I just turned in my column for next week’s Contributor, reviewing the new DVD release of the Jean Michel Basquiat film Downtown ’81. While Style Wars is often mentioned as the first hip-hop documentary, Downtown ’81 was shot a few years earlier even though it wasn’t released until 2000. The film is actually fictional, but its capturing of real rappers like Kool Kyle and Grand Master Flash in their actual Lower East Side milieu provides an invaluable glimpse into the early days of rap and graffiti culture.
But now a BBC film from the late 1970′s has resurfaced to challenge all comers to the title of earliest document of graffiti culture. Here’s Brooklyn Magazine on Watching My Name Go By…
In the crime-ridden New York City of the 70s, graffiti artists transformed subway cars, buses, billboards, and telephone poles into wild canvases. Made in 1976 for the BBC and recently dug up by Gothamist, Watching My Name Go By is a 25-minute mini-documentary about the rise of this graffiti culture. The film introduces the kids who lived to deface public spaces, chronicling how tags spread vine-like over the city’s every surface. It also features the anthropologists, cops, and pedestrians who liked to analyze them (“Psychologists have claimed that it’s a means of self-identification” one muses); scoff at their “vandalism” (“it makes the city look stupid”); or praise them as underrated artistic geniuses (“so imaginative!”).
The city’s graffiti culture has since been slightly tamed–the subways are no longer entirely covered in spraypainted scrawls–but the kind of homegrown hieroglyphic language these anonymous 70s writers developed still inspires many of today’s better known street artists, from Banksy to KAWS.
Here’s Watching My Name Go By…
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