Martha Cooper was a NY Post staff photographer who had an incredible reputation for documenting the streets of NYC. Long before people understood what graffiti was, Martha was embedding herself with artists as they snuck into the trainyards at night to paint the sleeping trains. On January 21, 1980, the photo editor of the post sent Cooper up to Washington Heights. The editor had heard over the police scanner that there was a riot in progress.
The “riot” the police thought was happening in the subway.
In Cooper’s words, “When I got there, about 25 little boys, all very young, were sitting inside the police station in the subway. The police had confiscated weapons, markers and other stuff.”
Growing up in NYC was a little different in 1980.
“ It turned out there wasn’t really a riot, so the cops let them go. They said, ‘Why don’t you explain to the lady what you were doing?’ One kid described a kind of dance where they spun on their backs and their heads and said that they battled each other for their T-shirts. After the cops released the kids, I asked for a demonstration, and they showed me different kinds of moves right outside the police station. I thought this was a great story, so I called the Post editors and said, ‘You’re not going to believe this. They weren’t having a riot. They were having a dance contest! You need to send a writer down here right away!’ But the Post didn’t like the idea. No riot. No story.’”’
Martha Cooper was at the forefront of Hip-Hop photography.
Not long after that, the soundtrack of my life changed forever inside a Catholic elementary school classroom. My fifth-grade teacher, inexplicably, kept a record player in our homeroom. Maybe it was a small act of defiance by the woman to bring a little pop culture inside the walls of a place that was desperately trying to make us forget the sinful content flooding FM radio at the time. When we finished our work on a Friday afternoon, students were allowed to bring a record from home to play for their classmates. This was a privilege we nearly had revoked when one of my classmates brought in their older sister’s copy of Musique’s disco classic (Push, Push) In the Bush. Perhaps, it was an act of defiance of our own.
I felt very fortunate about the timing of my education. When I started first grade, the Catholic school on the other side of the Brooklyn/Queens Expressway, Visitation, had just closed, and those students were being bused to our school. What was once a school with a student body as white as an eggshell suddenly became an ode to diversity, much to the dismay of many of the parents who lived in our very segregated section of Brooklyn.
Rene was one of my best friends at school. His parents grew up in Puerto Rico, and he lived with his family above a hardware store a few blocks from my house. We’d walk home from school together every day. On one Friday afternoon, as the kids in the class argued over who would get to play their record, Rene confidently strode up to the turntable in the corner of the room and put his record on. “Trust me,” he said. “You’ll want to hear this.”
From the very first notes of Planet Rock by Afrika Bambaata, I felt like I was hearing a message from the future. We had heard stuff that had a disco vibe like Rappers Delight before. But this was different. As many of my classmates stared dumbfounded at the record player, Rene started doing what we know now as a basic touch step. Step to the right, bring your left foot over. Step to the left, bring your right foot over. For breakdancers, it was a step that was almost like a clearing of the throat before you were about to sing. Soon, some of the other kids got up and started following the step. Boys that had never danced before, never wanted to dance, myself included, all got up and started doing that basic two-step and clapping our hands. It was as if we learned our first chord of music.
In that classroom, for the first time in my life, I felt like I had music that was my own. It wasn’t the Stones, Neil Young and the classic rock of my older brother. It wasn’t the Eagles California rock of my older sister. It wasn’t even the Yaz new wave of my extremely cooler older sister. This was my own language to share with my friends.
But it was more than that. It empowered boys around NYC to dance and express themselves in ways they never could before. As the music evolved in the 80s, social commentary infused the music with a vital energy. And my world was never the same.
A sample of the DJ tapes that teenagers like myself would scour the city to find.
Throughout this year, you are going to see a lot of tributes to the history of hip-hop, as 2023 is being deemed its 50th anniversary. On August 11, 1973, Clive Campbell, aka DJ Kool Herc, agreed to be the DJ for his younger sister’s back-to-school party in the community room of their apartment building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue in the Bronx. While the DJs of the day used their two-turntable setup to keep the music and the party going continuously, it was on that day Herc experimented with the idea of using the same record on both turntables so he could extend the breaks in the music—the instrumental parts of the song that emphasized the drumbeats. Herc was from Jamaica, a country with a rich tradition of dancehall reggae, where the DJs were stars themselves, often talking over the music as the night progressed. All these embers eventually would light the hip-hop flame that burns today.
To celebrate the 50th anniversary, there are already two great projects worthy of your time. Fotografiska is a wonderful museum of photography located on Park Avenue South in NYC. This past week, they opened an exhibit called Hip Hop: Conscious, Unconscious, which includes five decades of the best hip-hop photography the world has ever seen. And while it’s impossible to have an exhibit that comprehensively covers 50 years of music, I thought the curators have done a phenomenal job of representing every era of the art form, from those earliest beginnings in NYC to the global influence it holds today.
Travis Scott, as photographed by my friend Ahmed Klink. One of many wonderful photos in the exhibit.
Also currently underway is the masterful PBS documentary Fight the Power: How Hip Hop Changed the World, produced by Chuck D. Rather than making it a jukebox of your favorite hits, in Chuck’s inimitable way, the documentary looks at the social and political origins of the music and why it is so important to society. The first two episodes that have already aired are available on PBS.org, with subsequent episodes appearing weekly.
Public Enemy around the corner from my old office on Bleecker and Lafayette St. in NYC.
There will be other events throughout the year. I’m helping my local branch of the Brooklyn Public Library produce an event to commemorate the 50th anniversary, and I will share those details when they are available.
And one last fun thing to check out. There is a 2019 documentary on Martha Cooper called Martha: A Picture Story that is phenomenal and I recommend it very highly.
Little Shop of Horrors
When I launched Winding Road Stories, the very first book we published was a paranormal horror story called Azalea House by the very talented Clare Castleberry. I will readily admit, before publishing Azalea House, I wasn’t an avid horror reader besides the Stephen King books that many of us have read. While working on Clare’s book, a southern gothic tale about a young woman trying to escape the traumatic past of her family and sexual abuse, I realized that horror was so much more than a man in a mask chasing a beautiful ingenue with a butcher knife. It was about all of the things that keep us awake at night, and those terrors can take so many different forms. Once that connection was made in my mind, I was hooked.
This past week, I had the great pleasure of listening to Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones speak at The Strand in NYC. Tremblay’s book, A Knock at the Cabin, was recently made into a major motion picture by M Night Shamalayan. And Jones was in town to talk about the launch of his new book, Don’t Fear the Reaper, the second book in what is to be a trilogy about an indigenous girl named Jade Daniels, a horror-loving high school loner in Idaho.
Paul Tremblay and Stephen Graham Jones, who discovered the year-round Halloween shop in the East Village just before the interview.
As horror has become an increasingly popular genre (in many ways, with thanks to these two gentlemen), there are a lot more people trying to write horror books these days. And hearing Tremblay and Jones speak about their books, you can tell why they have succeeded where others have failed. The passion for their work shines through. Jones talked about working on the first book in his Indian Lake trilogy, My Heart is a Chainsaw, for over 10 years. He estimates he wrote over 750,000 words before it got whittled into the 120,000-word Stoker Award-winning book that it became.
When asked why Jones was so attracted to horror, he said, “Why be attracted to this essentially displeasurable thing that’s going to give you weird feelings inside and steal your sleep and give you nightmares? I don’t think I come to horror for the terror and the dread, I come to horror for that sigh after the jump scare when you realize you’re still alive and that feeling of aliveness is what I’m addicted to with horror.”
He also thought that we are in a particular place in time when maybe people are more receptive to reading horror because of what is at its essence. “I think the slasher is preoccupied with the justice fantasy,” he said. “Someone was wronged or disturbed and now a spirited vengeance has risen to exact justice or to rebalance the world. The world we live in, we see people doing atrocious things at microphones and podiums, and at the end, they wave, and everyone claps, and they walk away and that leaves us feeling our world is not just. It’s not fair. But for two hours at a time, six hours at a time, we can engage a justice fantasy in the form of a slasher and feel like there is a possibility for things to make sense.”
And as for how disturbing should one be when it comes to horror? “If there is too far, I’m still reaching for it,” he said. “That’s how you know you’re doing good stuff, if you’re getting nervous that you’ve gone too far, that’s when you know you’re doing good horror. If I ever get confident that I’m in the right place, I’m probably not writing horror.
The reading list for this week:
Hip-Hop Files: Photographs 1979-1984 by Martha Cooper
Martha was at the front line when Hip-Hop was taking shape, and this book is a vastly underappreciated time capsule of that era.
William and I worked together at Details many years ago and remain friends to this day. He now writes brilliant mystery novels set in England. But before that, he was one of the world’s greatest music journalists. William’s book documents the LA rap scene in the 1990s and follows several young men trying to break into the business. It is a phenomenal piece of reporting.
My Heart is a Chainsaw by Stephen Graham Jones
The first of the Indian Lake trilogy. Though Stephen has written many great books, including The Only Good Indians, Chainsaw was the book that really helped provide him with the audience he deserves as an author.
Don’t Fear the Reaper by Stephen Graham Jones
The second book in the trilogy which just came out this past Thursday. According to Stephen, he just turned in book three to his editor last week.
The Cabin at the End of the World by Paul Tremblay
This masterpiece of apocalyptic terror was recently made into the feature film Knock at the Cabin by M. Night Shyamalan. But be forewarned, the ending of the movie is VERY different from the book.
Enjoy the Super Bowl! See you next week.
I've bookmarked this post. Your recommendations are going to make a dent in my credit card!
Brilliant, as always.