Wild Style (1983) - by Biff Ackley

In the late ‘70’s and early ‘80’s the Bronx was an absolute horror. New York City was broke by 1976; the city had suffered a net loss of half a million people since 1950, and most of the middle class taxpayers that left had been replaced by new immigrants just trying to survive. The Bronx was hit hard by the city’s struggles, it was torn in two by an expressway built for the convenience of suburbanites, de-valued by the loss of manufacturing jobs, and ultimately left for dead by everyone but the most desperate. Pretty much the story of the American city in the second half of the 20^th Century.

 

And yet, desolate and depressed as it was, the Bronx somehow emerged as the birthplace of three intertwined cultural movements, and the impact of these movements is being felt in popular culture to this day. The Bronx has a legitimate claim as being the birthplace of hip-hop, graffiti and break-dancing, or if not the birthplace, as least the day care center. It was in the South Bronx that these new forms of expression found their earliest home. When the capitalist city fails to be profitable and mainstream society starts to lose its grip on urban culture, artists often find ways to re-appropriate the most heavily abandoned urban spaces for their own, much more lasting, uses. During the ‘70’s and ‘80’s West Berlin and the East Village had their own movements amid similar (if not as drastic) conditions of urban dissolution, but neither movement was as fun as the South Bronx scene.

 

All of this is by way of introducing one of the great cinematic documents of an arts movement in our time, “Wild Style”. There’s a plot and characters in this movie, but none of that matters, the film is really just a way of presenting the South Bronx culture of 1983 to the masses. It’s all about guys in skin tight jeans and afros painting on walls, break-dancing in the streets, rapping to minimalist beats, and in general making a devastated neighborhood breathe with life again. It’s a cry of dissent arising from the depths of an urban hell. If “Koyaanisqatsi”, released the previous year, presented the desolation of the South Bronx as the inevitable final stage of American urbanization, Wild Style presents the same neighborhood as the backdrop of a lively, even joyful cultural revolution.

 

Watching this film over 25 years later in the rehabilitated, sanitized New York of the Bloomberg era, you can’t help but feel the current incarnation of the city might just be missing something.

 

At least the tight jeans are back.