Lots of interesting coincidences this week, and when this happens, I tend to take notice and want to muse and share. In my Intro to Visual Art, Urban, and Screen culture course, I released an online module related to the subcultures of hip hop and punk as they emerged and evolved at around the same historical moment of the 1970-80s in the Bronx and London. This content, coming on the heels of modules related to the rise of graffiti and street art, is critical to the pedagogical underpinnings of my course as it provides for a discussion around both the mainstreaming and commodification of urban subcultures, but also of their global proliferation, circulation, and distribution (beyond their original urban context) and cross-over appeal via the screen. In this case, the screen was MTV, the world’s first 24-hour music channel on American cable television.
Above all else, MTV emerged as a dedicated platform for music videos, and when it launched in the summer of 1981, the channel made history for debuting the first rap video ever to be broadcast—Blondie’s Rapture. So you may be asking why a new wave punk band was the first to introduce rap music to a mainstream audience? After all, rap is a form of music linked to a distinct subculture of hip hop that is closely tied to African American performers and DJs. This is the question that I am asking my students to probe, but more specifically how and why Debbie Harry becomes a kind of vicarious guide to not only the world of rap music, but also street and graffiti art. If you watch the Rapture video (linked below), you will see Harry leading and dancing the audience through an underground East Village club and street scene, merging and overlapping the worlds of punk, glam rock, and hip hop complete with cameos by street artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Lee Quinones and hip hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy.
This past week, street artist Shepard Fairey happened to debut a large scale mural featuring Debbie Harry across from the famed CBGB music club in the same neighbourhood that had served as the setting for Rapture (see my feature image for this post). As Fairey describes in his Instagram post accompanying an image of the piece, Blondie had collaborated with him on the mural and he was inspired by the affinity felt with both the band and the punk subculture of New York. Fairey, who is perhaps one of the most important living street artists to mainstream graffiti to the masses (in part, with his Obey sticker series and contribution to Barrack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign with his “Hope” poster) has spoken out and at great length about his belief in the power of subculture to unite unlikely audiences despite any residual fear of “selling out.” As Fairey explained in a 2004 interview:
“I would consider my inside/outside strategy toward corporations somewhat of a Robin Hood effect... I use their money, which becomes my money, to produce stickers, posters, stencils, etc… I have been able to convince some of the corporations to invest in the cultures that they try to exploit, helping to create a more symbiotic relationship between the creators and harvesters of culture. It's not an easy game but I'm making the best of life without a trust fund.”
Interestingly, Debbie Harry and Blondie’s choice to partner with and showcase key members of the hip hop and graffiti underground of New York in their premier MTV video has something of the same mechanisms at play. At the very least, in an effort to appeal to the harvesters of culture at MTV, Blondie provided the spotlight and opportunity for a new audience to meet and acquaint themselves with real underground figures of New York. Put another way, Harry could have appropriated rapping without doing any of this (incidentally, she did not rap again), but she chose instead to pay proper respect and shine a light on the East Village subculture however candy-coated she had to make it for MTV. Recall that the early 1980s was still a time when African American music had largely been the subject of wholesale appropriation by generations of white American musicians. As such, this was at least a step in the right direction, and within a decade or more when African American rappers would come to rightfully lead and cross over hip hop to a global audience via mainstream media channels, there would be recognition of what a punk rocker from the East Village had done to help get that process started.
Jean-Michel Basquiat, Debbie Harry, Fab 5 Freddy, and Lee Quiñones on the set of Blondie’s “Rapture” video, 1981. Photos by Charlie Ahearn
A few more things before the round up:
Instagram has proven to be a wonderful research tool for many academics, especially for those of us who explore popular culture topics and the history of film and new media. Many accounts have sprung up in recent years targeting and specializing in specific topics and posting rich content. A great example and fantastic new account that I want to share here is queer.cinema.archive run by one of my department’s BFA alumni, Derek Le Beau. Derek features what he describes as “queer films, characters, and actors in the early days of film and Hollywood’s Golden Age” and he has been teaching me a thing or two as I take in his daily posts.
Several weeks back I shared how I was re-watching all five seasons of The Wire. Now that I have enjoyed taking a look back at that classic series, I am turning my attention to new-to-me shows that have come highly recommended. I am now one season into Hell On Wheels—an AMC produced television series which ran back in 2011-2016 that is set around the construction of the first transcontinental railroad across the U.S. I have been struck by how relevant and timely this show is for our current historical moment—many parallels around race relations, income inequality, and government/corporate corruption—and ironically enough, not that dissimilar to The Wire in terms of richly written characters and long narrative arcs.
