by John Beckman
But the cultural revolution had already happened, sometime in the middle sixties, and Abbie Hoffman had been one of the players. Woodstock Nation was up and running, but it wasn’t quite what he wanted it to be. Thanks to promoters, advertisers, movies, television, rock stars, and popular fashion, it rather resembled the frictionless freedom that had bored him at Antioch College: even the most radical fun had somehow become the status quo, and the mass of young white citizens felt entitled to it. It left some Americans wanting more—bomb-throwing Weathermen, acidheads turned heroin addicts, even the hardened Hoffman and Rubin—but what they wanted wasn’t exactly fun.
THAT SAME MONTH, in California, the “rock revolution” lost what moral force it may once have had. On the eighth and ninth of August, in the canyons of Los Angeles, a cult called “the Family” that had made a religion out of the Beatles’ White Album (1968) followed the orders of its leader, Charles Manson, and went on a gruesome killing spree—most notably stabbing to death the actress Sharon Tate, who was eight and a half months pregnant at the time. Among the messages they scrawled in their victims’ blood were references to “pigs” and the song title “Helter Skelter.” And in December of that year, at a free rock concert at San Francisco’s Altamont Speedway, Mick Jagger looked on in apparent nausea while some Hell’s Angels, who had been hired as security, stabbed a young black man to death by the stage.
The late-1960s rock revolution had dubious democratic potential. Not lively and kinetic like the “jazz revolution,” where bands and dancers goaded each other to higher levels of personal achievement, the rock revolution was a spectator sport, demanding nothing but echoes and applause. Not risky and kinetic like the pranks of the era, it welcomed passive participation. Rock led its would-be revolutionaries out beyond the law, and often it just left them there.
But Woodstock featured at least one band of outlaws whose star-spangled spectacle and outright audacity flooded all three of American fun’s rivers—the commercial, the wild-partying, and the political; a music whose excitement and fat, driving bass lines set a fast, funky pace for decades of American culture to come. The concertgoers had slogged in the mud for three days, sodden with hunger, overcrowding, and confusion, when, on Sunday night, in a plasmatic flash, the eye-poppingly dramatic Sly and the Family Stone, San Francisco’s latest pop sensation, jolted them with, as Steve Lake described it, “Sly’s ecstatic exuberance”: “Half a million clenched fists and peace signs rising into the air in a massive human tidal wave of approval.” Sly Stone’s joyous revolt of self-affirmation met the people more than halfway, surrounding them with ripping horns, thrilling organs, wicked guitars, and a rhythm section that, like the drums on Congo Square, didn’t follow but led the way. What could the people do but dance? The songs sang imperatives of acceptance and action. They used mockery and irony to put bigotry down. But their tone was so open and irresistible that their politics didn’t divide. They just conquered.
Like most of the funk artists his music would inspire, Sylvester Stewart came of age fighting in civil rights conflicts. Born in 1943 and raised in racially mixed Vallejo, California, he divided his time between leading street gangs, participating in local race riots, and crafting a jumping pop-music style that yoked his talents on drums and guitar. His star rose fast. He was signed by Autumn Records in 1964, and while he popularized his eclectic tastes as a Bay Area disc jockey—mixing soul, folk, and the new psychedelia—he was forming a multiracial band that, as Greil Marcus describes it, vaulted right over the race and gender hypocrisy that plagued the Haight-Ashbury free-love experiment: “There were whites as well as blacks, women—who played real instruments—as well as men: ‘The Family.’ ” While the Mime Troupe went rummaging in America’s back closets for its ugliest instruments of racial division, Sly and the Family Stone—a “tribe” and a “family” in the hippies’ best sense—unearthed the nation’s cultural gold, the rhythm and blues and dance and humor that the minstrels could only envy and mimic. Sly refined these minerals using bebop complexity, made it sparkle with Sgt. Pepper–grade costumes, and tricked it out for his postmodern age. The Family Stone was ultrasophisticated fun, the newest groove, the latest craze, twinkling with the kinds of signifying tip-offs that educated Louis Armstrong’s most attentive listeners. But it was also pungent with earthy rusticity, with sledgehammer clangs, gospel moans, trickster myths, and the honky-tonk revelry that Zora Neale Hurston found in Polk County, Florida. It was the newest of the new in an age oversaturated with creativity and novelty; “Sly Stone owned pop music,” Rickey Vincent claims, “from 1968 to 1970”; the brash egalitarianism of infectious hits like “Everyday People,” “Stand!” “Fun,” “Life,” and “Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin)” added a futuristic glimmer to the Panthers’ “Black Power.” In these songs, black solidarity and soul emerged as America’s postnuclear worldwide weapon, the bomb that would bring us together. And yet for all these songs’ aggressive novelty, the listener sensed how old they were: centuries old.
The Family Stone released three albums and several singles proclaiming the virtues of radically inclusive fun—the joys of self-pride and rolling crowd power. Their honey-toned anthem, “Hot Fun in the Summertime,” briefly lifted ’69 above its culturally disenchanted fug. By early 1970, however, the angst would reach even jubilant Sly Stone. Addicted to cocaine, prone to missing or canceling shows, he soon moved on from the people-moving music that had dominated the world’s discotheques. His dark and moody album, There’s a Riot Going On, has since been recognized as the spiritual soundtrack of the blaxploitation era, when sex and flash and criminality met with heady self-examination. But the high-spirited fun, it seemed, was past.
Or was it? Sly Stone’s personal story turned somber, but his early music spawned a nationwide phenomenon of ecstatic, erotic, space-age dance music that answered to Buddy Bolden’s call sign: funk. The matrix for disco, hip-hop, and techno, the new code for funk was written in 1970 by George Clinton and his Wizard of Oz–like theatrical offspring, Parliament and Funkadelic. Kicking off a decades-long Vote-for-Fun campaign, these P-Funk All Stars played for keeps.
To give one solid example, in “Chocolate City”—Parliament’s 1975 vision of a black-occupied White House featuring Muhammad Ali, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, Richard Pryor, et al.—Clinton exhorted his fun-loving Americans with a prescient rhetorical question: “Who needs the bullet when you’ve got the ballot?”
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Doing It Yourself, Getting the Joke
THE SOUTH BRONX WAS a war zone in 1971. Three-quarters of all kids dropped out of high school, an estimated eleven thousand belonged to violent street gangs, and ongoing turf wars, drug wars, and race wars raged among the Puerto Rican majority and African-American minority. That December, Cornell Benjamin, a leader of the dominant gang, the Ghetto Brothers, was stomped to death for urging rival factions to bury their hatchets. Remarkably, instead of murdering the aggressors, the Ghetto Brothers only pummeled them, turned them loose, and called an historic summit at the Bronx Boys Club. Police snipers surrounded the block; TV crews filmed the scene inside, while members of the borough’s major and minor gangs, many of whom had grown acquainted through lethal combat, filled the gymnasium in bristling détente. In Benjamin’s honor, the Ghetto Brothers and other gang leaders broke the attendees into caucuses and discussed the tenets of a binding treaty. Afterwards they joined their hands as one group: “Peace!” they said, in resounding unison.
The peace treaty didn’t fix the Bronx—the police redoubled their gang-fighting efforts; kids kept settling scores with blood—but in its aftermath the gangs started to disintegrate. Some fell to drug abuse or lost group cohesion. The Black Spades and the Ghetto Brothers, two of the biggest, reconstituted themselves for community action—registering voters, securing health services, and, most auspiciously, throwing block parties.
Clive Campbell, an eighteen-year-old Jamaican immigrant, caught this new wave of urban creativity and res
tarted American popular culture. Or should bragging rights go to his sister Cindy? In the summer of 1973, she needed money for the freshest back-to-school clothes, so, in the spirit of 1920s rent parties, she hired out their building’s recreation room, bought cheap cases of Olde English 800, papered the neighborhood with James Brown–flavored flyers, and put her brother in charge of the music. Souping up their father’s sound system with tricky wiring that made it the loudest thing these kids had ever heard, Clive—known as Hercules around school for his pumped-up body, and as “Kool Herc” in his graffiti tags—laid the foundation for a style of party making that would coronate DJ Kool Herc the king of the Bronx. That night, behind his decks, after activating the crowd with some funk and soul, he read their excitement like Buddy Bolden. He developed a technique right there on the spot to bring their dancing to a fever pitch. Listening for the licks, beats, and breaks that freaked dancers out the most, he repeated, layered, and compounded those breaks, hour after groovy hour, channeling the flashing electricity of gangland into the rhythmic frenzy of hip-hop.
“Forget melody, chorus, songs,” he recalled. “It was all about the groove, building it, keeping it going.” Kool Herc’s spinning was masterful and coy—he took to soaking labels off records (an old Jamaican trick) to keep other DJs from copying his tracks. But it wasn’t just his magic spin. On the mic, as MC, Herc flirted with the crowd—giving shout-outs, rapping rhymes, fashioning with his friends a singular slang as flashy and fresh as the kids’ funky clothes, as their sparkly tags. Herc’s name took flight. Cindy used her clout in student government to throw a party on a cruise boat, and by the next summer they had graduated from rec rooms to block parties. The police ignored large swaths of the Bronx, rendering street permits unnecessary, so Herc plugged his sound system into streetlamps. He took ownership of the streets, as he had learned to do with cans of spray paint. Soon the Campbells were hosting big throbbing parties like the ones they remembered back in Kingston. In the same open air where gangs used to rumble, Herc’s booming voice gave permission and warning, promising to shut down at the first sign of trouble. Under these radically civil conditions, practicing Sons of Liberty restraint from violence, they could rage all night. Rolling from break to break to break, the indefatigable parties “broke daylight.”
The violence wasn’t gone. The violence was evolving. Inner-city dance in the early 1970s ignored the smooth trends in the discotheques. The hip kids adopted the lightning-flash footwork of the Black Power, “Say It Loud” godfather of soul. What James Brown did onstage started in his blurring, stamping feet then rocked and shimmied up his twisting frame. The full-body athleticism of B-boys and B-girls—break dancers or “breakers,” the new Bronx wave—copied James Brown’s fiery bodywork and merged it with the styles of their favorite combatants, most notably Bruce Lee and Muhammad Ali. The block-party scene of Herc and his rivals became the battleground for B-boys and B-girls. Their “crews,” like gangs, competed for turf. But their combat also signified a repertoire of “comic moves,” including, according to the music journalist Will Hermes, “Monty-Python-style funny walks, Charlie Chaplin penguin-stepping, and assorted pantomime riffs.”
Afrika Bambaataa, the son of Jamaican immigrants, had been a leader of the Black Spades during the truce of ’71. He knew the strategies of turf warfare. A charismatic community leader and popular DJ, he politicized Herc’s endless groove; blending a black pride philosophy with the B-boys’ and B-girls’ nonviolent rivalry, he came to “preside,” as the hip-hop historian Jeff Chang puts it, “over a ritual of motion and fun.” Under Bambaataa’s influence and discipline, hip-hop “organization” eclipsed old-school gang warfare. In 1975, when police killed his cousin Soulski, Bambaataa’s constructive response was to turn gangland into “Zulu Nation”—a ferocious crew of rappers and breakers who spread their Zulu motto throughout the tristate area: “Peace, Love, Unity, and Having Fun.”
Like the Lindy Hopping of King Leon’s Jolly Fellows, who ruled Cat’s Corner at the Savoy Ballroom, Zulu fun, despite its peaceful message, imported all of street fighting’s danger, strength, endurance, wits, bravery, skill, and ruthless vengeance into the breaker’s “cypher,” a ring of support and feverous competition as old in its heritage as African storytelling. In the cypher, on the street, whether on scraps of linoleum or on bare concrete, B-boys and B-girls, in their best athletic dress, pushed the limits of flesh and gravity to spin, pop, twist, stop, glide, slide, float, and fly—better than their rivals and always on time. Cuts and abrasions were the battle trophies of this latest rebel fun. But: the smoother the surface the finer your style. And: “If you break on the cement,” B-boy Tiny Love testified, “you’re, like, a raw motherfucker.” So, just as taggers tagged train cars and billboards as prominent tableaux for their illegal art, breakers employed the marble floors of lobbies for impromptu breaking sessions, until security shoved them along. B-boy Trac 2, looking back on that era, remarked “how innocent and pure” he and other preteens “were in that environment … with all those abandoned buildings.” For at-risk kids, devalued by society, break dancing was “very empowering. It allowed us to be who we are and express it the way we wanted to express it.” B-boys and B-girls of the mid-1970s, whether Zulus or otherwise, were the vanguard of a self-sufficient youth culture that didn’t look to cops, teachers, social workers, or parents to show them how civil society works. Their “play” didn’t ask for the “guidance” Duffus advised to an earlier generation. The America they had inherited needed major improvements. They set out to fix it as kids do best—by having fun.
Of course it was the old Gilded Age scam that pure fun can be simulated, packaged, and sold back to the people as mass amusement. DJs like Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa, and the newest innovator, Grandmaster Flash, had come to accept that their dance-party subculture could never get bigger than block parties and discos. It was a rolling, organic urban experience that required hip-hop’s “four elements”: DJing, MCing, breaking, and tagging. Like Zulu Nation, it was all about unity. Rapper Chuck D, who was a teenager at the time, remembers thinking hip-hop could never be recorded. “’Cause it was a whole gig, y’know? How you gon’ put three hours on a record?” But then in December 1979, just as hip-hop was dying of old age in the Bronx, a studio found three unknown rappers, called them the Sugar Hill Gang, pressed a fifteen-minute track called “Rapper’s Delight,” and captivated the world with a bright and tinny echo of hip-hop’s original street-level bomb.
IN THE 1970s and early 1980s, young Americans, in cliques and crews, fixed their own society by urging each other to scary new heights—of personal style, of cool expression, of musical power, of physical daring. Discontent with the rebellious styles in stores, kids aggressively reconstructed fashion with scissors, markers, paint, and rejects. Unwilling to trust TVs, magazines, and newspapers to report the news that really mattered, they commandeered photocopiers, Diggers-style, and connected their subcultures through posters and zines. Unamused by the machinery, toys, and playgrounds that were sold to them by the older generations, they went where they wanted and crafted new tools. And unsatisfied with the entertainment industry—with the overproduced hits of hard rock and disco, with the deeply entrenched trends in both movies and sports—they made their own music, invented their own dances, shot films in Super 8, and, inspired by their era’s athletic mavericks, pushed sports into unimaginable new territory.
Doing it yourself (or DIY, as it came to be known) was nothing new for Americans. Plymouth and Merry Mount were DIY colonies, though with contrary ideas of what “it” was. The Sons of Liberty were DIY revolutionaries, determined to build government from the streets. Antebellum African Americans, deprived of society’s most basic freedoms, designed and sustained DIY liberties as durable as the U.S. Constitution—which, for that matter, was another big DIY project. And the pioneers in covered wagons, the Mormons pulling handcarts, the forty-niners over land and sea, and the millions upon millions of intrepid immigrants were all of them DIY a
dventurers, leaving behind what was safe and familiar to break something new from the frightening unknown. Historically, DIY is the American way. But its new rising spirit among 1970s youth, who picked up when the sixties counterculture tuned out and made use of what was already at hand, grew in large part from American failure: the inner-city devastation of “urban renewal” projects, the energy crisis, soaring unemployment, runaway crime rates and drug addiction, the moral collapses of Vietnam and Watergate. Many kids whom the system neither helped nor gave hope to made their lives meaningful all on their own. They built their civil society from the urban rubble and, as kids do, made it wild fun.
In the early 1970s, while Clive and Cindy Campbell were jacking into streetlamps and hosting their game-changing block parties, teenagers were risking their lives for fun along the embattled Los Angeles shoreline, where crews and gangs carved up turf south of Wilshire Boulevard—from the mean streets to the breaking waves. At the turn of the century, the tobacco millionaire and real estate developer Abbot Kinney had turned the marshland south of Santa Monica into a Coney Island–style seaside resort. Coursing with Old World canals and gondolas, it earned its name, Venice of America. After 1967, when its last theme park shut down, the derelict pier and its surrounding streets gave way to typical early-seventies decay: gang wars, arson, drug dealing, vandalism. But churning in the center of its waterfront ruins was a natural source of thrilling amusement: the wildest break in Los Angeles, growling through the broken rib cage of the Pacific Ocean Park pier. Among the radical surfers who braved Hell’s Angels and deadly chunks of urban detritus to surf underneath the P.O.P. was a band of fearless, long-haired teens sponsored by the Zephyr Surf Shop—the legendary Z-Boys. Home movies of the era show several kids at once fighting to own a curling wave, swerving and clashing between dock pilings and rebar and executing life-saving cutbacks. Locals chucked bottles and dropped concrete blocks onto outsiders who tried to crash their waves: “Death to Invaders” and “Invaders must die” read the in-dead-earnest spray-painted warnings. But the greatest hazards lurked underwater. “You could get impaled on a fallen roller coaster track or, like, a piling,” Z-Boy Tony Alva recalled. Under the jagged P.O.P., these most radical Californians fairly butchered the Beach Boys’ chipper “Fun, Fun, Fun.” In the same breath they openly mocked the wreckage of George C. Tilyou’s crumbling amusement-park legacy.
