reality. Often, literally coloring outside of the lines, filling in the cultural contours of their environments in brand new wings.
These hip-hop compatriots found shared values, audiences and impulses with the DJs and MCs. And like Voltron, all of these individual parts came together to create a cultural force, greater and more powerful than anyone could've ever imagined.
Key to this evolution would be things like fashion and the visual arts. And even Melle Mel, the man who wrote some of the most important bars of rap music expressed themselves through more than just rhymes.
Mel: I started out as a B-boy. I was a break dancer.
T. Lee: Dance has been at the center of hip-hop since the beginning.
Mel: You know, we had good moves, good hands, you know, quick feet.
T. Lee: Without those B-boys waiting to get down during the break beats, DJ Kool Herc might have never innovated his technique of looping those breaks, the foundation of hip-hop music. And as the music matured and expanded, so did breakdancing.
Mel: Crazy legs and having spinning on your head and all that.
T. Lee: These young dancers were pushing the limits of their bodies and gravity. Here's famous break dancer, Mr. Freeze, from the 2014 PBS documentary: A History of Break Dance. Recalling the first time he saw B-boying as a kid.
Mr. Freeze: I remember, we're in a circle watching, there's a gentleman that jumped up in the air and went down to a pose which now we call a freeze, of course. But everybody was completely mesmerized by it.
T. Lee: Many of the pioneering B-boys, including the legendary Crazy Legs, had Caribbean roots. Here's Crazy Legs in that same documentary.
Crazy Legs: Being Puerto Rican and utilizing the dance steps from salsa, mambo and things like that, that have a direct influence on us because we are Puerto Rican, Dominican, Cuban, whatever.
So the moves come from many different places, many different backgrounds, some gangsters, some churchgoers.
(LAUGHTER)
Yeah. You know.
T. Lee: Beyond being able to move, Melle Mel says being a B-boy required having a certain sense of style.
Mel: You did all your moves, but you had to look as clean as possible. We used to wear the Lee jeans and then the Pumas. And you get like a half a can of spray starch and make sure that crease be, like, you could almost stand the pants up, like, you know, because there'd be so much starch. It was like a finesse game, like who had the most finesse as far as with their moves and their dancing and especially the look.
T. Lee: Clothing has always been a part of self-expression. And as hip-hop took off in New York, so did the culture’s style.
Dapper Dan: Hip-hop made it possible for me to express myself through fashion.
T. Lee: Dapper Dan is the Godfather of Hip-hop fashion. He's a little older than most of the other hip-hop pioneers, already grown when the music and dancing were coming into their own.
He was a fashion designer in Harlem, as the culture was still stitching itself together.
Dan: Hip-hop had no identity. They had no fashion identity because there was an emerging desire for fashion, but their fashion really didn't cater to the street. So the street used to put things together.
T. Lee: Back then, neighborhood guys with money, the hustlers and drug dealers, they set the standard, taking high fashion and remixing it for the streets.
Dan: So what are the elements? The elements is diamonds, gold, you know, luxury. Everybody wants to brag, braggadocio, all of that, right. So I took all that and packaged it up. And then as hip-hop began to emerge, and they begin to make money independently, separate from the street culture, that's when everything changed.
T. Lee: By the early '80s, immaculate tracksuits, gold chains and fresh kicks were the uniform. Professor Mark Anthony Neal says, "No group embodies this more than Run-D.M.C.”
Mark Anthony Neal: They're doubling down on the look of the leather jackets and the untied Adidas and all those kinds of things.
T. Lee: Run-D.M.C. didn't just rock Adidas, they wrote a whole song about them. An anthem that eventually got them sponsored by the iconic international sports brand.
My Adidas, Run-D.M.C.: We started in the alley, now we chill in Cali. And I won't trade my Adidas for no beat up Bally's. My Adidas.
Neal: By the time we get to Run-D.M.C., you know, music television is a thing. And so the marriage of this new presentation form in terms of music videos, with Run-D.M.C.'s cognizance of a look of what Run-D.M.C. is, which then becomes an extension of the look of hip-hop, really creates a moment where the visual and the sounds go together.
The attitude that comes together, from how they look and how they sound, you know, became part of the selling, part of the music.
Dan: Fashion is one of the biggest and most exciting things about hip-hop. Everybody can't be a rapper.
Cey Adams: The clothes that we wore, really, told people who we are. And, you know, as a teenage kid, that's really important, to be able to have something that helps you identify other people that, you know, are into the same things that you're into.
T. Lee: Cey Adams was a part of hip-hop culture but his entry point was dance or music. He was a graffiti artist.
Adams: My idea was always like advertising. You have to be able to see my name from blocks away.
T. Lee: The relatively recent invention of inexpensive and readily available permanent markers and spray paint made it easy to quickly create bold lasting marks. And by the mid '70s, graffiti artists were using New York City itself as one huge canvas.
Adams: For me, it was bold outline, bright colors, positive message. And I never strayed from that.
T. Lee: Melle Mel remembers that when hip-hop music was new and looking for an aesthetic, graffiti was right there.
Mel: It kind of merged with hip-hop. And when we was doing parties, we always had, like, our guy was Phase 2, so he was, like, one of the famous graffiti writers and he did most of our flyers.
So graffiti became almost like a calling card, per se. You put graffiti on something and somebody automatically related it to hip-hop.
Neal: It is a practice that is attempting to push back against authority. And so in that regard, it aligned very perfectly to some of the energies that we started to hear from hip-hop in the early 1970s.
T. Lee: Just like the music, graffiti was a response to the city's physical neglect of Black neighborhoods.
Archival Recording: What people it’s benign neglect of urban space, it was not benign. It was just neglect.
And that neglect meant that you just had a constant set of, you know, trash wasn't being picked up and things weren't being painted over and, you know, nothing was being repaired. You just had a very beat-down physical environment.
T. Lee: Literally leaving a mark on buildings and subway trains became a way to take up and claim space for the culture and tell a city had left its Black children behind that we are here.
Archival Recording: I've seen graffiti all over the place. Graffiti in the schools, graffiti on the streets, graffiti on abandoned buildings, graffiti on the derelict cars, graffiti on the trains. When you go to the train station, you see all these train cars with all this beautiful graffiti on it.
Archival Recording: And they were incredible. People would try to get to certain stations if they knew that someone's, you know, art was going to be coming through because they knew they could get written over and also painted over at any time.
Adams: We used to call them blockbusters back in the day, top to bottom, top to bottom, whole car, end-to-end.
T. Lee: Cey Adams grew up in Jamaica, Queens, and got his start on the graffiti scene during the early '80s. He did a little of everything when it came to graffiti. But these blockbusters were always something special.
Adams: And you just want to knock people over. So if they're on a subway platform on the opposite side, that train pulls in, you want people to be able to see it.
T. Lee: How was graffiti a response to the economic conditions at the time?
Adams: There was never a program that helped me nurture my talents. I was born an artist. I didn't even have a thought of, oh, that's what I want to do. It was just inside me. And I think that graffiti became that outlet for us.
We had to steal our paint to be able to do what we had to do. We had to steal our materials and make the work that we made.
T. Lee: What's the first public thing that you tagged or drew on?
Adams: Well in my neighborhood in Queens, they, you know, had handball courts. And the goal was always to paint a full handball court from the top to bottom.
You know, the thing might be 25 feet high and 50 feet wide. It's gigantic. And it took me a couple of years before my skills got to that place, but once I did, that was the goal, to make a full handball court.
T. Lee: But it was largely illegal, right? I mean, did you care about the legality of it, or?
Adams: Well, I mean that is true. But it's a wall. Who am I hurting painting a wall? And the way we thought about it, we were beautifying our community. We were giving something back.
It was really that you just wanted people to know that you're here and you exist. It's probably the same reason that people rapped on a record. Hey, look at me, I'm over here. I'm doing something important. Notice me.
We're trying to change our circumstances. One spray paint mural at a time. One dance move at a time. One rap record at a time. We are literally working to change our environment.
T. Lee: But the power structure didn't necessarily see it as you're beautifying your neighborhoods. How did the power structure see it?
Adams: Just like, you know, that we were vandals. We were troublemakers, we were rabble-rousers. We were young Black and brown kids that, in their mind, was a problem. But for us, all we're trying to do is to be heard.
T. Lee: Professor Tricia Rose from Brown University grew up in the Bronx. She remembers being in all of the expansive murals and those beautiful blockbuster train car covers. But to her, all graffiti wasn't the same.
Tricia Rose: Most people tagged their name all over the universe of New York City, OK? And it really wasn't all that pretty. I mean, I'm going to tell you the truth from my perspective as a teenager, the trains were a hot mess. It felt, like, that this was a sign that people were just destroying their environment, and there was real fights about it.
T. Lee: Professor Rose says the city exploited that tension.
Rose: So there was an ability to piggyback on the anger of community members that the police and the, you know, the municipal government participated in to basically criminalize graffiti as a sign of disorder.
So in some ways, it's the beginning of broken windows policing, and you attach it as a symbol to a broader narrative of decline.
T. Lee: Broken windows is a theory developed in 1982 by two white sociologists. Their idea was that by cracking down on small visible signs of so-called disorder, police could prevent bigger crimes.
Rose: It's an approach to crime that actually was never proven to be valid. The concept of this hypothesis was that if you are very strict on very small infractions in a community, it will prevent bigger crime.
So it's a response to, sort of, extreme policing for tiny things and things that should be misdemeanors that shouldn't be terribly punished. And that if you come bring the hammer down on those and you surveil people using that philosophy, then it will prevent greater crime.
T. Lee: The city had been taking this approach to graffiti almost since the first tags appeared. Even when New York was on the verge of bankruptcy, the city devoted tens of millions of dollars to anti-graffiti efforts.
Archival Recording: Some people think vandalizing T.A. property is fun. Some people think vandalizing T.A. property is art. Vandalizing T.A. property is illegal.
T. Lee: Transit police were told to arrest any suspected taggers and they specifically targeted young Black and Puerto Rican men.
Rose: So graffiti was a perfect easy example. It was low-hanging fruit to justify all kinds of things.
T. Lee: But while the city was criminalizing graffiti, the art form was also finding patrons on the Downtown art scene.
Adams: Downtown in New York was a gritty, rough place. But we all knew each other. Fab 5 Freddy was a buddy of mine. Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Futura 2000, DONDI White, these are all, you know, giants of hip-hop culture and, you know, contemporary art.
T. Lee: But how different, what was happening downtown, from like Harlem and the Bronx?
Adams: There was an excitement that was very different than what was going on in my neighborhood. There was excitement there too, but it was just a different thing.
When you would (ph) hear people talking about the jams in the park, that was what was going on in the neighborhood, you know, Uptown, the Bronx, Queens.
But when it came to trying to find a market for your art, you had to go Downtown for that. That's where the collectors were. That was where the galleries were.
T. Lee: Downtown was a universe away from hip-hop's birthplace in the Bronx. It was a bridge that connected the underground to the mainstream.
By the time the white band Blondie released their video for Rapture in 1981 featuring Basquiat behind a pair of turntables and graffiti artists tagging the wall and said, the culture was finding a whole new audience. Rapture was the very first song featuring rap ever played on MTV.
Rapture, Blondie: Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody's fly. DJ spinnin' I said, "My my." Flash is fast, Flash is cool, François c'est pas, Flash ain't no dude. And you don't stop, sure shot. Go out to the parking lot --
T. Lee: And making his way around the outer orbit of this downtown crowd was an inspiring artist and model named Michael Stewart. He bumped shoulders with dancers and other artists at clubs like Pyramid and Lucky Strike. He even appeared in the audience for Madonna's very first music video.
But in the middle of the night, on September 15th, 1983, Michael was heading back to his parents' home in Brooklyn after a night of partying on the Lower East Side when police say he began tagging the wall of a subway station. Witnesses say a group of police officers then cuffed and beat him.
Archival Recording: Michael Stewart was brought to Bellevue Hospital unconscious. The family charges the police beat up the young man. The T.A. police deny it.
T. Lee: Whatever happened, Michael never regained consciousness and he died 13 days later at just 25 years old.
Archival Recording: Two physicians retained by the family have told News 4 New York that hemorrhages in Michael's eyes indicate he could have been strangled.
T. Lee: Witnesses later testified they could hear Michael's cries for help. And one said, he saw an officer choke Michael with a night stick.
The police department insisted that it was Michael who had been violent that night. Eventually, an all-white grand jury would clear the officers of wrongdoing.
Adams: A lot of us did tributes to him. Jean-Michel did tributes to him. Keith Haring did tributes to him. You know, we would tag things, you know, Michael Stewart rest in peace. Really, we were outraged, but we were also scared.
Rose: It was an incident that really galvanized young people who were, at that point, perhaps, you know, a little bit less aware of how dangerous this could be, that they would literally kick and beat you to death for writing on the wall.
Adams: The thing that to me is really important about Michael Stewart is that he was a representative of a lot of us. And the idea that he could be killed just because he had a magic marker in his hand is a shame. It's a direct reminder. They don't like us, they don't like the way we look and, you know, you shouldn't be around here.
T. Lee: Michael Stewart was the victim of a system that deemed young Black men and boys criminal and hip-hop dangerous.
But 1983 was just the beginning. Crack cocaine was about to hit the streets, and nothing would ever be the same again.
Reagan: My very reason for being here this afternoon is not to announce another short-term government offensive, but to call instead for the national crusade against drugs. A sustained, relentless effort to rid America of this scourge by mobilizing every segment of our society against drug abuse.
T. Lee: That's next. Stick with us.
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Reagan: Today, there's a new epidemic, smokable cocaine, otherwise known as crack. It is an explosively destructive and often lethal substance which is crushing its users. It is an uncontrolled fire.
T. Lee: In September of 1986, President Ronald Reagan and First Lady Nancy Reagan addressed the nation about the drug crisis in America.
Nancy Reagan: Say yes to your life. And when it comes to drugs and alcohol, just say no.
Archival Recording: The president and Mrs. Reagan set a very deeply ambitious goal of nothing less than a national crusade against drug abuse. Drawing a comparison to World War II, the president said, now we are in another fight for our freedom.
Reagan: And drug abuse is not a so-called victimless crime.
T. Lee: As the Reagans were condemning drug use, the Contras, a right-wing counterrevolutionary group in Nicaragua supported by the Reagan Administration, were funneling tons of cocaine into the U.S. to help fund their war against the socialist Sandinistas who had overthrown Nicaragua's government.
Officials at the highest levels of the U.S. government were either complicit or turned a blind eye as these forces allied with the administration were trafficking cocaine into the country.
And about a year before Reagan's address, awash in Central America cocaine, crack started appearing on the streets. When people discovered a cheap and easy way to convert coke from powder to solid rock.
Crack is smoked or freebased, giving the user a quicker, more intense high than powder cocaine, which is sniffed. Crack was much cheaper, more readily available and because of crack's short-lived high, addicts needed to chase it. And chase, they did.
But the media, they chased it too, giving a hyped-up play-by-play of the whole frenzy.
Archival Recording: Few have become so popular, so potent, so addictive so fast as what's known on the street as crack. The crack problem has become a crack crisis as it's spreading nationwide.
T. Lee: Take this report from CBS Evening News in 1986 which is full of b-roll of Black people and closeup shots of crack vials.
Archival Recording: This is it. The drug so powerful it will empty the money from your pockets; make you sell the watch off your wrist, the clothes off your back.
Archival Recording: Or kill your mother.
Archival Recording: Yeah, that's what we're seeing.
T. Lee: At the time, officials said crack was stronger and more addictive than cocaine. And there was a widespread belief that crack users were more violent. Both these claims later proved to be far overblown. But it was too late. Politicians were already crafting laws around the new drug.
Archival Recording: The president signed a new $1.7 billion anti-drug bill calling it a major victory in the nation's war on drugs. The new law provides more money for intercepting illegal drugs and requires tougher penalties for drug dealers.
T. Lee: Tougher doesn't really do it justice. The 1986 Anti-Drug Act set mandatory minimum sentencing for drug offenses. But the punishments for crack were harsher than for powder cocaine, much harsher.
A person could get the same sentence for selling a hundred times more cocaine than crack. For example, if you're caught with five grams of crack, the weight of two pennies, came with a minimum of five years in prison.
To get five years in prison for powder cocaine, a person would have to be carrying 500 grams of the stuff, about the size of a loaf of bread. This discrepancy was felt on the streets immediately.
Archival Recording: It felt like a logo, like a logo for harassing certain people.
Rose: I mean, it was entirely targeting Black people.
T. Lee: Dr. Tricia Rose says regardless of the official "rationale" the sentencing disparity had a clear aim. Powder cocaine with its shorter sentences was expensive and favored by richer whiter users. Crack, on the other hand, was associated with poor Black inner-city neighborhoods, despite Black and white people using crack at similar rates.
Rose: You know, maximum sentencing, double standards for sentencing between crack and cocaine because, you know, crack was just devastating Black communities, which are all hyper-unemployed, you know, and have very few job prospects. And all of that lack of investment, that was neglect, that was not benign.
Dan: They only reacted to the money and the way the money was flowing. There had never been so many young people with so much money. And so, they was completely captivated by the money that was in the street at the time.
T. Lee: Dapper Dan, the now-famous fashion designer, was getting his store off the ground in Harlem as crack was taking hold in New York. And he saw both sides of the story.
Dan: There was like a certain respectable social feel in Harlem up until the crack epidemic.
T. Lee: Hmm.
Dan: And then that was it. You know, like those forces that were controlling neighborhoods and had a big impact on neighborhoods, lost it. You know?
T. Lee: Hmm. So you have that shift with crack changes everything, right, obviously our families, our communities --
Dan: Yes, it changed everything.
T. Lee: -- our homes, but there was also a lot of money being pumped into the communities circulating through the drug markets. How did that affect --
Dan: Yeah.
T. Lee: -- what was happening culturally? Like did the drug dealer attain like a higher status at the point?
Dan: During the crack epidemic, it just collapsed a whole family. And the drug dealers became the new symbol of the community, the symbols of the hood. And that's what made the change.
T. Lee: When Dap started selling high-end bespoke clothing, it was no surprise who came through first.
Dan: I decided to open up the store and cater to street people because those are the only clientele that had the money that could afford the kind of things that I was going to make.
T. Lee: At the time, Dapper Dan was mostly selling furs and custom clothes inspired by the fashion and Afro-centric style that he saw on a visit to the Congo. Then one day a bigtime Harlem heroin dealer rode up.
Dan: When Jack Jackson came into the store, he had a Louis Vuitton pouch.
T. Lee: This was a big deal. Most people in the neighborhood back then, even the rich drug dealers, had difficulty accessing those super high-end luxury brands.
Dan: Everybody got excited. He's pulling hundred dollar bills out this pouch.
T. Lee: Hmm.
Dan: And I say, wow, I had already been studying symbolism and what it meant. I say, why they so excited about that pouch? It ain’t but $5 worth of vinyl. And so I said, it's the symbols.
T. Lee: But Dap couldn't stock brands like Louis Vuitton, they refused to work with him.
Dan: So all the brands that wouldn't sell to me, so I say, you know, I could take those symbols and use them in a way they’d never been used before.
T. Lee: Hmm.
Dan: And that's when I began to teach myself everything about textile printing.
T. Lee: Dap starting printing his own fabrics, taking those luxury brand logos and remixing them into clothes for the streets.
Today, the line between luxury and street is more blurred. Like how the late streetwear designer, Virgil Abloh was artistic director for Louis Vuitton but used his Off-White fashion label to design exclusive high-end Nike's.
But in the early '80s, what Dapper Dan what doing was revolutionary. And once the drug dealers got on board, everyone wanted a piece.
Dan: We all wanted to be like the hustlers in Harlem. Even the original rappers that were coming to me, all of them wanted to dress like the gangsters in Harlem there because those are the ones, I mean, you could still see variations of it today. All the diamonds and jewelry, that's a holdover from that part of the culture.
T. Lee: By the mid '80s, Dapper Dan wasn't just dressing rappers in style of drug dealers. Rappers were coming to him for their own looks.
Dan: So as the artists is coming in, I'm paying attention to their lyrics and how they wanted to represent themselves. I knew early on, like you hear me say, I did not dictate fashion, I translate culture.
T. Lee: In 1985, Dap got a big break in hip-hop when he first styled LL Cool J, who, at just 15, became the youngest rapper with a record deal at the fledgling Def Jam Records. LL would become the hip-hop fashion icon in his own way with those Dapper Dan-made luxury designer tracksuits, kangol hats, and of course the gold duke (ph) chains.
LL became a regular at Dan's shop and soon some of the biggest names in the game were coming in.
Dan: When Eric B & Rakim came, Eric B is a swag guy, so I made him swagged out. Rakim is a 5-percenter, so I put the 5-percenter image in and gave him that look, right.
T. Lee: Eric B was a cutting-edge DJ who used unexpected eclectic samples and had found a young MC with a signature style to match his own elevated approach. His name, Rakim.
Rakim's flow, with its complicated rhyme structure and subject matter, a kind of street theology, was different from anything else any other rapper was doing at the time.
While stars like Run-D.M.C. were hype, staccato, in your face, Rakim was stoic, laid back and intentional with supreme lyricism. He was the end of one era and the beginning of another. He took the name Rakim Allah, the God MC and no one objected.
I Know You Got Soul, Eric B & Rakim: Picture a mic, the stage is empty. A beat like this might tempt me, to pose, show my rings and my fat gold chain, grab the mic like I'm on Soul Train. But I'll wait 'cause I mastered this. Let the others go first so the brothers don't miss. Eric B. break the sticks. You got it. Rakim will begin when you make the mix. I'll experiment like a scientist. You want to rhyme, you gotta sign my list.
T. Lee: In the summer of 1987, Eric B & Rakim released their first full-length album, Paid in Full. On the cover, both were wearing Dapper Dan originals, black and white leather jackets with oversized Gucci logos.
Dap also designed for the legendary crew out of the Bronx, Boogie Down Productions led by KRS-One.
Dan: When Boogie Down Production came --
T. Lee: Uh-hmm.
Dan: -- I listened to their lyrics and what they was (ph), and at that time they was involved in Jamaican culture. So I made them outfits --
T. Lee: Uh-hmm.
Dan: -- with regulars, logos and stuff like that but I used all the Jamaican styles --
T. Lee: Uh-hmm.
Dan: -- and Jamaican colors, OK?
T. Lee: The group was pushing the boundaries of conscious rap. Their track, Illegal Business from their 1988 album, By All Means Necessary, addressed the over-policing and hypocrisy that defined the war in drugs.
Illegal Business, KRS-One: So here is the deal, and here is the facts. If you ever wonder why they can't stop crack, the police department, is like a crew. It does whatever they want to do.
In society you have illegal and legal, we need both, to make things equal. So legal is tobacco, illegal is speed, legal is aspirin, illegal is weed. Crack is illegal, cause they cannot stop ya, but cocaine is legal if it's owned by a doctor.
T. Lee: While The Message from the Furious Five was a reflection of ghetto life in their moment, as the decade went on, MCs like KRS-One were getting more explicit in their critique of the injustices wielded against Black America.
Archival Recording: I know for a fact that hip-hop artists in many cases, and often, felt the burden of their times and wanted to speak to those issues.
T. Lee: Anti-drug policies and enforcement tactics were in full swing. At the start of the decade, a Black person was three times more likely to be arrested for a drug-related offense than a white person.
By 1989, a Black person was five and a half times more likely to be arrested. Reagan's war on drugs was essentially a war on poor Black people and as prisons were beginning to fill up with drug offenders, the consequences of this war on drugs were devastating for Black communities.
Rose: I think, in some ways, many of us lived through it and didn't understand it until we looked back.
T. Lee: Dr. Tricia Rose was in New York during this time.
Rose: And there was a tremendous amount of protest about police violence, but the sense that there was an orchestrated system, right, a mass incarceration system designed to ensnare you and walk you through every piece of that system, right, all the humiliation, all the economic evisceration, all the surveillance and targeting forever.
And all of the ways that small amounts of drugs were being criminalized in Black communities and being treated with rehab elsewhere and other communities, you had a general sense of those pieces, but they didn't yet come into view as a system.
T. Lee: But that way of viewing all of these pieces as a system would soon come into focus and hip-hop was among the first art forms to connect the dots. Perhaps no group defines this moment of hip-hop's social maturation as a culture as a radical megaphone more than Public Enemy whose logo was a B-boy in crosshairs.
Neal: Public Enemy was the thing that really brought together a kind of generational consciousness. Public Enemy's music was the music of that consciousness.
Harry Allen: The thing that connected me to Hank, and Bill, and Chuck, and Flav, and Terminate and all of them, was that in an era where everybody was saying hip-hop was a fad, these were the first guys I had ever met and took it completely seriously.
T. Lee: Harry Allen, a hip-hop activist and journalist, goes way back with Public Enemy and before their first album. And you might recall PE famously dropping its name in a song, Don't Believe the Hype.
Don't Believe the Hype, Public Enemy: I'm going' to my media assassin, Harry Allen, I gotta ask him. Yo, Harry, you're a writer, are we that type? Don't believe the hype.
Allen: I would say especially in this earlier era at that time, there was a lot of thinking about political change and the music affecting it or at least being, if you will, a megaphone or a microphone for it, a place where we could talk about these things.
T. Lee: It was their 1987 debut album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show with songs like You're Gonna Get Yours that established their ethos, unapologetically pro-Black, militant, rebellious, taking aim at corrupt cops and the government who supports them all embodied by Chuck D's legendary booming voice.
You're Gonna Get Yours, Public Enemy: No cop got a right to call me a punk. Take this ticket, go to hell and stick it. Put me on a kick but line up, times up. This government needs a tune up. I don't even know what's happenin', what's up? Gun in my chest, I'm under arrest.
Adams: When I started making work, I knew right away I wanted to change the look and feel of Black music. And I set out to do that one album design at a time.
T. Lee: Cey Adams, the visual artist who got his start in graffiti worked with Public Enemy on some of their iconic album covers.
Adams: And so, having allies like my friend Chuck D from Public Enemy have a similar mindset, I thought, this is different than your grandfather's R&B. We're going to really, you know, flip it. We were literally going to shake things up.
T. Lee: At this time, up and coming director Spike Lee was working on his new movie, the now-iconic Do the Right Thing. It tackled racism and police brutality in late '80s Brooklyn. And with the characters dressed in Jordans and gold chains, this was hip-hop.
Archival Recording: Not only did ya knock me down, you stepped on my brand-new white Air Jordans I just bought, and that's all you can say is "excuse me"?
Archival Recording: What, are you serious?
Archival Recording: Yeah, I'm serious, I'll fuck you up quick two times.
Archival Recording: Two times.
Archival Recording: Who told you to step on my sneakers, who told you to walk on my side of the block, who told you to be in my neighborhood?
Archival Recording: I own this brownstone.
Archival Recording: Who told you to buy a brownstone on my block, in my neighborhood, on my side of the street?
T. Lee: When Spike needed an anthem for the film, he turned to Public Enemy and they gave him, Fight the Power.
Fight the Power, Public Enemy: Our freedom of speech is freedom or death. We got to fight the powers that be. Lemme hear you say, fight the power. Fight the power. Fight the power. Fight the power. Fight the power. Fight the power. Fight the power. We've got to fight the powers that be.
Allen: It wasn't just a record to move or dance to, it was a statement about breaking through, about breaking through and saving ourselves.
T. Lee: Fight the Power plays throughout Do the Right Thing. It's under the opening credits with Brooklyn-born actress, Rosie Perez, dancing and mean-mugging to it. And it's what one of the characters Radio Raheem blast all day on his boombox. (MUSIC PLAYING)
Archival Recording: Yo, is that the only tape you got?
Archival Recording: You don't like Public Enemy, man? The shit's dope!
Archival Recording: I'm down! But, you don't be playin' nothing else.
Archival Recording: I don't like nothing else.
Archival Recording: Yo, check this man. You know Sal --
T. Lee: And it's playing in the pivotal scene when Sal, the white pizzeria owner, smashes Radio Raheem’s boombox. The two fight and then the police show up. One grabs Radio Raheem, choking him from behind with a billy club, lifting him off the ground until his body goes limb.
Archival Recording: Gary, that's enough. Gary, that's enough man.
T. Lee: Strangled to death by a police officer. If this sounds familiar, it's not a coincidence. Spike explained his inspiration for the scene in a 2019 interview with The New York Times.
Spike Lee: Michael Stewart, a graffiti artist, he's about as big as I am. Eleven New York City transit police jumped on him and strangled our brother to death. That's where I got the idea for the chokehold murder of Radio Raheem.
T. Lee: Years before Eric Garner, before George Floyd, Spike Lee put this police brutally on display, on the big screen for the world to watch. And Public Enemy gave the hip-hop generation a song to understand, how the system was complicit in their oppression. And their rallying cry to fight back. All on a foundation laid at the start of the decade by The Message.
Allen: I think if we look at the history of Black music over time, from the music of the enslaved to the present, I think we always find in all of them a call for freedom, for justice.
And I think that the social forces, and the uses of technology, and even political change, I think allowed hip-hop to kind of like be more expressive and say things that, in many cases, hadn't been said because I'm finally going to get this off my chest, so-to-speak, not as an individual but as a culture, so-to-speak.
T. Lee: As the '80s were coming to an end, a new hip-hop generation had found its anthem and its voice. And it was strong, so strong that it shook the powers that be.
Rose: We do not want to underestimate how frightened people were about the potential of hip-hop. It's easy to forget unless you really listened back at what it meant to hear hundreds and hundreds, in some cases, thousands of Black kids, you know, like yelling back the lyrics at the singer, at the MC, just the sense of like, hey, you, you're not the only one with a microphone, right?
T. Lee: I'd also imagined the kind of articulation of anger and discontent in the difference. It's one thing’s that you’re weary but you're resilient in the blues and gospel and there's something else on the side. It's another thing to say, fight the power.
Rose: Yeah, exactly.
T. Lee: That's a whole different ballgame, right.
Rose: It's one thing to say I'm weary. It's a whole another thing to say, you know, eff the police, fight the power, we're not taking any more nonsense. And then it's like, OK, well what's next?
T. Lee: What's next is coming up in part three of Street Disciples.
Next week, the violence from the state and the increasing violence within the community reaches a boiling point. Artists make a call for peace as a provocative new sound is emerging on the West Coast.
Artists like N.W.A were pushing rap into a new era, speaking to a specific kind of violence and police brutality in L.A., with a sound that was bold, brash, and unyielding.
They called it reality rap, but the world would know it as gangsta rap.
Fuck Tha Police, N.W.A: Fuck the police comin' straight from the underground. A Young nigga got it bad 'cause I'm brown, and not the other color so police think they have the authority to kill a minority.
T. Lee: I speak with the remarkable D.O.C., a rapper, writer and producer behind much of N.W.A's most important work, including Straight Outta Compton, who also went on to co-found Death Row Records with the infamous Suge Knight.
Archival Recording: But those out there that are raised for war, you know. They're raised to be on a pivot all the time and you have to kill or be killed or, you know, you have to watch everybody.
T. Lee: That's on episode three of Street Disciples: American's Most Wanted.
Follow us on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook. Using the handle @intoamerica record pod or you can tweet me @tyramainelee, that's @trymainelee, my full name. And if you want to write to us, our e-mail is intoamerica@nbcuni.com. That was intoamerica@nbc and the letters uni.com.
If you love the show, help spread the word. You can do that by rating and reviewing Into America on Apple Podcast or wherever you're listening right now.
Into America is produced by Isabel Angell, Allison Bailey, Mike Brown, Aaron Dalton, Max Jacobs, and Janmaris Perez. Original music is by Hannis Brown. Our executive producer Aisha Turner. Thanks to Stefanie Cargill, Joe Hoerdermann and Jim Mueller for recording help.
And an extra special thank you to Cedric Wilson and Bryson Barnes for sound design this week.
I'm Trymaine Lee. We'll be back next Thursday with the next episode of Street Disciples.
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